Why? What's the relevance? I really don't see it.
Woody Guthrie's Protest Songs Against Donald Trump's Father Are Covered By Modern Artists 65 Years LaterMore than 60 years before Donald Trump was elected president, legendary folk singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie was writing song lyrics blasting his father, Fred Trump, as a racist landlord. Now those lyrics are getting new life in songs like “Old Man Trump,” covered by Ryan Harvey, Tom Morello, and Ani DiFranco, and “I Ain’t Got No Home,” covered by the Missin’ Cousins.
Woody Guthrie, a pillar of American protest music who was famous for songs like “This Land Is Your Land,” signed a lease in an apartment complex in Brooklyn back in 1960 and was soon writing bitter words about his landlord, Fred C. Trump, according to The New York Times.
The angry writings about “Old Man Trump” were uncovered by scholar Will Kaufman, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire, who was working on a book about Guthrie. In them, Guthrie claimed that blacks were unwelcome as tenants in the Trump apartment complex near Coney Island and that Fred Trump stirred up racial hate and profited from it.
Guthrie’s lyrics named Fred Trump by name, calling him out for bigotry and discrimination in the apartment complex.
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project
Guthrie went on to rework his song “I Ain’t Got No Home” into an angry critique of Fred Trump, according to Mr. Kaufman, again calling out Fred Trump in the song.
Beach Haven ain’t my home!
I just can’t pay this rent!
My money’s down the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!
Kaufman wrote about Guthrie’s journal writings in a thorough piece on The Conversation, with “Woody Guthrie, ‘Old Man Trump’ and a real estate empire’s racist foundations.”
“For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing – both public and private – out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens,” Kaufman said.
Indeed, years later the Justice Department would bring federal cases against Fred and Donald Trump for “racially discriminatory conduct” for practices such as charging higher rent to black families and instructing management to tell blacks that there were no vacancies. Trump Management settled the case, though they said the agreement did not constitute an admission of guilt.
(Inquistr)