It’s fascinating to hear this recording of Woody Guthrie singing one of his last great songs, Deportees. By this time the degenerative condition that would finally take him, Huntington’s Disease, had got a hold and he was beginning to show symptoms, his writing was becoming more erratic and yet here he manages an incredibly clear and focussed account of the Los Gatos air crash that took the lives of 28 Mexican migrant workers and four American crew charged with deporting them back to their homeland. Sadly missing is the beautiful tune later added by Martin Hoffman, which inspires such gorgeous chorus harmonies and renders a song of protest as a powerful singalong anthem.
Here Woody delivers the song into his home reel to reel on a dubiously tuned guitar as a kind of talking blues, in a matter of fact voice. There are flourishes of his famous expression, the stretching of notes and the wry vocal twists but overall it just sounds terribly sad. Woody sounds tired, I’m sure the illness was partly to blame but also his 4 year old daughter, Cathy had recently perished in a house fire. Both the fire and the air crash were probably caused by faulty wiring, and Woody was incensed by the thought that the manufacturers greed, reflected in shoddy workmanship, had caused both these tragedies. His notebooks show that he had plenty of lyrics and ideas left in him but I wonder with the benefit of hindsight if after a short lifetime of protest and speaking out for the downtrodden and disadvantaged if the sheer weight of oppression wasn’t beginning to take its toll.
As a song and a recording this isn’t likely to disturb any hit parade anywhere, but as a historical document and evidence of a working process of one of the most important songwriters and activists of the 20th century, this is priceless!
