T-Bone Slim

Matti Valentinpoika Huhta (1880–1940), better known by his pen name T-Bone Slim, was a humourist, poet, songwriter, hobo and labor activist in the Industrial Workers of the World.

He was born in Ashtabula, Ohio to Matti and Johanna Huhta, Finnish immigrants from Ilmajoki, Finland. Matti Huhta grew up in his parent's boarding house in Erie, Pa. He no doubt learned of the labor struggle at dinner everyday. Huhta married Rosa Kotila and left Ohio and his family around 1910, travelling the northern tier of the United States as a migrant worker, at which point he became a member of the I.W.W.

Huhta had one surviving child at the time of his death, Edna Huhta. Huhta was buried in potter's field NYC.

IWW lore likes to picture his death in 1940 in NYC as mysterious, but the coroner's office firmly states that they found nothing irregular in the manner of death. Huhta slipped off the docks in NYC where he lived at the Seaman's Boarding House and worked as a barge captain.

Huhta was employed for a period as a reporter for the daily News-Telegram in Duluth, Minnesota, and the Finnish radical newspaper the "Industrialisti", but quit after an editor "misquoted him and balled up his article" about an I.W.W. mass meeting. He later contributed numerous articles and songs to the I.W.W. press and is widely regarded as one of the union's finest columnists and songwriters. He was a regular columnist for Industrial Solidarity and, later, for the Industrial Worker and Industrialisti until his death in 1940 in New York City.

T-Bone Slim's best known works include "The Popular Wobbly", "The Mysteries of a Hobo's Life", and "The Lumberjack's Prayer". Later, his work would become a source of inspiration for the emerging American surrealist movement and many of his songs were revived during the American Civil Rights Movement.

In an interview with David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky cites T-Bone Slim as one of his favourite "Wobbly Singers".