Most people know the Dropkick Murphys because of their hit song “Shipping Up To Boston,” which was featured in The Departed. But most people also don’t realize that Woody Guthrie, the great American anti-fascist troubadour, wrote the lyrics to that song.
Woody himself never recorded the song (which is understandable; I mean, it’s kind of a weird song about a guy with a peg leg who goes to Boston? What?). But the handwritten lyrics were kept in climate-controlled conditions in the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York, where Murphys frontman (and also noted Nazi kicker) Ken Casey first found them.
More recently, the Dropkick Murphys released two acoustic albums of songs featuring unpublished or unfinished Woody Guthrie lyrics. The documentary above, This Machine Rising, details the band’s experiences exploring the Guthrie archives and collaborating with Guthrie’s granddaughter to make the project happen. Along the way, they discuss Woody Guthrie’s influence on American culture, music, and politics. As Guthrie’s granddaughter says in the film, he was in many ways the progenitor of American punk rock—unabashedly standing up for the progressive causes he believed in, and also killing fas with a song.
(I also interviewed Guthrie’s granddaughter recently, though it was about her grandmother, rather than her grandfather.)
This Machine Rising was directed by Dave Stauble, a longtime member of the Murphys’ road crew—who, by coincidence, was also my dorm neighbor during my freshman year of college. I learned this when I saw him filming at a Murphys show over Labor Day weekend, during which the band ended their set in true Woody Guthrie fashion: reminding their audience that Labor Day is a celebration of unions and the working class and that “Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies don’t give a fuck about the unions, or the workers, or any of you.”
Previously:
• How Woody Guthrie’s second wife changed modern dance and mental healthcare