He sang about love, injustice, Einstein – and his landlord Fred Trump, father of Donald, ending up in hell. As a trove of Guthrie tracks resurfaces, his daughter Nora remembers the penner of ‘hard-hitting songs for hard-hit people’
W
ith 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.”
