What the world needs now

“What the world needs now is another folk singer like I need a hole in my head,” David Lowery sang, 30-some years ago.

If the point there is that a new folk singer is going to fix everything, or that a new folk singer might be, in itself, a sufficient solution to all the world’s problems, then, yes, of course, that’s silly.

But these days folks need all the help they can get and, well, some new folk singers and new protest songs may not be everything the world needs now, but they can’t hurt.

It’s not like we can look back at everything Woody Guthrie wrote and sang and say, “Here’s how that changed the world in direct and tangible ways.” But I think we can still make a case that his songs helped. If those songs didn’t “change the world,” they maybe changed some people who went out and did.

All of which is to say that I’m very impressed with this timely and timeless composition from Jesse Welles:

That song reminds me of a terrific scene from John Ford’s 1940 adaptation of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath:

MULEY: You mean get off my own land?

THE MAN: Now don’t go blaming me. It ain’t my fault.

SON: Whose fault is it?

THE MAN: You know who owns the land — the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.

MULEY: Who’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Comp’ny?

THE MAN: It ain’t nobody. It’s a company.

SON: They got a pres’dent, ain’t they? They got somebody that knows what a shotgun’s for, ain’t they?

THE MAN: But it ain’t his fault, because the bank tells him what to do.

SON: All right. Where’s the bank?

THE MAN: Tulsa. But what’s the use of picking on him? He ain’t anything but the manager, and half crazy hisself, trying to keep up with his orders from the east!

MULEY: (bewildered) Then who do we shoot?