Songwriting: How To Write A Political Song

Cisco Houston: Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
Lyrics by Woody Guthrie.

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Joni Mitchell is one of my favorite songwriters, but she has one big weakness. She does not know how to write a political song. This shows up especially in her later work. She certainly is passionate about some issues, but her anger gets in the way of her craft, and she winds up with rants instead of songs. In this, she is hardly alone.

Before I go any further, I should clarify my terms. I have been careful to use the term "political song", not "protest song". A political song is a song written to be listened to by people who may not even agree with the songwriter when they first hear the song; done properly, the song persuades by drawing the sympathy of the listener. By contrast, a protest song is written to energize a group of people who already agree with the songwriter: at its best, a protest song is musically simple enough to be learned by a thousand or a million people while they march through the streets. A classic example of a protest song is "We Shall Overcome".

Returning briefly to Joni Mitchell, I have discussed her works as political songs, but really the problem is that they are too lyrically simplistic to be effective political songs, but they are too musically sophisticated to work as protest songs either.

To see how a political song should work, let's look at a classic example: Woody Guthrie's "Deportee ( Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)".

Guthrie actually wrote this as a poem in 1948, and the music was written a decade later by a school teacher named Martin Hoffman. On January 29, 1948, a plane carrying a crew of four Americans and a "cargo" of 28 migrant workers being deported to Mexico crashed in Los Gatos canyon in California, killing all on board. Guthrie found the fact that the Mexicans were identified in the newspaper accounts only as deportees offensive. Hence the line, "You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane."

Guthrie tells the story of this event through eyes of an unnamed fellow migrant worker who either knew some of the victims personally, or knows plenty of others like them. He gives some of the victims names, because to him they are people, not just "deportees". This is the key to what makes the song work. Guthrie does not sloganize; he personalizes. He gives us a character we can identify with, who tells us of the pride he takes in the hard work that he and his fellows do.

Guthrie even manages to get another issue into his poem without losing his focus. As part of the farm subsidy program at that time, the government paid farmers to destroy some of their crop to support higher prices. Guthrie found this unconscionable when people were going hungry. He ties these two themes together at the very end of his poem with these lines:

Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except 'deportees'?

And he doesn't need to say anything else.



Reader submission by Darius