Woody Guthrie’s ‘Deportee,’ an Ode to Deported Workers, Has Never Been More Relevant

For anyone who follows the news, the story will sound eerily familiar: migrant workers rounded up by immigration officials, put on a plane and transported to a deportation center and, ultimately, Mexico. The shocking twists, however, are the year it happened — 1948, in Fresno County, California — and the tragedy that ensued: The aircraft crashed, killing everyone onboard, including the 28 workers.

A month later, Woody Guthrie immortalized the horrific incident with a basic sketch for a song that, in the late Fifties, became “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” after Colorado folksinger Martin Hoffman set it to music. “Deportee” has since been covered by Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, Dolly Parton, the Byrds, Joan Baez, Ani DiFranco, the late Guthrie pal and folksinger Cisco Houston, and Guthrie’s son Arlo, among many others.

But Guthrie’s own version has been lost to history, until now.

Unveiled today, “Deportee (Woody’s Home Tape)” is a newly unearthed and restored recording of Guthrie talk-singing his first version of the song. The historical document will be part of Woody at Home — Volumes 1 + 2 , a collection of previously unheard Guthrie recordings out Aug. 14.

In the tradition of so many topical and protest songs, “Deportee” was ripped directly from the headlines. Then living on Long Island, Guthrie heard the news about the plane crash either on the radio or in a newspaper. The New York Times reported that of those who died, some “entered the United states illegally” and others “stayed beyond duration of work contracts in California.” But as Guthrie noted of the coverage, only the members of the crew were identified. The workers were simply called “Mexican deportees,” as if they simply had no identifies; many were later buried in a mass grave in California.

The following month, Guthrie wrote the lyrics to “Deportee.” As his granddaughter Anna Canoni, president of Woody Guthrie Publications, said in a statement, “After reading the article, which only named the four Americans that perished, Woody wrote this song in — I don’t want to say anger or frustration, but perhaps in observation of the 28 Mexican nationals who were not named in the article, and moreover, an observation of how the U.S. treats foreigners.”

In the home recording of the song, Guthrie is heard talking the lyrics over basic fingerpicking, without the more developed melody Hoffman later added. Making this version even more potent, Guthrie also adapts a first-person approach (“I don’t have a name and I ride this big airplane/And just call me one more deportee”) instead of the later third-person revise (“You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane/All they will call you will be ‘deportees’”).

“Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” is probably the best-known of Guthrie’s songs that he didn’t fully record. At the time he made this tape, at the Guthrie family home in Brooklyn, he was coping with the early signs of what would later be diagnosed as Huntington’s disease. Guthrie would eventually be hospitalized in New Jersey, where a young Bob Dylan would meet him (a moment depicted in the recent Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown).

The new collection includes nearly two dozen unheard recordings, including a version of “This Land Is Your Land” with added verses, and home recordings of “Pastures of Plenty” and “Jesus Christ.” But for present-tense reasons, “Deportee” remains the most haunted and haunting of the tapes. As Canoni said, “My grandfather wrote, ‘A song ain’t nothing but a conversation you can have again and again.’ It keeps this conversation in the narrative. …  And unfortunately, it needs to be had again and again and again.”