The story of how Woody Guthrie was featured in Martin Scorsese’s movie ‘The Departed’
If you’ve visited a Boston Red Sox home game anytime in the last decade, you’ll have noticed that there’s a special way that the crowd gets pumped up before the ninth and final inning. The crowd rises, after already having stood and sang along to Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’ earlier in the game, and gets ready to let loose once more with another anthem. Two hits are all it takes for the energy to rise instantly, and once the delicate picking of banjo comes in, there’s no doubt as to what’s coming next: ‘I’m Shipping Up to Boston’ by legendary Boston Celtic punks the Dropkick Murphys.
Featuring some of the most explosive bagpipe playings in the history of recorded music, ‘I’m Shipping Up to Boston’ is a minimalist masterpiece tailor-made for maximum impact. With energetic blasts of punk drums, distorted guitars, and throaty shouts, the song is a perfect representation of the slightly scruffy and highly impassioned attitude that Bostonians have towards… well, everything, but mostly the Red Sox.
The Dropkick Murphys originally recorded the song for the B-side of the 2004 single ‘Fields of Athenry’ and was featured on the Hellcat Records compilation Give ‘Em the Boot IV that same year. The band decided to re-record it for what would be their highest-selling album, 2005’s The Warrior’s Code. This was the version that eventually caught the attention of Martin Scorsese, who heavily featured the song throughout his 2006 Boston-centric film The Departed.
It’s not hard to see why ‘I’m Shipping Up to Boston’ became an anthem: it’s highly charged, extremely energetic, and incredibly easy to sing along with. In fact, the song only has one brief verse and the song’s chorus, with a total of less than 20 different words included in the entirety of the lyrics, ‘I’m Shipping Up to Boston’ might be one of the simplest songs ever written. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that the lyricist for the song was none other than folk icon Woody Guthrie.
While Dropkick Murphys’ bassist/singer/songwriter Ken Casey was visiting Guthrie’s archives in the early 2000s, he came across scraps of unused lyrics and poetry from the late songwriter. Some of these scraps served as the basis for both ‘I’m Shipping Up to Boston’ and ‘Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight’, with the band putting their own spin on some of Guthrie’s decades-old ideas. In that sense, The Departed has a unique connection back to the folk history of Guthrie’s long-lost America, thanks to the revitalising work of the Dropkick Murphys.
Check out ‘I’m Shipping Up to Boston’ down below.
