The Great Bernardo Palombo translated Woody Guthrie’s “Deportees” into Spanish for the first time, and performed it at a November 2014 fundraiser, Stand With Ferguson, at Middle Collegiate Church on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, and Joan Baez, performed as well to raise funds following the killing of Michael Brown and the emergence of what soon would become the Black Lives Matter movement. (Timothy Lynch in Berkeley writes that before Bernardo, Nanci Griffith released the song with Spanish verses back in 1998 and Tish Hinajosa released a Spanish version of the song on her 2013 release “After The Fair.”)
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Thank you for sharing this! Beautiful, and it makes so much sense to have it Spanish. Thank you, Bernardo, for this translation and performance!
Wonderful. Bernardo’s voice is soulful and moving. Thanks Mitchel for sharing this now, we need the music medicine.
Good !! very good . thank you . Norma
( if you’re not getting a decent response this is because this is a miserable website – Rollin’all around like the song.
Mitchell,
Thank you for sharing this.
It is more beautiful in Spanish than in English.
Mary Prophet
Thanks Mitchel for posting this very moving song, so relevant today. Should have been translated into Spanish earlier! Chris
Dear Mitchel,
As with all you do, you bring the best and
most human to us. Thank you, Rosa
I knew Bernardo in the early 80. and would have loved to be at that event.
Bravo!
Could you or Bernardo provide the Spanish words?
Incidentally, I heard a few years ago that the deportees had been recently identified and that some kind of memorial had been or would be constructed for them. I don’t know any specifics.
How beautiful! By the way, the music was composed by Martin Hoffman.