It is a story that seems familiar and it is in a disturbing way: workers raked by the authorities who deal with immigration, loaded on a plane, brought to a expulsion center and, finally, in Mexico. Even more disturbing are the year in which it happens – 1948, in the County of Fresno, California – and the tragic ending: the plane crashes killing all the passengers, including the 28 workers.
A month after the fact, Woody Guthrie immortalizes him in a sketch of a song that later became in the late 1950s Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) With the music of the Folksinger of Colorado Martin Hoffman. Deportee It was then interpreted by Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, Dolly Pardon, Joan Baez, Ani Difranco, as well as by the friend of Guthrie Cisco Houston and his son Arlo Guthrie. The byrds version is part of the list drawn up by Rolling Stone of the 100 best protest songs of all time. The original version of Guthrie, however, had been lost. At least so far.
Registration of Deportee (Woody's Home Tape)recently rediscovered and restored, will in fact be included Woody at home – Volumes 1 + 2which contains unpublished records of Folksinger and which will be released on August 14th.
Like many other protest songs, Deportee It was born taking inspiration from the news. At the time Guthrie lives in Long Island and learns of the air -core from the radio or newspapers. The New York Times He reports at the time that among the dead, some “entered illegally in the United States” and others “remained in California beyond the duration of their employment contract”. As Guthrie himself pointed out, only crew members have been identified. The workers were called “Mexican deportees”, as if they had no identity, and buried in a common pit in California.
Guthrie writes the text the following month. As his nephew Anna Canoni said, who today leads the Woody Guthrie Publicactions, “after reading the article that mentioned only the four dead Americans, Woody wrote it I don't want to say for anger or frustration, but to remember those 28 Mexicans without name and make it clear more as the United States deal with foreigners”.
In the registration you can hear Guthrie recite the text with a simple guitar accompaniment played in fingerpicking style, without the most elaborate melody that Hoffman added later. To make this version even more powerful, Guthrie adopts a first -person perspective (“I don't have a name while I travel on this big airplane / call me only deported”) and not the third person that emerged later (“you will not have a name when you climb that great plane / they will only call you deportees”).
Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) It is probably the most famous of the songs that Guthrie has never finished. When he recorded the ribbon in the family home in Brooklyn he was already facing the first symptoms of what he would then be diagnosed as Huntington's disease. He was then hospitalized in a New Jersey hospital, where he received visits from a young Bob Dylan, a moment also told in the film A Complete Unknown.
Woody at home contains almost two dozens of unpublished records, including one This land is your land with additional stanzas, and home versions of Pastures of Plenty And Jesus Christ. But for its sad topicality, Deportee It is the most poignant and at the same time disturbing song of the collection. As Canoni says, “my grandfather wrote that a song is nothing more than a conversation that you can repeat several times. And this is a conversation that we must still do, and again, and again ».
From Rolling Stone Us.
