It may not be music to Donald Trump’s ears, but a new, upbeat American song accusing the would-be president’s father of being a racist landlord makes its debut on Wednesday.
Written by folk icon Woody Guthrie decades ago and unearthed earlier this year, the lyrics are a broadside against Fred Trump, the New York businessman who made a fortune building middle-class housing.
Guthrie, a life-long champion of America’s down and out, rented an apartment from Trump senior in 1950 and was so offended that one of his complexes was virtually all-white that he jotted down notes in protest.
“I suppose old man trump knows just how much racial hatred he stirred up in the bloodpot of human hearts,” goes one verse in the now released “Old Man Trump,” which has been set to music from another Guthrie track about housing.
Its digital launch comes with the Republican nominee sluggish in polls and trailing an enormous $40 million deficit behind Hillary Clinton’s bulging war chest of donations ahead of the November election.
Further adverse publicity, in this case about the man whom he extolls and whose fortune helped launch his own business career, will be unwelcome.
“I thought it was cool to use a tune from that era, but we gave it a folk-punk vibe to update it,” said singer-activist Ryan Harvey, who produced the cover with singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco and Tom Morello.
“We wanted it to sound like a modern song because the content was relevant then and it’s relevant now,” Harvey told media.
“It’d be easy to write off the song and say ‘yeah that was the 50s and things were different back then,’ but things aren’t really different. I live in Baltimore and that’s a very racially segregated city.”
Harvey says the song pits competing white US experiences: the racist landlord out to make money and the working class man standing up, in this case for blacks, and who wants to live in a different place.
“What’s more American than Woody Guthrie and Donald Trump?” he said.
“Woody Guthrie is somebody we associate with this old hard working America, the dust bowl, and Donald Trump is someone we associate with just the worst criminal elements of capitalism.”
He hopes that Guthrie, who died in 1967, is somewhere “cracking a smile and saying good work.”
“Old Man Trump,” he said, is not just Trump senior; it could be “that guy in every era expressing those views and that level of disdain.”
Harvey said the song exposes “the sort of fallacy of this brand of patriotism that Donald Trump is really projecting.”
Guthrie wrote three different versions, but never completed the song. The musicians believe the words sat, unrecorded, in his notebook for 66 years.
Proceeds from the track will go to CK Team Relief, a coalition of independent volunteers working with refugees, and the Baltimore Right to Housing Alliance, a rights organisation led by low-income residents.
Guthrie’s words were originally found by biographer and British scholar Will Kaufman at the musician’s archive in Oklahoma in January.
The US Justice Department in the 1970s probed Fred Trump’s business over allegations it turned away African-American applicants, with the case settled with an agreement to advertise to minorities.
His son has inflamed the US political establishment by running a vitriolic presidential campaign demanding a ban on Muslims and Syrian refugees into the United States and calling Mexicans criminals.
Harvey, who admired much of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders’s campaign, said he had not yet decided whether to vote for the party’s presumptive nominee, Clinton, in November.
