In January of 1948, a plane carrying 28 Mexican workers to the El Centro Immigration Detention Center fatally crashed in California’s Los Gatos Canyon. In media coverage of the accident, the white pilot, flight attendant and immigration official were recognized by name, but the workers aboard — some of whom were in the United States legally on short-term labor contracts through the Bracero Program — were referred to only as “deportees” and buried in a mass grave.
When folk singer, anti-fascist and labor advocate Woody Guthrie read the news, he was inspired to write the lyrics to “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” The song assigns symbolic names to the workers and condemns the brutal, precarious conditions that migrants are forced to labor under. In classic Woody Guthrie fashion, the speaker is situated within the immigrant workers’ struggle, rather than observing it from a distance:
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on / Six-hundred miles to that Mexican border, They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves. / Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Roselita / Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
Solidarity — a value central to Guthrie’s oeuvre of more than 3,000 songs spanning his 55 years — is built into these lyrics.
“Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” by Woody Guthrie, performed by Joan Baez at the 2017 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony
About 10 years after “Deportee” was first written, while Guthrie was battling Huntington’s disease (which eventually took his life), a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman composed music to accompany the lyrics. Since then, the song has been performed by a host of musicians, including Dolly Parton, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan.
But no recording of Guthrie performing “Deportee” has ever been available — until now.
Shamus Records released Woody At Home, a collection of 22 previously unheard recordings by Guthrie, on August 14. Nora Guthrie, Guthrie’s daughter, and Anna Canoni, his granddaughter and album co-producer, hope the release will introduce a new generation of listeners to his work.
The rise of fascism in the United States — along with new developments in audio software that made the recordings publishable — convinced the Guthrie family and their associates that the music scene needed a dose of Guthrie’s anti-authoritarian, anti-racist, Nazi-punching ethos.
HOW TO UN-BAKE A CAKE
The tapes weren’t originally intended for commercial distribution; they were recorded in the living room of Guthrie’s Brooklyn apartment between 1951 and 1952, on a portable tape recorder given to him by his producer, in hopes of pitching the songs as covers for other artists.
For decades, the tapes were what recording engineer Steve Rosenthal politely refers to as “compromised audio.” Guthrie’s guitar drowned out his voice and a low humming noise muddied up the entire collection. The guitar, voice and hum were lumped together on a monotrack, making it impossible to balance their relative volumes by simply adjusting a fader.
But in recent years, “de-mixing” (AI) software has developed that can isolate and separate the elements of a monotrack. Giles Martin, producer of The Beatles’ de-mixed Revolver album, explained the new tech to Rolling Stone: “It’s like you giving me a cake, and then me going back to you about an hour later with flour, eggs, sugar, and all the ingredients to that cake, that all haven’t got any cake mix left on them.”
Rosenthal used similar software to de-mix Woody At Home. “The hum on all the recordings, we were able to hear it, isolate it and then get rid of it,” he said.
The result is 22 intimate tracks. Some are new renditions of well-known Guthrie tunes — “This Land is Your Land” is the album opener, which Canoni wanted to get “out of the way,” so less famous songs could get a chance to shine. Other songs had previously existed only in written lyric form, or as covered by other artists, like “Deportee.”
Listening to the album is like getting a crash course in people’s history.
“Tear the Fascists Down” by Woody Guthrie
“Great Ship” eulogizes the 1,195 lives lost on the Lusitania in 1915. “Buoy Bells from Trenton” tells the story of the Trenton Six, a group of Black men who were wrongly convicted of killing a white shopkeeper in 1948. “I’ve Got to Know” demands answers from the powers that be:
Why do your war boats ride on my waters? / Why do your death bombs fall from my skies? / Why do you burn my farm and my town down? / I’ve got to know, friend, I’ve got to know!
When Canoni listens to it, she thinks of the genocide in Gaza, where American-made bombs have been dropping for almost two years. I listened to the song the same day that the Trump administration requested a one-day sentence for the officer who fired 10 shots through Breonna Taylor’s window, and I felt its eerie prescience.
In “Backdoor Bum and the Big Landlord,” two men — one of them homeless, the other flush with cash from his many rental properties — journey together through the solar system. The last stop on their intergalactic trip is heaven. The former gets in just fine, but the landlord arrives a day late, weighed down by his gold coins. When he tries to buy his way in, he is (spoiler alert!) not admitted.
Nora Guthrie suspects her father wrote the song about Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father. The elder Trump was the Guthrie family’s landlord at the time, and his racist housing practices inspired more than one Guthrie song, including “Old Man Trump.”
“I Ain’t Got No Home” and “Old Man Trump” by Woody Guthrie, performed by the Missin’ Cousins
CALM IS A FORM OF RESISTANCE
For Nora Guthrie and Anna Canoni, the gentle, intimate sound of “the home tapes” is central to the album’s emotional weight — and political power.
Footsteps, creaking floorboards and the voices of Guthrie’s wife and young children are audible around him as he sings from the kitchen-slash-living room of his Brooklyn apartment.
“Whether it was at home or on the road, in a flop house, in a box car, most of his writing took place in busy spaces,” Nora Guthrie recalled. He wasn’t the type to write protest music from the comfort of an ivory tower — in fact, he painted the now-famous phrase “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his guitar around the time he was shipping out with the Merchant Marine in the 1940s, on his way to fight fascists during World War II.
Though the spare instrumentation on the tapes is more a matter of circumstance than artistic choice, the lo-fi quality can be heard as a feature. “When they first gave it to me to listen to,” recalled Nora Guthrie, “I laid down on the couch and turned off the lights. I had to become very quiet to listen to it. This world is so freaking noisy. Politics, the news, they scream at you. They don’t tell you what’s going on, they scream at you.”
Anna Canoni, too, found the experience grounding, like a guided meditation, or Leftist ASMR.
Overwhelm, paralysis and misdirection are pillars of the Trumpist media strategy. In this environment, John Berger’s observation that “calm is a form of resistance” rings especially true. In her 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein agrees, explaining that she writes to instill a sense of calm in herself and in her readers — a calm that is fully compatible with the passion and anger necessary to make change. “Calm is … the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize,” she writes. “The goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it.”
Woody At Home has this effect. Quietly, calmly, sometimes backed by his guitar, sometimes a capella, Guthrie condemns injustice wherever he finds it, from the immigration system to the landlord-tenant relationship to Hitler’s rise in Europe.
WHO’S GOING TO WRITE THE NEXT VERSE?
Woody Guthrie’s songs typically end with a lesson or a call to action, explained Canoni, so she arranged the album to end the same way. In the final tune, “You Better Git Ready,” the devil
wakes Guthrie up in the middle of the night and tells him that hell is too tame for the Nazis, so they need to be defeated in this world.
You better get ready, brother / You better get ready, sister! / You better get ready, / ‘Cause you know you’ve got to fight!
Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan drew inspiration directly from Guthrie, and their hosts of imitators and acolytes also partake in the radical musical tradition Guthrie helped foster.
“Who’s going to write the next verse?” Nora asked. “Who’s going to write the next song? We’re behind them.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source inthesetimes.com ’
