I grew up on a steady diet of Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, etc. That’s the music my grandfather listened to while we mucked out stalls, rode in the pickup truck, worked in the yard, sat in the porch swing. I was particularly a Dolly Parton fan and I could sing a lot of her songs, so when I got my first cassette player, I asked for one of her albums. My dad was disappointed because he wanted me to ask for the Bill Gaither Children’s Choir, but my aunt had taken me to see 9 to 5–I was too young at 9, but I HAD to watch Dolly on a big screen–and so I got both. Of course I loved the title track and I sang it at the top of my lungs. (I still do that actually.) But there was a song on that album that set me on a lifelong path. It was a cover, but delivered by Dolly, the message became incredibly important to me.

Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) is a protest song with lyrics written by Woody Guthrie. He wrote it about a plane crash that happened in January 1948 near Los Gatos Canyon in California. The crash killed 32 people: four Americans and 28 migrant farm workers who were being deported to Mexico. At the time I heard Deportee, I was living next to a cotton field in far west Texas, just about a mile from a cluster of window-less, metal-roofed, cinder block buildings. Those buildings were the homes of migrant workers who appeared each fall to pick cotton. Because my grandmother was averse to driving on main roads, I was carted off to school each morning via the dirt road that ran alongside these buildings and I would look out the window at the workers getting ready for the day. There were often children and I wondered why they weren’t leaving for school, too. I still wonder.

According to legend, Guthrie was moved to write Deportee after seeing a newspaper article that described the victims merely as “deportees.” Guthrie added names: “Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita; adiós, mis amigos, Jesús y María…” The first time I heard the song, I attached it to the migrant workers in the fields by my house, many of their faces still firmly lodged in my memory, now with imaginary names. (see bottom)

The thing that sticks with me 50 years later is that the culture isn’t appreciably different and in some ways is worse. There are more media outlets; therefore, if something isn’t reported by a larger, more traditional paper or network it will likely gain traction elsewhere. That’s good. But the overall appreciation for the contributions migrant labor makes to our society–not the least of which is providing the food we put on our tables every single day–remains lower than it should be. This is especially frustrating in the midst of this political and democratic rupture in our country, government operatives snatching people off the street. So many people have been classified now as deportees, and so many of them are legally in our country. Some are citizens.

You might say that more protest songs are needed and you’d be right, but the protest songs from decades past are still so relevant. I protest that.

Dolly, we will miss you. Your unmatched humor and wit and kindness has rippled out in ways you could have never known while you walked the earth with us, but maybe now you can. Fifty years from now we’ll still be listening to you and hopefully your example will be the one that overtakes and endures instead of whatever we are living through right now.

Dolly’s version

Woody’s Version

Note:
The migrant workers I saw in west Texas weren’t always Mexican or Hispanic. There were also Black workers and sometimes white workers, too.