The Woody Guthrie record inspired by one of America’s most infamous murder trials
It might seem odd that Woody Guthrie would be moved to write a whole collection of songs in the 1940s about two convicted murderers who were executed in the 1920s.
However, considering how many movies have been made about OJ Simpson and the Menendez Brothers in recent years, it’s obviously a long-held American tradition to dramatically revisit the controversial court cases of its past.
For Guthrie’s project, the focus was the 1921 trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and admitted political anarchists who were accused of murdering two men during a robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. Guthrie was only nine years old when the high-profile trial took place; an event greatly influenced by an anti-Italian and anti-immigrant fervour taking hold in the country. After just a few hours of deliberation, the jury found the pair guilty of first-degree murder, and the judge laid down the harshest possible sentence. Despite numerous appeals and attempts to introduce new evidence, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927, when Guthrie was still a teenager in Oklahoma.
It’s not clear how much young Woody would have been following the news of the famous case as it unfolded, but by the time he’d established himself as the biggest name in American folk music in the 1940s, the story was reintroduced to him by Moses Asch, a Polish-American immigrant and founder of the New York label that would become Folkways Records. Asch saw the Sacco and Vanzetti trial as emblematic of an ongoing injustice in American society: a rush to judgment against immigrants and a lack of access to the same legal resources as native-born people.
Guthrie, as the voice of the working man and the downtrodden, seemed like the ideal performer to draw attention to this issue, and he agreed to take on the project, beginning work on a set of songs over the course of 1946 and 1947. There were at least 11 songs Guthrie recorded demos for, including ‘We Welcome to Heaven’, which imagined Sacco and Vanzetti being embraced at the pearly gates as innocent men. The closing lines of that song are particularly powerful:
“You come the straight road, Sacco and Vanzetti, / You fought with the lord on his most private ground / He hired his courts and his babblers against you / But, I’m here to say you went up and not down.”
Even though their execution was two decades in the past by this point, amateur cold case detectives were still routinely returning to the case during this same period in the ‘40s and for decades to come, with some concluding that the men had almost certainly committed the murders, but had been unfairly tried nonetheless.
Despite the work he’d put into the Ballads of Sacco & Vanzetti project, Guthrie ended up abandoning the recordings by 1948, possibly as a result of Moses Asch briefly going into bankruptcy and losing the ability to finance the record. Woody was also reportedly unhappy with the quality of the recordings and had elected to move on.
It was only in 1960 that Asch finally decided to release the unfinished Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti on Folkways Records. By then, Guthrie had been hospitalised in New Jersey with Huntington’s Disease, and may or may not have been clued in to the record’s belated release. Later, in 1971, an Italian film was made about the Sacco & Vanzetti case, featuring music by Ennio Morricone and a new song, ‘The Ballad of Sacco & Vanzetti’, written and performed by Joan Baez. Not long after that, Bob Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’ continued the tradition of the criminal defence protest song.
