Song of the Day 2/19: Johnny Rodriguez, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”

As usual, the cruelty is the point. The White House released a video of captive immigrants shackled for air transport; naturally no details about who they were or where they were headed, just that they departed from Seattle. To amuse themselves the MAGAts labeled it “ASMR,” which IDs them as the sort of deep thinkers who spend waaaaay too much time on social media.

I had to look it up, but ASMR, or “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” refers to a soothing, tingling feeling that some people experience when they hear certain stimuli – whispering is a common trigger. It might be pseudoscience – neurologists think there’s something to it but haven’t been able to nail down a mechanism – but examples are all over social media.

So those clanking chains give Trump and the MAGAts the tingles, get it, huh, get it? Suck it, libs! (These people think “Lord of the Flies” was an instruction manual.) All I feel tingling is my spider sense – given the recent rash of airplane crashes, and how fast passengers had to evacuate the Delta flight in Toronto that landed upside-down and burst into flames, it occurs to me that shackled passengers would be doomed in an emergency.

Which leads me to this song, prompted by the fiery crash of an immigration service plane in California in January 1948 that claimed 32 lives. Woody Guthrie, living in New York, read about it in the newspaper and was irked by the fact that the story gave the names of the American flight crew and guard but referred to the 28 Mexicans aboard only as deportees, who were buried anonymously in a mass grave.

Guthrie wrote it as a poem and recited it as a chant because he could no longer play guitar (his Huntington’s Disease went undiagnosed until years later), which is how Pete Seeger took to performing it. The melody we know today was written in 1958 by a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman, who heard Seeger perform it and thought it needed a melody. The composition quickly became a tear-jerking standard in the Great Folk Music Scare of the time.

Several folkies recorded it first, and once the Byrds version was included on the Easy Rider soundtrack it moved beyond the protest crowd. The Highwaymen, Dolly Parton, Billy Bragg, Nanci Griffith, Old Crow Medicine Show – it’s a long list, but I don’t think anyone was as personally invested in it as Johnny Rodriguez.

The Texas-born Rodgriguez had a string of country hits in the ’70s and ’80s, and he sang one of the verses on the 1985 version by the Highwaymen, the outlaw-country supergroup of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. I don’t know when this video was filmed but it looks to be about the same time. Rodgriguez stopped charting by the end of the ’80s but stayed active well into this century. His last LP came out in 2012.

Of all the covers out there, I’ll give you the one El Somnambulo would choose – Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Dave Alvin from their 2018 LP “Downey to Lubbock.”