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Forbes
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
What We Should Learn From The History Of Farm Workers
Photo of folk singer Woody Guthrie playing his guitar while a cigarette dangles from his lips. Ca. ... More 1960s. (Photo by �� John Springer Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) History repeats itself. Sometimes vaguely, sometimes obviously. But it always repeats itself. Once in a long while, though, the repeat performance is so direct and so exact, that we'd have to wonder what our leadership had been doing other than learning the lessons of that history. This is one of those times. On January 28, 1948, a twin-engine propeller DC-3 crashed in Los Gatos Canyon (Fresno County, California), resulting in the deaths of 32 people, four Americans (flight crew and security guards) plus 28 migrant farm workers who were being deported from California back to Mexico. Woody Guthrie, America's greatest native-born songwriter ('This Land Is Your Land') and activist, was deeply upset that radio and newspaper coverage of the crash did not give the victims' names, but instead referred to them merely as "deportees". The result of Guthrie's scorn was what many consider his last great song, the hauntingly beautiful but unmistakenly direct 'Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)'. Here is Woody's son Arlo performing it. I promise that if you read the lyrics while listening to Arlo, you'll elevate your experience. Other that, the only introductory comment I'll make is that this is one of those repeats of history that is so spot on, direct, and unmistakable – from the broad-stroke message to the smallest of details – that no other words could enhance or diminish it, especially in today's climate. It's eerie how close the newspaper and cable news coverage today is to the lyrics of this song. The crops are all in and the peaches are rottingThe oranges piled in their creosote dumpsThey're flying 'em back to the Mexican borderTo pay all their money to wade back again My father's own father, he waded that riverThey took all the money he made in his lifeMy brothers and sisters come working the fruit treesAnd they rode the truck till they took down and diedGoodbye to my Juan, goodbye, RosalitaAdios mis amigos, Jesus y MariaYou won't have your names when you ride the big airplaneAll they will call you will be "deportees"Some of us are illegal, and some are not wantedOur work contract's out and we have to move onSix hundred miles to that Mexican borderThey chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thievesWe died in your hills, we died in your desertsWe died in your valleys and died on your plainsWe died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushesBoth sides of the river, we died just the same Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, RosalitaAdios mis amigos, Jesus y MariaYou won't have your names when you ride the big airplaneAll they will call you will be "deportees"The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos CanyonA fireball of lightning, and shook all our hillsWho 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 trees?To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoilAnd be called by no name except "deportees"? Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, RosalitaAdios mis amigos, Jesus y MariaYou won't have your names when you ride the big airplaneAll they will call you will be "deportees" Living in New York City at the time, Woody considered the news coverage racist because none but the four Americans were mentioned by name. Cesar Chavez, later the founder of the United Farm Workers union, learned of the tragic crash while serving in the US Navy, helping convince him that farm workers should be treated "as important human beings and not as agricultural implements". In 1948, Chavz took up the fight. In 1958, Martin Hoffman, a teacher, wrote the final version of the music. In 1967, Woody died. In 1993, Chavez died. On Labor Day, September 2, 2013, a permanent grave marker – the Deportee Memorial Headstone – was unveiled at the site, naming all Mexican laborers by name.
Irish Examiner
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Book review: The New York neighbourhood that changed the music world
How does an artistic 'scene' come about? What factors need to coalesce? What turns a spark into a long-lasting flame? When it came to the legendary Greenwich Village music scene in 1960s New York, a lot seemed to hinge on a singular, magnetising place and event: the outdoor jams held every Sunday in summer in Washington Square Park. These happenings drew towards them, from far and wide, from the various crannies where they had been hiding, all those with a secret and unusual passion for folk music. The sessions formed what someone called 'the incubation ground for the revival of folk singing'. It was a case of come one, come all: Arlo Guthrie, who would have been around 10 years old, was dropped off by his mother Marjorie to wander around with his guitar until he found a group he could join in with. From here sprang friendships, encouragement, collaborations, and perhaps the most precious commodity of all: momentum. All would be tested — though ultimately strengthened — by run-ins with the police and the city authorities about timings, crowd size, and the proper filling out of permit applications. Indeed, the freedom to make music in the park would become the subject of a famously chaotic riot in 1961. David Browne thoroughly examines those early outdoor sessions as well all that happened indoors in countless coffee houses, music stores, apartments and sundry dives over the course of close to five decades — from 1957 to 2004 — with a heavy focus on the tumultuous '60s. As a result, Talkin' Greenwich Village is the kind of book you hope to walk away from with illuminating anecdotes and factoids to entertain and illuminate your friends. It doesn't disappoint. For instance, I hadn't known that Strange Fruit, which was debuted by Billie Holiday in a Greenwich Village club in 1939, was written by a Jewish teacher from the Bronx called Abel Meeropel. (A whole book could be written about the enormous Jewish contribution to the Village scene, whether in the form of artists, enthusiasts, or impresarios.) Later, we read about a duo called Kane and Carr, opening for Tom Ashley and the Irish Ramblers at Folk City in 1963. They had previously had a hit called Hey, Schoolgirl, using the moniker Tom and Jerry, but eventually found fame under their true names: Simon and Garfunkel. In a book like this, one also hopes to meet some memorable characters. They turn up in their droves. There is Israel Young, for example, a pre-med student who ended up ditching that career after he was introduced to square dancing by a friend at his college astronomy club. 'Izzy' went on to set up the Folklore Center, an eccentric Village institution selling books and sheet music. About square dancing, he once said: 'It would be like, you know, masturbation. After you do it, you say you'll never do it again, and then another'. David Browne, a senior writer at 'Rolling Stone' and the author of several music biographies. The Clancy brothers and Tommy Makem, meanwhile, make an entrance on page 42. And, again, I learn things I should have known but didn't; that Paddy and Tom both served in the RAF during the Second World War, for instance, or that music was originally intended as a means of raising money to pursue their first passion, acting. Hearing them sing became a rite of passage for American 'folkniks' who occupied the Village alongside the beatniks (and the 'stareniks' who came to gawp at the beatniks). Jazz, though, was still the dominant Village musical genre in the late '50s and remained a big part of the delights on offer. In the summer of 1965 alone, Charlie Mingus, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins, and many others were all to be heard live somewhere in the area between, roughly speaking, Fourth Avenue and the Hudson (going east to west) and between Fourteenth Street and Houston (going north to south). Bob Dylan edges his way into the story at the beginning of chapter three and Judy Collins' reaction to hearing him for the first time is priceless: 'He was singing old Woody songs, and I thought, 'Badly chosen and badly sung'. I was so bored.' Tom Paxton said: 'We were very friendly, but we didn't get to know him. He was not to be known.' From the outset, some of Dylan's songs didn't quite fit the established, beloved paradigms, whether hillbilly laments, or noble protest songs, or something bluesy. Bob Dylan performs at The Bitter End folk club in Greenwich Village in 1961 in New York City. File picture: Sigmund Goode/MichaelIndeed, the early covers of Blowin' in the Wind seem to show other Village musicians trying to drag Dylan's classic back into more familiar shapes. And whereas experiments when they came — the transition to electric instruments, for instance — were usually the production of conscious deliberation under the influence of external pressures — 'The Beatles scuttled all of us,' said Sylvia Tyson — Dylan was perhaps always running off internal, invisible, idiosyncratic forces, entirely his own. It was a scene riven with contradictions. The folkies themselves were swarming over someone else's neighbourhood: in the case of Greenwich Village, Italian Americans. 'It was an Italian neighbourhood,' said Terri Thal. 'People lived there. And we came in, and we destroyed it, and they hated us.' By the mid-60s, when folk was taking its strong pop and rock turn, there were crowds, crime, drugs, knives, guns. No wonder the locals were upset. The people's music didn't always turn out good for, well, the people. Paradoxes multiplied. Rootless urban drifters singing roots music. Artists who couldn't hold down a job, sticking up for the working man. Sizeable egos singing about self-sacrifice and humility. Experimenters messing with tradition, decrying capitalism while chasing record contracts, singing of austerity, penury, and starvation and hard times, but with cash to blow on drugs and booze. These tensions largely remain between the lines of Talkin' Greenwich Village, with the author preferring to tell a fascinating story in a fairly celebratory fashion, rather than detour too far into analysis. By 1967, the original Village folk scene was running out of steam and talent with many of the best-known names heading for other parts of Manhattan — 'loft jazz' in The Bowery, anyone? — bigger venues, the West coast, or even Europe — as well as heading, musically speaking, for the more lucrative and fashionable fields of rock and pop. As a larger-than-life Village legend who stayed at his post right to the end — he died in 2002 — Dave Van Ronk, the Mayor of McDougall Street himself, acts as a kind of fulcrum for the whole story Browne is attempting to tell. Van Ronk's durability meant that, though not homosexual himself, he was around to get caught up in, and arrested during, the 1969 Stonewall Riots. On the story wends, from the likes of Loudon Wainwright III (Van Ronk tells him Plane Too was either the best song he'd ever heard or the worst) through to Suzanne Vega. By the end, the Village is more of a 'musical ghost town', its spirits fled to a thousand different places and the same number of different fates. David Browne is a genial storyteller who wears his immense knowledge lightly. If he were a folk singer, he'd be the type who performs in the service of the song, not himself, which helps to make Talkin' Greenwich Village a very fine read indeed.
