The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #158783   Message #4203669
Posted By: GUEST,henryp
09-Jun-24 - 09:34 AM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: Trump songs
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Trump songs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia;

"Old Man Trump" is a song with lyrics written by American folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie in 1954. The song describes the racist housing practices and discriminatory rental policies of his landlord, Fred Trump (the father of the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump). Although the lyrics were written in 1954, it was never recorded by Guthrie. In January 2016, Will Kaufman, a Guthrie scholar and professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire, unearthed the handwritten lyrics while conducting research at the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In December 1950, Woody Guthrie signed a lease at the Beach Haven apartment complex owned and operated by Fred Trump in Gravesend, Brooklyn. There are several handwritten drafts of the lyrics with titles such as "Beach Haven Race Hate" and "Beach Haven Ain't My Home". In its lyrics, Guthrie expresses his dissatisfaction with Trump and the "color line" he had drawn in his Brooklyn neighborhood:

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 Beach Haven family project

Similarly, an unreleased variant of Guthrie's "Ain't Got No Home" protests Trump's segregation at Beach Haven.

Beach Haven is Trump's Tower
Where no Black folks come to roam
No, no, Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

According to scholar Will Kaufman, Guthrie "thought that Fred Trump was one who stirs up racial hate, and implicitly profits from it." In Guthrie's notebooks he wrote about wanting to put an end to the segregation with "a face of every bright color laffing and joshing in these old darkly weeperish empty shadowed windows."