I would like to talk to you about Woody Guthrie, this immense American performer, composer and guitarist (1912-1967), tutelary figure of folk revival and protest song. We owe Guthrie, who began as a street musician, a host of remarkable ballads on wandering hobos during the Great Depression, on outlaws, the undocumented.
His song Deportee denounced a news item from 1948: these Mexican migrants expelled from the United States, died in an accident on the plane returning, whose names the press had not published because they were only expelled. He never stopped denouncing the rich and powerful, defending the damned of the earth. This militant and powerfully gifted icon retains her light decades after her departure. He was a big influence on Bob Dylan, who visited him every day at a New York hospital in his final moments. The cantor of Blowin’ in the Wind dedicated to him, in his first album, the magnificent ode Song to Woody on the music of one of the songs of this pioneer: 1913 Massacre.
Good recordings bring back to us the voice, the commitment and the poetry of his mentor. I listen to them often. The beauty of his melodies is matched only by the quality of the texts. His father, a cowboy in his youth, associated, it was said, with the Ku Klux Klan, had participated in 1911 in the lynching of a black woman and her child. It is undoubtedly partly by filial revolt that the heart of Woody Guthrie will have beaten so much on the left. While never ceasing to love his father, because nothing is ever as simple as that. Still, some blindly follow in the footsteps of toxic parents and others break free with panache. Since 1930, on all his guitars, the musician wrote: “This machine kills the fascists! »
But why bear witness to this today? Because of a song, never recorded by him (there is, among others, a not famous musical version by Ryan Harvey), but with preserved words, that my brother Hubert, a fine connoisseur of the genre, made me discover. Under the ineffable title ofOld Man Trump (Ain’t My Home), composed in 1954, found in 2016 in the family archives, it attacks the real estate developer Fred Trump, father of the man who was to sit enthroned in the White House in an era no less turbulent than his. It starts like this:
“ I guess Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate/ He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts / When he drew that color line / Here at his Beach Haven family project. »
Basically, the song accuses tough, racist businessman Fred Trump of appealing to the basest of human instincts by refusing to rent his apartments to people of color in his apartment buildings.
The Beach Haven in Brooklyn, where Guthrie had lived for a time, had proved hostile to blacks, boycotted by the owner under various pretexts, with the implicit support of the federal housing administration (the Federal Housing Administration). The scandal made people howl. Iron Man was no exception.
Donald Trump had something to hold on to. But comparing the destinies of the former president and the committed artist, what a contrast! The first undertook to walk in the footsteps of his unscrupulous and racist father, who nevertheless stubbornly rejected him, while Woody Guthrie on the contrary made the choice to move forward off the paths marked out by his father, also a segregationist. Like what the father-son bonds can be tied or undone in all ways. Just learn to orient yourself.
Fred Trump fathered children and grandchildren clinging to his ideological lineage. Wicked calculation! We can no longer count the perverse effects of his son’s policies on the disunited United States as on the entire planet. Politician ethics have crumbled under many meridians in contact with him, while his disinformation campaigns, passed on to full social networks, have sown hatred in people’s minds at high speed. And who can see today the end of these excesses?
That Donald Trump’s unresolved problems with his father have in part had similar consequences for the state of the world in the 21st century.e century is dizzying. And reading the verses of Woody Guthrie, we say that his “Old Man Trump” has no time, finally. It is this eternal black wave flying over generations, to be slain from time to time with the weapons of the day.
I wonder what a powerful new troubadour could write about the former tenant of the Oval Office. Contemporary anti-Trump songs exist. The fact remains that the diatribe pinning down in music all of his legacy for posterity is still missing. May new Woodys arise! Top hearts !