This is another in the long list of Woody Guthrie songs I’ve known since my elementary school years, and stands out for me in part because Dave Van Ronk recorded it on his second Philo album, in a period when we were spending a lot of time together. I was surprised, because Dave hadn’t recorded any of Woody’s other songs, and I didn’t think of them as his kind of music.

Of course, he knew a bunch of those songs, because everybody did, but he also was of the generation and sect that had tended to shy away from Woody’s work, in part because it had been canonized by the previous generation of folk revivalists, and in part because he tended not to like “country” or other white southern “old-time” styles. He’d come up in the Civil Rights era, and although he liked the members of the New Lost City Ramblers as individuals, he associated much of their repertoire with a culture he considered retrograde and dangerous. As he once put it, “It’s the soundtrack of the lynch mobs, and I want nothing to do with it.”

Obviously, that’s an oversimplification, but it’s not wrong: some canonical old-time players performed under the sponsorship of the Ku Klux Klan, and many more were solid segregationists and, if around today, would be solid MAGA voters. Others, of course, were populists (the left-wing kind), or connected with various union or farmer organizations he thoroughly supported, and Guthrie was firmly on the left, so that wasn’t a specific problem, but it still wasn’t his kind of music — and, again, there was the problem of canonization. He thought Dylan was, on the whole, a better songwriter than Guthrie; that Joni Mitchell was, on the whole, a better songwriter than Dylan; and that Cole Porter was a better songwriter than any of them.

So I was surprised he recorded this one. Part of the explanation was that he was in a mood to pay tribute. He recorded this on the same album as Tom Paxton’s “Did You Hear John Hurt?” and followed it with Dylan’s “Song to Woody.”But he also just thought it was a damn good song.

This is another of the songs Woody wrote in 1941 on commission for the Department of the Interior, celebrating the Bonneville Power Administration, and appearing on the soundtrack of a documentary film promoting dam-building and rural electrification. I’ve posted some others (“Grand Coulee Dam,” “Roll On, Columbia“), but this one feels more timely, due to the current war on immigrants, or migrants, or just poor people — and that’s not just a MAGA problem; the Democrats and lots of other parties in lots of other countries are getting votes by framing migrants as a problem, rather than as people trying to escape and solve problems.

I’ve written a lot about that in my blog about immigration, borders, and related issues, and will keep writing about it, because it’s the central issue of our time, along with the climate changes that are making mass immigration increasingly vital for many millions of people.

For this post, I’ll just add that my chording for this song is consciously idiosyncratic; my basic idea was just to stay on the Dm chord, adding other notes where they seemed to fit. You might call that approach modal, but I see no need to get fancy about the terminology; my inspiration was a piece Pete Seeger wrote about the virtues of simplicity, in which he mentioned that he had finally got the point of playing “Old Joe Clark” with a single chord all the way through. I’m also headed that way with “Nottamun Town”/”Masters of War,” though, as with this one, I sometimes throw in an extra note or switch to another chord if it feels right. More and more, on songs like these, I’ve been thinking of the guitar as an accompanying instrument, following the voice, rather than as providing a solid foundation. And it’s not coincidental that in both of my examples, I’m working from a minor chord, while a lot of old-time players would have played major chords, though sometimes singing the minor third. And, in case that sounds technical… I know lots of people, including Dave Van Ronk, who could easily point out where someone was singing a minor third while playing the major, but I’m not one of them. I write music history, but I’m not that kind of musicologist, and the bottom line on this arrangement is that it’s what feels right to me these days.