‘Deportee’: the only recording of Woody Guthrie’s prescient protest song
While reading the New York Times on January 29th, 1948, Woody Guthrie came across the Associated Press’ coverage of a plane crash that occurred near Coalinga, California, the day prior.
All 32 passengers and crew members on the aircraft perished, but of the deceased identified, the AP story only named the crew members. Left out were those later identified as farm labourers from Mexico, AP referred to them simply as “28 Mexican deportees”.
Subsequent reporting found that the United States Immigration and Naturalisation Service chartered the plane. Some of the workers onboard had travelled to the US without documentation; others had arrived as part of a government-sponsored work program. All of them were travelling home because their contracts had ended. Upset by the blatant disregard and lack of nuance in the reporting of the tragedy, and angered by the racism inflicted on the passengers, Guthrie was compelled to commemorate the lives lost with a song, and wrote what would become ‘Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)’.
Guthrie gained acclaim for his political songwriting, never shying away from addressing the injustice, poverty and maltreatment entrenched in postwar America, harsh realities that he came across daily. Penning bold anthems like ‘This Land Is Your Land’, ‘Tear the Fascists Down’ and ‘Do Re Mi’, open criticisms of greed, racism and war, Guthrie became an early protest musician. He forged a deep friendship with fellow folk singer Pete Seeger and spurred a young Bob Dylan to pack up and move to New York, the then-fledgling musician’s only hope being to visit Guthrie in his hospital bed.
‘Deportee’ would later be set to melody by schoolteacher Martin Hoffman, popularised by Seeger and recorded by artists including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, The Byrds, Lyle Lovett and Dolly Parton. But it began as a simple poem, wherein Guthrie assigned symbolic names to the deceased.
“Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita / Adiós mis amigos, Jesús y Maria…” the song begins, Guthrie’s vocals more of a chant than singing. He finds a bittersweet kinship in their story, as he was once forced to leave his family in Oklahoma in pursuit of work during the Great Depression, writing the lines, “Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted / Our work contract’s out and we have to move on…”
While Guthrie’s poem has lived on since it was first written 77 years ago, the only known recording of the singer-songwriter’s own rendition was a long-buried home recording. Now, Guthrie’s sorrowful tale has been restored with the help of artificial intelligence audio tools, finally released (on what would have been Guthrie’s 113th birthday) as ‘Deportee (Woody’s Home Tape)’. The song will also appear on Woody at Home — Volume One and Two, a collection of 22 previously unreleased tracks from the folk singer.
The restoration amazingly captures Guthrie’s essence, a gentility in his voice with a simple strum of his guitar. Though the singer died in 1967 at age 55, getting to hear a ‘new’ recording of his reminds us of the sincerely timeless nature of his poetry.
