A Mosquito Sung Out With Its Wings
Woody Guthrie: “Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti” (Smithsonian Folkways)
It’s oddly satisfying to realize that perhaps the most poignant record to pit against the hate machine of today is one that is older than my parents. It is also a needed reminder that the most system-fucking voice can often be the softest and sweetest. I think if Woody Guthrie was around today, he’d be hanging out with Karl Blau and touring the country with him. He sure as shit wouldn’t be singing at any labor rallies or Communist get-togethers as he did in his time; I don’t think either a) really exist anymore as palpable means of public change, or b) have hot ladies or whiskey. I could be wrong. The point is, if you don’t already know about the trial and sentencing of Sacco and Vanzetti, you got a D in history class, but that doesn’t matter because a dulcet-toned Oklahoman who was never on the TV is here to surpass time and teach you all about it, and, tangentially, how nothing had, nay has changed.
“Old Judge Thayer”, a song clearly representing the repression of the Man and the target of Woody’s derision, exists as a perfect metaphor that now could be extended to human diapers like Rupert Murdoch or Matt Drudge: can we really blame the singular and identifiable right-wing bloggers and big news barons, or is it better to musically sing their names over and over again in public or on record? The answer is, we should taunt these idiotic figureheads like Bart egging on Darryl Strawberry. Throughout the near fifty minutes of this album, he mentions Thayer just about as much as John McCain mentioned Joe the Plumber during his third debate. However, like the personified animals that bounce around the courtroom, constrained only by the lyrical imagination of Woody G., the story of Sacco and Vanzetti is one of a timeworn, tattered fancy.
Thayer, a lazy judge who was prejudiced and misled, and Wurzelbacher, a guy who probably couldn’t cut it as a cop and is now desperately clinging to his money should anyone tell him what to do, are alternately everything and nothing at all. The information glut is nothing new and is relative depending only on when you were born. There have always been special interest groups swaying otherwise decent people into believing the buck stops with them. Singing out tunefully should be the new old antagonism again. It’s startling how Neil Young was the only entertainer in the Bush years to follow Guthrie’s lead and make an hour-long statement on a political moment. And even that wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Think of what this nation might be if there were a troubador, screamer, or MC on most of our TV stations, ready to intone what they think to be the truth.
All the songs on “Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti” now smack of an old-timey sort of byegone allegory, as if these two wrongfully executed Italian immigrants were no more real than Hansel and Gretel or Paul Bunyan. (No wonder it’s hard to imagine — for a lot of young people today, uprisings began and ended in the sixties.) But perhaps the best and most useful of the bunch is the closer “Welcome To Heaven”, a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” state of the union so apt it rings truer than any factual detail he slings at us. Woody laughs almost passively throughout the entire thing, like he was half-dead in 1945: “I’d say that this world is so awful funny / It’s the funniest world that I’ve ever lived through.” It’s chilling not only because he’s singing into the darkness, but because he knows the darkness will never quite leave.
