Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee”
My two-month old granddaughter has figured out joy and frustration, but she is a few years away from being able to find words to go with her memories. I’m a dyspeptic old guy and a lot of life is rolling in the muted pleasures and painful regrets that issue out of the concatenations of memory over time.
I first heard the Woody Guthrie song “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)’’ by Woody Guthrie back in the early ‘80s, probably from a version of the song performed by Joan Baez. Baez sings the song in her classic folkie style, but with hints of latin guitar. Arlo Guthrie’s version was probably the next version that I heard. Arlo’s version has the veracity of the Guthrie voice. It sounds right, but the history of the song is more complicated.
I went down the rabbit hole on “Deportee,” after finding that it appeared on Dolly Parton’s 1980 album “9 to 5 and Odd Jobs.” I assumed that the record was a soundtrack album to go along with the hit movie, “9 to 5,” which Dolly starred in with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, but when my daughter and I put it on to listen to with the baby we discovered that it was something else. (For the full album, and it is worth it, go here). The album art depicts Dolly in workman’s overalls, high heels, a metal lunch box and somehow carrying or dragging with her the tools of about a dozen trades, all of which has nothing to do with the movie. The first side opens with the theme of the movie, written and performed by Dolly, and the rest of the album follows the country pop or countrypolitan style which the google AI tells me involves lush orchestration and choral backings that replace twangy choruses. It could be a tiresome style, but in Dolly’s hands I don’t see that anyone could complain. However the real surprise is what follows making of the entirety of both sides of the album.
“9 to 5 and Odd Jobs,” is a concept album about the struggle of working men and women. Dolly Parton has never campaigned for any politician and she has shied away from making her politics explicit or dogmatic. Nevertheless, the selection of songs on this album runs the gamut from compassionate to radical. Her song “Hush-a-Bye Hard Times,” works out from the chorus of the Stephen Foster song, “Hard Times Come Again No More.” In the hands of most singers the song is preserved in the amber of its nineteenth century phrasing, making it seem distant even with its emotional relevance intact. Kate and Anna McGarrigle along with Loudon Wainwright, Emmy Lou Harris and other present such a version. Dolly’s version has an upbeat sound that would have been unrecognizable to a nineteenth century audience. The singer of the song speaks from inside of the hard times rather from the outside looking in. Her revised version ends:
Hush-a-bye baby
Don’t cry no more
Your mama can’t give you
What your crying for
Hush-a-bye hard time
Go ye away
I don’t intend to be treated this way
Oh hush-a-bye baby
Hush-a-bye hard times
Hush-a-bye baby
Don’t cry no more
Despite the defiance in the voice, I can tell you from my current experience that trying to soothe a baby when you don’t have what they need is a hard place to be.
That song is followed by the traditional “House of the Rising Sun.” There is a pretty deep rabbit hole that you can go down there too. If you are the rare person unfamiliar with the song, I can tell you that it is a song sung from a brothel. After “Deportee,” the last song on side one is “Song for the Common Man,” which is a paean to blue-collar working people.
Side two opens with another Dolly composition cataloging the range of labors that women are engaged in our times and the struggles entailed. “Detroit City,” is a Mel Tillis song that tells about the loneliness and melancholy of a poor southerner who rode the rails to Detroit for work only to be submerged within a constant cycle of labor by day and drinking by night. “But You Know I Love You,” is the song of a traveling salesman who longs for the family that he supports, but seldom sees. Merle Travis’ song “Dark as a Dungeon,” expresses a misery in labor that seems almost primordial. The album closes with a more optimistic song by Dolly that is probably a close reflection of her feelings about her own upbringing. It ends:
So, come on down
Have a look around
At rich folks living in a poor folks town
We got no money but we’re rich in love
That’s one thing that we got a-plenty of
So, come on down
Have a look around
At rich folks living in a poor folks town.
Once again, Dolly is expressing a resistance to the condescension that many poor people feel when those better off take notice of them. As nice as Dolly is, the phrase class struggle comes to mind here.
Nevertheless, the song “Deportees” is the most radical of all in the way that argues the capitalist system ruthlessly and thoughtlessly exploits the weakest among the labor force. Dolly’s father was a sharecropper until he was able to acquire a small scale tobacco farm. She came from the kind of poor white family that James Agee and Walker Evans wrote about and photographed in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” - a group still down at the bottom in America in the 1960s when President Johnson strove to lift them up with the Great Society programs. As with the Stephen Porter song “Hard Times Come Again No More,” the beauty of the song “Deportees” can aestheticize the subject that the songs mean to expose.
It's hard to say if the Dolly Parton version of “Deportees,” helped improve the condition of farm workers, even though I am pretty sure that she really does care about them and the way that they live. A pragmatic voice urges us to settle for what we can get rather than to hold out for what we really want and what the world really needs. The history of the song goes back seventy-eight years. It still seems prickly and relevant despite the ways that Guthrie’s original anger may now be slightly suppressed.
The song opens with what seems like a calm point of ending:
The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting
The oranges are filed in their creosote dumps
Despite that calm there is a discordance. The harvest is over, but rather than having a crop ready to go to market the peaches are rotting. The second line was always mysterious to me. Dumps are large cardboard boxes the size or a shipping palette. They rest on the palette and are about four feet high. The creosote is a poison that renders the oranges in them inedible. At the time, the government wanted excess harvest destroyed in order to keep agricultural prices high. The third line, “They're flying 'em back to the Mexico border,” has an ambiguity to it that is only resolved in the following line. This is the first hint that the attitude that America has towards Juan and Roselita, et al. is not positive.
Woody Guthrie famously wrote “Deportees” in response to a newspaper article in which none of the names of the agricultural workers were mentioned, only the crew and the deportation agent. He wrote the text and never performed it publicly. He shared it with Pete Seeger who popularized it first as a talking blues. It was thought that there were no recordings of Guthrie singing the song, however, he left behind a collection of reel to reel tapes. It was thought that they were unusable, but recent improvements in technology unlocked their contents and a recording that Guthrie made in 1948 came to light. You can hear it now.
The recording is also a talking blues. Guthrie’s expression is already a bit challenged by his Parkinson’s. Nevertheless, his righteous anger rumbles in his voice, particularly when he comes to the lines,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?
There is one word that is different from the text as we know it. The last time that we are used to hearing the word “aeroplane,” we hear instead, “air crate.” Here we see that in Guthrie’s mind the workers are being treated just like the excess fruit, packed in a crate to be destroyed for no reason. And indeed they were. At the last minute, the airplane meant to be used for the flight was swapped out and a smaller (and fatally unsafe) plane was substituted. It was too small for the number of people on board, and three of the migrants, left without seats, just sat on suitcases.
“Deportees,” entered the canon of American folk music through the work of Pete Seeger. The tune was added by Martin Hoffman, a student teacher who attended a house concert that Seeger put on Hoffman suggested the tune for Deportees based on a Mexican melody, with the added melody it started to be taken on by other performers. Cesar Chavez mentioned hearing Cisco Houston’s version in his car as a moment when he felt pulled in to commit to the farm worker’s struggle. (Much of this paragraph is sourced from an article that I just can’t get access to anymore. Any mistakes that have entered into my account are based on failures of memory on my part. This article is the only source for a lot of information about how “Deportee” became the phenomenon that it is).
The beauty of the music that so enhances the song can draw one away from the urgency of the message. When it brings me to tears I have to wonder if the tears come from the music, the message, or the confluence of the two. Like the sailors with Odysseus hypnotized by the song of the sirens, music can help us forget the real urgency of a moment. However, as with Cesar Chavez and the many singers of “Deportee,” who sang it as a part of the farm worker’s struggle, the message can come through all the more persuasively on the back of the music.
Many versions of the song omit the last two verses where Guthrie turns most directly political and amp up the pathos of the chorus. Sadly, Dolly Parton is one of those, so her political activism can be a little bit of a disappointment. Yet it is still there. The basic message that every one of us are deserving of dignity is a strong start. This shouldn’t feel like a radical position, but for the moment it is. Denying people dignity is one of the first and most important steps in denying the sum of their humanity, and their right to life itself. I love Dolly, but Woody is a necessity.
