Latest news with #PlaneWreckatLosGatos
The Guardian
29-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘He wrote five songs about washing dishes!' The lost Woody Guthrie gems rescued by AI
With mass deportations of migrants across America – not to mention reports of people being put in shackles or made to kneel and eat 'like dogs' – Nora Guthrie is disappointed there hasn't been more noise from musicians about the issue. 'I've been out protesting every weekend,' says the 75-year-old daughter of singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, and founder of the Woody Guthrie Archive. 'And I've found myself asking, 'Where are the songs for us to sing about this?'' In need of a track that meets the moment, she turned to Deportee, a song her father wrote in 1948 in response to a plane crash in California that killed four Americans and 28 Mexican migrant workers, who were being deported. 'A few days later, only the Americans were named and the rest were called 'deportees',' explains Nora's daughter Anna Canoni, who recently succeeded her mother as president of Woody Guthrie Publications, over a joint video call from New York. 'Woody read about it in the New York Times and the same day penned the lyric.' Originally a poem, the song (often subtitled Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) was first popularised by folk singers Martin Hoffman and Pete Seeger and has since been covered by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell. Now, though, leaps in AI audio restoration technology mean we can finally hear Guthrie's own long-lost, home-recorded version, and it's striking how powerfully it speaks to the way migrant workers are demonised today. They 'fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil', he sings, 'and be called by no name except 'deportees''. Singer Billy Bragg argues that 'When the ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] are rounding people up in fields, the song could hardly be more relevant.' Initially a single, Deportee also appears on Woody at Home, Vol 1 and 2, a new 22-track treasure trove of Guthrie's final recordings (including 13 previously unheard songs), made at home in 1951 and 1952, just months before he was first hospitalised with the neurodegenerative Huntingdon's disease that led to his death aged 55 in 1967. 'He'd been blacklisted [during the McCarthy era, for activism], so he couldn't perform as much and couldn't get on the radio,' says Nora. 'Huntingdon's was seeping into his body and his mind. The tapes are a last push to get the songs out, because he senses something is wrong.' Guthrie's advocacy for migrant workers and social justice was informed by lived experience. Born into a middle-class family in Okemah, Oklahoma, he was just 14 when the family lost their home and he subsequently lived through the dust bowl, the Great Depression, the second world war and the rise of fascism. 'He had to migrate from Oklahoma to California,' says Bragg. 'He knew what it was like to lose your home, to be dispossessed, to go on the road. The Okies were really no different to those Mexican workers and were just as reviled.' Performing with the slogan 'This machine kills fascists' written on his guitar, Guthrie packed his seminal 1940 debut Dust Bowl Ballads with what Anna calls 'hard-hitting songs for hard-hit people'. He penned his most famous anthem, This Land Is Your Land – a new version of which opens Woody At Home with extra verses – after a road trip, as the lyric says, 'from California to the New York island'. 'Woody wrote it because he was really pissed off with hearing Irving Berlin's God Bless America on every jukebox,' says Bragg. 'It annoyed the shit out of him. I've actually seen the original manuscript for the song and crossed out at the top is Woody's original title, God Blessed America for You and Me, which I think gives him claim to be an alternative songwriter, the archetypal punk rocker.' Between the early 1930s and the 1950s, Guthrie penned an astonishing 3,000 songs, recording more than 700 of them. The Woody at Home recordings were made at his family's rented apartment in Beach Haven, Brooklyn, on a primitive machine given to him by his publisher with a view to selling the songs to other artists. With his wife out working, the increasingly poorly singer somehow managed to record 32 reels of tape while minding three kids. Sounds of knocks on doors, and even Nora as a toddler, appear on the tapes along with conversational messages. 'He'd write on the couch with the kids jumping on his head,' Anna says. 'He'd write on gift wrappers or paper towels. We've found some of Woody's most beautiful quotes in correspondence, like in a 1948 letter to [folk music champion] Alan Lomax, 'A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it.' Sometimes he only had time for a title. Everything was coming out so quickly he had to get it down.' Woody at Home contains previously unheard songs about racism (Buoy Bells From Trenton), fascism (I'm a Child Ta Fight) and corruption (Innocent Man) but also showcases the breadth of Guthrie's canon. There are songs about love, Jesus Christ, atoms … even Albert Einstein, whom he once met and took a train with. It tickles Nora that her father wrote 'no less than five songs about washing dishes'. Guthrie wrote Old Man Trump, also known as Beach Haven Race Hate, about their landlord, Fred Trump – father of Donald – and his segregative housing policies. Woody at Home premieres another song about him, Backdoor Bum and the Big Landlord. 'It's really the story of how the guy who has everything gives nothing and the guy who has nothing gives everything,' says Nora. 'My favourite bit is when the landlord gets to heaven laden with gold. They send him to hell and he goes, 'Let me see your manager. I'm gonna buy this place and kick you out.' The arrogance and entitlement are astonishing, but it clearly defines someone we all know. We lived in Trump buildings. We know who they are.' The family moved to Queens where, when Nora was 11, she answered the door to an inquisitive 19-year-old singer-songwriter called Robert Zimmerman. The future Bob Dylan had read Guthrie's autobiography, Bound for Glory. 'I was a little upset because I was watching American Bandstand and had to answer the door,' she chuckles. 'There was this guy standing there who looked dusty and weird. I slammed the door and ran back to American Bandstand. But he kept on knocking.' The 2024 Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown dramatises the iconic 1961 meetings between the teenage future legend and his hospitalised, dying idol. Nora loves the film, but points out: 'My father wasn't in a room on his own like in the movie. Woody was on a ward with 40 patients, in a psychiatric hospital because there were no wards for people with Huntingdon's at the time. There was a sunroom to the side where Bob would meet him, take him pens and cigarettes. My memory is that Bob would not only sing his songs for Woody' – Dylan subsequently recorded a heartfelt tribute, Song to Woody – 'but that he'd also sing my father's own songs to him. I can't emphasise enough how kind Bob was, but he understood that Woody needed to hear what he'd achieved.' By then, Guthrie was very ill. 'Because of Huntingdon's I didn't have a dad in the traditional sense people talk about,' Nora says with a sigh. 'He couldn't really talk or have long conversations like we're having now. We couldn't have physical contact because with Huntingdon's your body's always moving. You'd have to hold his arms back so you could hug him. If we ever went out to a restaurant people would look at us like he was drunk and that hurt.' Nora became Woody's carer and, in her tireless curation of his legacy, has been caring for her father ever since. 'That happened accidentally,' she says, explaining how she'd spent 10 years as a professional dancer when – in 1991 – Guthrie's retiring manager called her in to sort through boxes of his stuff. 'One of the first things I pulled out was a letter from John Lennon,' she says, fetching the framed letter, sent to the family in 1975, for me to see. It reads: 'Woody lives and I'm glad.' The next find was the original lyrics for This Land Is Your Land. 'It was a treasure trove.' From which there is more to come. His descendants hope to spark today's young songwriters – and protesters – in the way Guthrie did for Dylan, Springsteen and countless others. 'I see us as the coal holders,' says Anna. 'We keep Woody's ember burning so that whenever someone wants to ignite the fire in them, Woody is hot and ready.' Deportee (Woody's Home Tape) is available now on streaming services. Woody At Home, Vol 1 and 2 is released on Shamus Records on 14 August
Miami Herald
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Miami Herald
Reversing course, Key West City Commissioners agree to cooperate with ICE agreement
Key West city commissioners on Tuesday night reversed course from a vote last week to declare an agreement with U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement void — instead opting to cooperate with the agency in the Trump administration's mass deportation effort. The decision angered the dozens of people who packed City Hall, urging commissioners to either stick with their initial vote to end the agreement with ICE or wait until a judge decides if municipalities must comply with such agreements. The city of South Miami filed a lawsuit in Leon County court in March against the DeSantis administration seeking a judge's opinion on whether the city is required to take part in so-called 287(g) agreements, named after a section in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. READ MORE: Key West City Commissioners vote to end police agreement with ICE. What's next? Key West City commissioners voted 4-2 not to wait for the judge's decision before voting on the ICE cooperation agreement. The vote to void the agreement with ICE last week sparked international headlines and a vow from the DeSantis administration to punish the Southernmost City if it didn't change course. On Tuesday, more than 100 people packed City Hall. Most urged commissioners to stick with their original decision, while wearing shirts that read, 'Be Brave.' A man and woman sang the Woody Guthrie song, 'Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),' a protest song Guthrie wrote about a 1948 plane crash that killed almost 30 migrant farm workers on a deportation flight from California to Mexico. Lucy Hawk read a letter on behalf of 133 residents of Bahama Village, which has a large Haitian migrant community, pleading with commissioners to reject the 287(g) agreement. 'These people are very proud of what you did last week, and we hope you honor that,' Hawk said. Last Tuesday, the commission voted 6-1 to void the agreement, which allows police officers to stop, question and detain undocumented immigrants, arguing it was not enforceable because it was approved in March by the police chief and not the city manager by way of elected officials. However, following pressure from Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier — including threats to remove elected and unelected officials from office — three of the six commissioners, as well as Key West Mayor Danise Henriquez, voted to stay in the agreement. 'I'm voting with my head, and not my heart,' said Commissioner Donald Lee, the former Key West Police chief who last week voted to void the agreement when said the opposite, that he was 'voting with my heart' yet hoping that wouldn't get the city in trouble with the state. As people stormed out of the meeting, Commissioner Lissette Cuervo Carey, who voted last week to stay in the agreement and maintained her stance Tuesday, criticized the crowd's reaction. 'It appears that we are 'one human family,' ' she said, referencing the city's motto,' Unless we have a difference of opinion.' Commissioners Monica Haskell and Mary Lou Hoover voted to maintain the city's objection to entering into the 287(g) agreement. Commissioner Samuel Kaufman, who supported ending the agreement last week, wasn't present because he was out of town, but sent a statement criticizing Henriquez for calling the special meeting without enough time for him to change his travel plans. When the commission voted to end the agreement last week, Uthmeier, who sent a letter to the city the next morning threatening to take action against the city, including removing from office those who voted for the resolution. In Florida, law enforcement departments that operate county jails must enter partnerships with the federal government so their officers can carry out limited immigration agent functions. State statutes do not explicitly require local and municipal police departments to join these agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as the 287(g) program. But DeSantis and his administration have pressured local officials, arguing that their police departments must join to comply with the state's sanctuary city laws, which prohibit local governments from limiting collaboration with ICE. Uthmeier's office has also threatened local officials in Orlando and Ft Myers with removal from office if their local governments don't agree to have their police departments join 287(g) agreements. During the June 30 meeting, commissioners supporting the voiding of the 287(g) agreement argued Key West is not a so-called sanctuary city, meaning that if someone is arrested and police find out he or she is undocumented, police inform federal immigration authorities. City officials also said police regularly support and protect ICE and other federal agencies that operate in Key West, but officers have not taken part in immigration enforcement. Police Chief Sean Brandenburg said last week that he signed the agreement with ICE in March because he was told by law enforcement colleagues in other municipalities that if he didn't, he faced removal of office by the governor. But, he said Tuesday that his officers have never actively participated in ICE raids and don't plan to. 'We are not conducting raids of any kind,' he told commissioners. Berbeth Foster, senior staff attorney at the Community Justice Project, a racial justice and human rights legal nonprofit in Miami, told the commissioners Tuesday that municipalities are not required to join into 287(g) agreements in Florida. 'It is clear in the legal language in the statute,' Foster said. Hours before the hearing, Key West Mayor Danise Henriquez, who voted along with the majority of the City Commission to void the agreement with ICE last week, stressed she did so only because the city's charter required the agreement to be signed by the city manager, not the police chief. Henriquez said that she supported the majority vote because she thought a new a new 287(g) agreement should be written up that 'could be considered and, if approved, properly executed by the City Manager in accordance with local legal requirements.' 'Let me be clear: I have no intention of breaking state law or undermining lawful immigration enforcement. My sole aim is to do things the right way — transparently, legally, and in the best interest of the City of Key West,' Henriquez said in the statement.
