Tag: Woody Guthrie

No Longer Just “Deportees”

Woody Guthrie Bio Joel Klein The nameless “deportees” of Woody Guthrie‘s “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)” were recently remembered by name on a monument unveiled in Fresno, California. The song and the memorial commemorate a plane crash on January 28, 1948 after a plane chartered by the U.S. Immigration Services flew out of Oakland and crashed near Coalinga.

Thirty-two people died in the crash, but newspapers originally only reported the four names of the pilot, the first officer, the flight attendant, and an immigration officer. The media merely referred to the 28 others as “deportees.” Many of the 28 Mexicans were part of a government work program who the government was flying home, while some of them had entered the country illegally.

Woody Guthrie knew about the importance of names, as he showed in his earlier song about the 1941 sinking of the Reuben James. After the California plane crash, he read about the nameless deaths and created his own protest by writing a poem about the event, noting the way the media dehumanized the people from south of the border.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees.”

Guthrie biographer Joe Klein called the “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” lyrics “the last great song [Woody Guthrie] would write” (Woody Guthrie: A Life, p. 362). Guthrie, however, chanted the words of the poem, as it was without music.

“Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” would not be performed publicly as a song for more than a decade, after a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman added the music and Pete Seeger began performing the song. In the video below, Woody’s son Arlo Guthrie performs the song at Farm Aid in 2000.

The song ends with a question, asking “Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?/ To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil/ And be called by no name except ‘deportees’?” The memorial evokes Guthrie’s imagery, as it features a stone etched with names on 32 leaves, commemorating all who died in the plane crash.

The recent news coverage of the memorial has tried to make up for the original reporting on the crash. The Los Angeles Times published an article listing the names of everyone who died in the crash. You may also order a cool print that commemorates the memorial and lists the names.

There are several nice covers of “Deportee,” including one by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan during the Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid-1970s (thanks to Dylan scholar Michael Gray for pointing me to the Baez-Dylan version).

Also, check out this cool video of Lance Canales & The Flood singing “Plane Wreck At Los Gatos (Deportee)” that also features the memorial. Canales lives in Fresno, and he and his band wanted to highlight the names of those killed. At around the 3:25 mark, you see people holding up signs with the names. So this video of a powerful rendition of the song finally answers Guthrie’s question, “What were their names?”


What is your favorite Woody Guthrie song? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Mumford & Sons Join Elvis Costello on “Ghost of Tom Joad”

    Mumford & Sons Elvis Costello Ghost of Tom Joad Mumford & Sons recently collaborated with Elvis Costello to record Bruce Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” They made the recording for Bono’s One campaign to get world leaders to focus on poverty issues as the leader meet in Northern Ireland at the G8 summit.

    In this video, Elvis Costello and Mumford & Sons talk about the song before playing it. Check it out.

    We have discussed on Chimesfreedom the connection between “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and the work of Woody Guthrie. In the video at the end, you see Costello bring the song back to Woody Guthrie with an impromptu singing of “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You,” whose history we also have discussed.

    The new recording of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” is part of a collection of protest songs that you can listen to for free and learn more about on the One website, including songs by Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, The Cranberries, and may others. The collection is listed as “songs that changed the world.”

    What do you think of the new version of “The Ghost of Tom Joad”? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    The Children of “The Dust Bowl” (Short Review)

    The Dust Bowl Ken Burns

    Several years ago, I read Timothy Egan‘s The Worst Hard Time, a National Book Award winner about the dust storms and drought that struck the High Plains in the 1930s during the Great Depression. The book is a fascinating immersion into another time describing the causes, government responses, and the people in an otherworldly land. So I was excited to see that filmmaker Ken Burns created a new two-part documentary about The Dust Bowl for PBS, and that Egan appears several times throughout the film.

    Timothy Egan Worst Hard Time Dust Bowl The Dust Bowl is unable to go into the depths that Egan’s book did about the causes and the responses to the environmental disaster, but the documentary narrated by Peter Coyote gives viewers a decent understanding of a somewhat forgotten period of American history that is still relevant today. As today’s politicians debate the effects that human beings have on our environment (even if scientists agree), The Dust Bowl provides a clear example of how human activity destroyed an environment. The film explores how the farming practices ruined the landscape, how the government was eventually able to effectively respond, and how humans often fail to learn from experience.

    What The Dust Bowl does best, however, is tell the personal stories of the people who lived on the High Plains during the 1930s. Through interviews with twenty-six survivors who were there, along with outstanding photos and video footage of the land and the dust storms, one gets a good sense of what it was like to live on the land at the time, as well as understanding why some stayed and why some left.

    More precisely, The Dust Bowl captures what it was like to be a child growing up there at the time, as the most fascinating interviews in the film are of people who experienced the drought and dust storms. And, of course, those people still alive now were children during the Dust Bowl era. So, the most moving tales come from the eyes of children remembering details like the dust on the dishes and the joy of being reunited with a parent. Also, because they were children, we see that some of the stories that most affected the speakers were not about falling wheat prices or how the dirt affected the local economy but about seeing how the drought affected animals. So just as animals often play a large role in our memories of childhood, one person vividly remembers the death of a calf, another remembers the community’s brutal response to an influx of jackrabbits, and others are haunted by other similar childhood experiences.

    Others who are no longer alive give us additional perspectives on the times, including footage of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Another famous voice we get to hear is that of Woody Guthrie, both talking and singing about “the dusty old dust.”

    Dayton Duncan Out West Amazon The story moves along briskly and is engaging throughout. The episodes were written by Dayton Duncan, who has worked with director Ken Burns on other series like The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz. I have been a fan of Duncan’s since the late 1980’s when I discovered his book Out West: American Journey Along the Lewis and Clark Trail (1988), where Duncan recounted his own modern road trip tracing Lewis and Clark’s famous travels. When I saw that he was working with Director Ken Burns years ago, I was glad that Burns found such a good writer.

    If you enjoy Ken Burns’s other work, such as The Civil War, you probably already know whether you want to see The Dust Bowl or have already seen it. I am a fan of all of his work. But even if you have not seen his other work, you might find The Dust Bowl engaging because its first-person accounts provide an entertaining living history and a living warning about our times. Check your local PBS stations for reruns of The Dust Bowl, which is also available on DVD and Blu-ray.

    Another Review Because Why Should You Trust Me?: For a different view on The Dust Bowl, check out “Burns’ ‘Dust Bowl’ speaks to our times, but it’s dry” from David Wiegand.

    What did you think of The Dust Bowl? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    • Tell Me, What Were Their Names?

    reuben james woody guthrie
    On October 31, 1941, the USS Reuben James was torpedoed by a German U-552 submarine near Iceland. At the time, the Reuben James was part of the Neutrality Patrol that guarded ships making passage between the Americas and the U.K. Within around five minutes, the entire ship went down. Different sources vary, but approximately 115 of the 160 men aboard died.

    The Almanac Singers

    Around this time, Woody Guthrie was playing with a group called The Almanac Singers, which also included Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell, and Lee Hays. The group had recorded songs about civil rights and unions, and they had previously recorded a song critical of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s peacetime draft.

    But in reaction to the sinking of the Reuben James and the attack on Pearl Harbor less than two months later, the Almanac singers released an album in 1942 supporting the U.S. war effort.  One of the songs was about the Reuben James.

    Woody Guthrie’s Drafts of “The Sinking of the Reuben James”

    When Guthrie began writing “The Sinking of the Reuben James,” his initial plan was to humanize the tragedy by listing all of the victims of the tragedy. His original version included lists of names as well as some details about some of the men: “There’s Harold Hammer Beasley, a first rate man at sea/ From Hinton, West Virginia, he had his first degree.” (Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life, at 216.)

    Guthrie took a draft of his song to a meeting with The Almanac Singers. They agreed he had a great idea for a song, but they wondered if listing all of the names made the song a little boring. Seeger suggested that Guthrie try describing the event in detail while adding a rousing chorus that would get across the same message.

    Guthrie went back and reworked the verses, while Seeger and Lampell worked on the chorus, personalizing the song without listing the names by asking the listener: “Tell me, what were their names?/ Did you have a friend on the good Reuben James.” Below is Guthrie’s solo version of the song they wrote.

    Note that in the above version he asks “what was their names” instead of using “were” as in other versions as well as in the official Guthrie lyrics.

    The Music for “The Sinking of the Reuben James”

    Regarding the music for the song, Guthrie set the verses to the tune from “Wildwood Flower” by The Carter Family.

    Popularity

    “The Sinking of the Reuben James” became one of the Almanac Singers’ best-known songs. But despite the patriotic tone of this song and other ones they released at the time, the Almanac Singers continued to be harassed for their earlier anti-war stance and they disbanded within about a year.

    “The Sinking of the Reuben James” was officially listed as being written by “The Almanac Singers.” But in later years Seeger graciously gave credit to Guthrie for both the verses and the chorus.

    {Woody at 100 is our continuing series celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the birth of American singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie on July 14, 1912. Check out our other posts on Guthrie and the Woody Guthrie Centennial too. }

    (Public domain photo via.)

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    The Killing of “Two Good Men”

    Sacco and VanzettiOn August 23, 1927, Massachusetts executed Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolemeo Vanzetti. The two admitted anarchists were Italian immigrants executed for the 1921 murder of a person during an armed robbery of a shoe company paymaster.

    The Trial and Execution of Sacco and Vanzetti

    The fish-peddler and shoemaker had no prior criminal record when they were arrested for the murder.  But they were prosecuted during a period of anti-immigrant and anti-radical sentiment, and many aspects of their trial were unfair.

    The judge overseeing the proceedings saw the two men as “anarchist bastards,” but others rallied in support of the accused. At the time of their execution, protests were held at many places around the U.S.

    Many still believe to this day that the two men were innocent of the crime.  Also, there have been recent arguments that only Vanzetti was innocent. There is a Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society that works to keep the case in the public eye, and there is an exhibit about the case at the courthouse in Massachusetts.

    Woody Guthrie and “Two Good Men”

    Many years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, folk-singer Woody Guthrie found some kinship in the plight of the two men. In the mid-1940s, he worked on a project of several songs about Sacco and Vanzetti to tell their story.

    One of the songs in the cycle is “Two Good Men.”

    Like Guthrie’s song about “Tom Joad,” which we discussed previously, “Two Good Men” is a story song.  “Two Good Men” focuses on the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. Although the song is not as complete and detailed as “Tom Joad,” it contains many details.

    Some of the details in the song include the names of the judge (Webster Thayer) and the people who prosecuted the two men: “I’ll tell you the prosecutors’ names,/ Katsman, Adams, Williams, Kane.”

    In addition to the details of the case, in “Two God Men” Guthrie also focuses on connecting the execution to the labor movement of his day:

    All you people ought to be like me,
    And work like Sacco and Vanzetti;
    And every day find some ways to fight
    On the union side for workers’ rights.

    Supposedly, Guthrie was unsatisfied with his cycle of songs about Sacco and Vanzetti. Eventually, he gave up on the project.

    Fortunately Guthrie’s songs about Sacco and Vanzetti were not lost.  The founder of Folkway Records Moe Asch, who had commissioned the songs, went ahead and released the unfinished product.

    Guthrie was probably right that “Two Good Men” and the other songs did not live up to his best work. I prefer folksinger Charlie King’s song about Sacco and Vanzetti with a similar name, “Two Good Arms.” But Guthrie also was right that we should continue to remember and fight against injustices.

    {Woody at 100 is our continuing series celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the birth of American singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie on July 14, 1912. Check out our other posts on Guthrie and the Woody Guthrie Centennial too. }

    Photo via public domain.

    What do you think of “Two Good Men”? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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