"So Long, Its Been Good to Know You" by Woody Guthrie

Killooleet Sing, 1964, from Vermont Life magazine

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There I am, age 10 with bangs swept off to the side and sitting next to the girl holding Tony Seeger's banjo at the Camp Killooleet Community Sing night. Every week, we had a Monday Community Sing night indoors in the main house and campfires outdoors by the lake on Fridays where we sang all the old folk songs I learned during the 4 years I went to Camp Killooleet in Hancock Vermont. Camp Killooleet was run by John Seeger, Pete Seeger's older brother. It is now run by Kate Seeger, John's daughter.

Tony Seeger, nephew to Pete Seeger, is leading us in song. Tony was my first banjo and then guitar teacher at this camp. I don’t play banjo anymore, but I still play many of the arrangements he taught me on guitar and I am forever grateful to him for starting me down this path.

Pete Seeger was a frequent visitor to camp during those years and I learned a great many songs from him when he led us in song at the campfires. This Woody Guthrie tune is one of them. 

The recording below comes from the 5th Annual Woody Guthrie Hoot at the Old Stone House in Brooklyn NY in 2017. Thank you to Joel Landy for the recording and on the mandolin is Vincent Cross !

Here's hoping we can raise our voices in song together soon!

So Long, Its Been Good to Know You

"Deportee" by Woody Guthrie

Shot taken by me on a back road near Salinas, Ca

When you wander through the Salinas Valley today, if you go down a certain back highway, you will pass these gigantic wooden figures of happy farm workers picking heads of lettuce while their boss watches them work on the side of the road. As you drive through mile after mile of farmlands, you can see actual farm workers looking not so very happy as they labor in the hot sun. Our fruits and vegetables are picked by Mexican immigrants (both legal and "illegal") in much the same manner as they did more than 60 years ago when Woody Guthrie  wrote Deportees. I took this shot a few years ago, when I still lived on the Central Coast of California.

Woody heard a report on the radio in 1948 about the plane crash carrying Mexican farm workers who were being deported back to Mexico by U.S. Immigration authorities,  and he wrote a timeless classic song about it. Recently, these nameless "deportees" were given names and a memorial nearby. For more, see the article here.

Here is a version I sang in honor of Woody Guthrie's 100th birthday at the last Woody Guthrie birthday bash at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC in 2012.

Deportees by Beth Kotkin