Music

Bruce Springsteen raises his voice

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Bruce Springsteen released the protest song “Streets of Minneapolis,” directly criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations. The song, written in response to deadly shootings by federal agents, condemns the actions of “King Trump’s private army” and honors victims in Minneapolis. He has actively called to “rise against authoritarianism”

LYRICS

[Verse 1]

Through the winter’s ice and cold

Down Nicollet Avenue

A city aflame fought fire and ice

‘Neath an occupier’s boots

King Trump’s private army from the DHS

Guns belted to their coats

Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law

Or so their story goes

[Verse 2]

Against smoke and rubber bullets

In the dawn’s early light

Citizens stood for justice

Their voices ringing through the night

And there were bloody footprints

Where mercy should have stood

And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets

Alex Pretti and Renee Good

[Chorus]

Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice

Singing through the bloody mist

We’ll take our stand for this land

And the stranger in our midst

Here in our home, they killed and roamed

In the winter of ’26

We’ll remember the names of those who died

On the streets of Minneapolis

To That Man Robert Burns

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Woody Guthrie

In this letter-poem, Woody Guthrie points out the similarities between himself and Robert Burns, and the deep connection he felt to the poet, as well as reminiscing about visiting Scotland as a torpedoed seaman during the Second World War.

Dear Robert Burns,

You skipped the big town streets just like I done, you ducked the crosstown cop just like I ducked, you dodged behind a beanpole to beat the bigtime dick and you very seldom stopped off in any big city where the rigged corn wasn’t drying nor the hot vine didn’t help you do your talking.

Your talking was factual figures of the biggest sort, though. Your talking had the graphboard and the chart and had something else most singers seem to miss, the very kiss of warm dew on the stalk.

Your words turned into songs and floated upstream and then turned into rains and drifted down and lodged and swung and clung to drifts of driftwood to warm and heat and fertilize new seeds. Your words were of the upheath and the down, your words were more from heather than from town. Your thoughts came more from weather than from schoolroom and more from shifting vines than from the book.

I go to the church halfway between the farm and halfway into the town and halfway back. I sing and dance at just one altar only and cry with the folks that would like to be more fertile. If there’s a bench I kneel down to laugh and cry on, I suppose it’s this bench with the kids waiting along it while us dads and us mamas stamp and stomp around looking for something to give our trip more sense. I worship in the limbroof arbors of pure fertility and very little else makes sense to me. Like Robert Burns and Jesus and some others I believe we ought to learn how to make a law or two to help us brothers love the sisters more.

I bought your little four-inch square book when I was a torpedoed seaman walking around over your clods and sods of Glasgow and the little book says on the outer cover, Fifty Songs of Burns, the price 4d, and I read from page to page and found you covered a woman on every page. I thought as I picked the book up here at home that maybe the book ought to have some kind of a new name. Like, Fifty Pages of Fifty Women, enlarged upon by Robert Burns.

Well, Rob, it’s awfully rainy here in Coney today. Been drizzling like this now for several days to make some folks happy and some folks sad, since this is a big resort town and folks pay good money to come here from all over. Some like the rain today and some folks hate it. I like it and love it for several reasons, like you’d love it, to see our new seeds grow in this old trashy back yard, and to see these green shoots, roots, limbs and leaves start dancing like Tirza and her Wine Bath. And because Marjorie just painted some flowers of a wild and jumpy color on the pink wall of the baby’s room so when he does squirm his way out here to see his light of the day he’ll see some twisting flowers like you seen all around your rock hearths and heatherhills there all over your Scotland. This rain is making the grass and flowers spud out, the roots to crawl like guerrillas, and the house to take a better shape, so’s our little shoot and shaver can have these growing limbs to give him such a good fast start that maybe he can grow up in four years with us giving him pushes to be as happy and dancy and glad and joking and pretty as our little Stackybones was on that Sunday’s afternoon when she got dressed up her very prettiest in her pinkest dress and greenest ribbon to look just as nice and sweet and glad and pretty as any of your fifty girls you raved about. And fifty times fifty. The only good part about living you really did miss, Bob, was not to get to stick around a house like Marjorie keeps and see a kid like Cathy dance and grow. You died at thirty-four which was a bit too young for you to get to see these things I’m seeing in the faces of my kids.

This is why I’ll keep you posted and brought up to date as the year leafs out and me and Marjorie have more kids of the kinds you missed out on.

Published in Woody Guthrie, Born To Win (Macmillan, 1965), pp. 213–15.

Listen to “O Canada” from The Kingston Coffee House 1/13/26

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By Mike Stevenson | January 13, 2026

Tonight on THE KINGSTON COFFEE HOUSE, we celebrate the music of our neighbor to the North, a nation whose vast landscapes mirror the depth of her musical artistry. We’ll hear songs from 60’s-era folk icons Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen – as well as a few lesser-known Canucks (David Wiffin, Ron Sexsmith, Mary Margaret O’Hara) whom I expect will become favorites.

Listen to a full replay of “O Canada”, below

GLORIOUS AND FREE
– The Royal Canadian Mounties “O Canada”
– Neil Young “Ohio” (Young) 1970 CSNY So Far
– Dolly, Linda & Emmylou “After the Goldrush”(Young) Trio II, 1999
– Gordon Lightfoot “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” The Way I Feel, 1967

  • WHEN I WOKE UP THIS MORNIN’
    – Ian & Sylvia “Early Morning Rain” (Lightfoot)1965
    – Gordon Lightfoot “Steel Rail Blues” Lightfoot, 1966
    – Ian & Sylvia “Katie Dear” Newport Folk Festival 1964
    – Ian & Sylvia “Someday Soon” Newport Folk Festival 1964
    – We Five “You Were On My Mind” (Sylvia Fricker)You Were on My Mind, 1965
  • HEROES IN THE SEAWEED
    – Neil Young “Til the Morning Comes” After the Goldrush, 1970
    – Rick Danko “Twilight” (Robertson) The Best of Mountain Stage 1989
    – Joni Mitchell “Morningtown” Ladies of the Canyon,1970
    – Joni Mitchell “California” Blue,1971
    – Leonard Cohen “Suzanne”
  • RING THE BELLS THAT STILL CAN RING
    – Perla Batalla, Julie Christensen “Anthem” (Cohen) I’m Your Man
    – Jesse Winchester “Sham a Ling Dong Ding” Love Filling Station, 2009
    – Steve Barakatt “O Canada” (instrumental piano)
  • GAILGRAITH ST. GOODBYE
    – Kate & Anna McGarrigle “Kiss And Say Goodbye” Heart Like a Wheel, 1976
    – Ron Sexsmith “Gailbraith Street”, Ron Sexsmith 1995
    – Neil Young “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” After the Goldrush, 1970
    – David Wiffin “Skybound Station” Coast to Coast Fever, 1973
    – Jerry Jeff Walker “More Often Than Not” (Wiffin”)Bein’ Free, 1970
    – Joni Mitchell “You Turn Me On I’m a Radio”, For the Roses, 1972
Joni

“Cause who needs the static – it hurts the head”

  • WHISPERING PINES AND CALLING ANGELS
    – Lucinda Williams & Boz Scaggs “Whispering Pines” (Robertson/Manuel)
    – Cowboy Junkies “Mining for Gold” (trad) The Trinity Sessions, 1988
    – Jane Silberry & KD Lang “Calling All Angels” When I Was a Boy, 1993
  • STILL I WISH YOU’D CHANGE YOUR MIND
    Neil Young “Comes a Time” (1976) Comes a Time, 1976
    Neil Young “Four Strong Winds” (Tyson) Comes a Time, 1976
  • ALL THE PEOPLE WERE SINGIN’
    – Daniel Lanois “Jolie Louise” Acadie, 1989
    – Joan Baez “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (Robertson) Blessed Are, 1971
    – Gale Garnett “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” (1964) • Grammy winner 1965 for Best Traditional Folk Recording
  • PROBABLY BE ROOM IN HEAVEN
    – Ocean “Put Your Hand in the Hand”, 1971
    – Cindy Walker “Blue Canadian Rockies” (C Walker) 1964
    – Judy Collins “Someday Soon” (Tyson) Who Knows Where the Time Goes? 1968
    – Ann Murray “Danny’s Song” (Loggins) 1972
  • BIGGER AS WE GO
    – Bruce Cockburn “You Get Bigger As You Go” Humans, 1980
    – Mary Margaret O’Hara “Dear Darling” Miss America, 1984
    – Jennifer Warnes “If It Be Your Will” (Cohen) Famous Blue Raincoat, 1986
    – Toronto Symphony Orchestra “O Canada” (en francaise)
  • GOODNIGHT / HARVEST A NEW DAY
    – Rufus Wainwright & Andrew Bird “Harvest” (Young) Folkocracy, 2023
    – The Band “It Makes No Difference” from The Last Waltz
    – Mary Margaret O’Hara “Anew Day” Miss America, 1982
Mary Margaret O'Hara

Toronto’s Mary Margaret O’Hara. One critic observed, “Her angelic voice seems to be almost a cross  between Doris Day and Bjork”

SHOW NOTES:

In the second hour of the show, I read a bit from public television’s popular travel guide Rick Steves’ open letter to Canada

Additionally, you can visit the Rick Steves Europe blog for an enlightening and (sometimes) encouraging interview with two prominent Canadian authors sharing their perspective on today’s strained political relationship between the US and its northern neighbor. [FREE]

June Tabor “Mayn Rue Platz”

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“Mayn Rue Platz” (My Resting Place) is a famous Yiddish poem and song by Morris Rosenfeld, a “sweatshop poet,” commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire victims (1911), where a worker tells his beloved not to look for him in beautiful places but where “lives wither at the machines,” a powerful reflection on exploited labor, with various artists performing modern versions.