Talk:The Preacher and the Slave

[Consolidation of multiple "Bye and Bye" sections]
Believing that WP will somehow carry on (even if The Beast of the moment lives up to its potential), allowing time for the following "bye-and-bye" sections to become part of a longer discussion, i'm reformatting what i found as 2 consecutive and indentically named section, into (admittedly bizarrely structured) subsections of this section, each preserving the muddied addressability of the first and the futile attempt at addressability of the second, while making each unambiguously addressable. Some editor (a century or two hence) will no doubt thank me for diminishing the distraction they inflict, from the next generations of more substantive discussion sections that are yet to be conceived. --Jerzy•t 20:38, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Bye and Bye
The second of the three links to the lyrics has the spelling 'by and by' in the chorus, which corresponds more to modern usage ('by and by' = sometime in the future; 'bye' = short for goodbye). Can I change it? PhilUK (talk) 19:36, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

No-one has commented or objected so I've changed it. PhilUK (talk) 20:17, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Bye and Bye
I would like to contribute to the talk page and give more reasons for changing the earlier "by and by" back to the original "bye and bye." In his book, Guerrilla Minstrels, Hampton quotes the I.W.W. Songs book and uses the spelling "…bye and bye…" in the lyrics to the song "The Preacher and the Slave" (Hampton 66). Smith's book, Labor Martyr Joe Hill, uses the spelling "…bye and bye…" for the lyrics to "The Preacher and the Slave" (Smith 20).

Works Cited:

Hampton, Wayne. Guerrilla Minstrels. First Edition. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1986. Print.

Smith, Gibbs M. Labor Martyr Joe Hill. New York: The Universal Library: Grosset & Dunlap, 1969. Print.

Chamor (talk) 01:28, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Pie in the sky
Plenty of sources (otherwise presumably meeting WP:RS) treat the lack of evidence of prior usage as evidence of lack of prior usage, an obvious fallacy when applied to eras subject to neglect of many kinds of pop-culture documentation. My personal belief is that Joe Hill indeed coined "pie in the sky", despite my impression that the relevant song of his has in my lifetime been only a fringe meme -- one which i encountered only at an anti-war conference where a latter-day Wob brought to a day-care center (in Syracuse?) copies of what i think of as "The Little Red Songbook" (which probably was in fact at least a subtitle). While i regard the evidence -- the parallel positions, in the same melody, of "In the sweet by-and-by" and "You will eat, bye and bye" [sic] -- as providing a moral certainty that at least an intimate of his (and more likely he himself) exploited the 6 syllables of rhyming. Nevertheless, IMO RS (while sometimes being weaker) should mean more than that about explicit (tho seldom or never iron-clad) statements -- even tho doubtless it also sometimes means lies by seemingly reliable sources. (As those lying m'f'g theologians will tell you, there is no certainty this side of the grave -- even tho they want you live on their "hay" about there being certainty beyond it.)  I'm not going to engage on what language should be used instead -- i admit i expect to be a voice in the wilderness on this -- but i find some merit in making the point about moral certainty and RS not lying on the same one-dimensional continuum. --Jerzy•t 20:38 & 21:14 &:20, 20 November 2016 (UTC)