‘I’m Shipping Up to Boston’: How Woody Guthrie gave the world a punk anthem
The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn’t exist, and the greatest trick the Dropkick Murphys ever played was making a set of lost Woody Guthrie lyrics sound like they were forged in the basement of a south Boston dive bar.
To many listeners, the Dropkick Murphys’ track ‘I’m Shipping Up to Boston’ is the undisputed heavyweight champion of Celtic punk, a roar of defiance that famously soundtracked Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and became the unofficial theme song of New England; however, the man we actually have to thank for the track isn’t a Boston local with a grudge, but the ‘Dust Bowl Troubadour’ and the patron saint of American folk, Woody Guthrie.
It was a matter of fate that brought Guthrie’s lyrics about a “sailor peg” to frontman Ken Casey’s doorstep over two decades ago. The Dropkick Murphys were invited by the family of the late folk legend to sift through his extensive archives, where, amidst thousands of unrecorded scraps of lyrics and fragmented poems, Casey stumbled upon five lines of what would eventually become the band’s biggest commercial hit. While Dust Bowl-era folk and Celtic punk are not typical bedfellows, the song has become an essential anthem for the working-class citizens of Boston since its release on the 2005 album The Warrior’s Code.
And actually, there’s more of a connection between safety pins and dust-bowl denim than we might think. In 1943, Guthrie penned the famous protest track ‘Talking Hitler’s Head Off Blues’ and, in a fit of patriotism, painted the words ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ onto the side of his guitar.
Much like Billie Holiday and the Industrial Workers of the World before him, Guthrie believed music could serve as a vital site of resistance, and he spearheaded a mid-20th-century movement that cemented the alliance between countercultural music and left-leaning politics. In that sense, it could be argued that he was actually the first true punk, or as one Reddit user on r/PunkMemes aptly put it (to the tune of 318 upvotes), “Woody Guthrie isn’t punk: punk is Woody Guthrie”.
The anthem nearly didn’t see the light of day, primarily because Casey didn’t initially see the potential in the maritime fragment. “I laughed at it when I saw it. ‘I’m a sailor peg, and I lost my leg’, What the hell!” he told Boston.com, initially taking the lyrics as a joke, but upon returning to rehearsals, he realised they fit perfectly over a melody the band had been struggling to finish.
By pairing Guthrie’s repetitive chant with some explosive bagpipe playing and energetic blasts of heavy drums and distorted guitars, the band transformed a folk scrap into a platinum-certified juggernaut that proved Guthrie truly was a proto-punk, whose lyrics possessed a grit capable of surviving decades of silence. This validation of punk as a continuation of an older lineage is far from an isolated incident, with the history of the ‘people’s music’ is one of constant theft and transformation: The Pogues, for instance, injected the raw energy of the London punk scene into traditional Irish standards like ‘The Irish Rover’, while The Clash turned Vince Taylor’s rockabilly deep cut ‘Brand New Cadillac’ into a punk staple.
More broadly, rock’s most sacred cows have always borrowed heavily from the past: The Rolling Stones began as a high-octane tribute to the Chicago blues of Muddy Waters, and The Beatles famously lifted the opening DNA of ‘Come Together’ from the back catalogue of Chuck Berry.
The debt the Dropkick Murphys owe to Guthrie hasn’t been forgotten, and they’ve spent the last few years leaning further into the archive, releasing two full acoustic albums, This Machine Still Kills Fascists in 2022 and Okemah Rising in 2023, dedicated entirely to Woody’s words.
