As it’s Inauguration Day (Congratulations Joe Biden & Kamala Harris!), I was inspired while watching the coverage to chose this song for the Song Spotlight. Then I saw Jennifer Lopez sing Woody Guthrie’s Americana classic “This Land is Your Land,” at the event and I was doubly inspired. So here goes:
“Christ For President”
(Jay Bennett, Woody Guthrie, Jeff Tweedy)
Jay Bennett: banjo, piano, clavinet
Billy Bragg: National guitar
Ken Coomer: drums, percussion
John Stirratt: acoustic bass, bass pedals
Jeff Tweedy: acoustic guitar, vocals
Writing in No Depression magazine, Linda Ray noted how “Christ For President” “reflects a synthesis of Guthrie’s views on religion and socialism that prefigured by more than two decades the Liberation Theology that fostered revolutionary activity in South and Central America throughout the 1980s.”
A decade after its recording on the first volume of the Wilco/Billy Bragg collaboration, Mermaid Avenue, this spiky, satirical protest song would subsequently be well used in Larry Charles’s 2008 documentary, Religulous, which focuses on political comedy pundit Bill Maher’s diatribes against religion. It can be heard during a montage showing protestors with shirts that advertise “religious freedom” holding signs that say things like “Christians Take Action!” The montage also features former Republican presidential candidate John McCain saying that “the constitution established the United States as a Christian nation.”
When performing this snarling song for the first time in a solo acoustic performance at the Lounge Ax in March 1998, Tweedy introduced it by saying, “This is probably one of the only lyrics we did that you’ve maybe seen before if you have Pastures Of Plenty,” referring to Guthrie’s book, Pastures Of Plenty: A Self Portrait - The Unpublished Writings Of An American Folk Hero, published in 1990.
The first documented performance by Wilco on “Christ for President” took place at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. The band played the song at nearly every show during 1998-2000 (the most being 60 times in 1999), then went down to several times a tour. Its tally is at 137.
No Depression scribe Ray, wrote that “Christ for President” “may be the band’s first foray into explicitly religious or political content.”
It sure wouldn’t be the last.
This is an edited excerpt from Wilcopedia by Daniel Cook Johnson, published by Jawbone Press (www.jawbonepress.com). Order your copy here.
More later...
