Hoffman’s friend Judy Collins went on to write “Song for Martin” in his memory in 1973. After graduation, Hoffman went on to start a demonstration school on the Rough Rock Reservation in Arizona. Since its original release, “Deportee” has been covered by dozens of artists, including Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Ani DiFranco, Willie Nelson, Concrete Blonde, Billy Bragg and most recently Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello.īut while the song is well known, its origins were largely hidden. “He tells his friend, Dick Barker, ‘This song, Dick, ‘The Plane Wreck at Los Gatos’, it was written by Woody Guthrie.’ And then he goes on to tell us that those words needed a melody to it, and he says, ‘I put the two together and here’s what happened.’”
“What’s interesting is, Martin actually speaks before he records the song,” Hernandez said. But as Hernandez has heard that original recording. They have not authorized the release of any of the tapes. On the first tape, track number four was listed as “Deportee - original recording.” Vigeant has since returned the original tapes to Hoffman’s family.
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“And on each tape, it said ‘Mart’ and a series of years.”
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“And I found this little pack of four cassette tapes in a sandwich-size Ziploc bag with a table of contents typed on a manual typewriter with my dad’s handwriting on it,” she said.
After Davich died in 2007, Vigeant was going through her father’s old boxes. Vigeant’s father, Jerry Davich, was one of Hoffman’s closest friends. “Two months later, Martin receives a letter in the mail from Pete’s manager saying Pete is going to record that song and he wants to co-credit (Hoffman) with Woody Guthrie for that song.”ĭuring Hernandez’s research into Hoffman, he found an original recording of Hoffman singing “Deportee” from Diane Vigeant. “As Martin’s playing that song, right here in Greeley for the first time, Pete Seeger takes a notepad out, writes a few things down, puts it in his pocket, says, ‘Thank you guys, good night,’ leaves,” Hernandez said. At an after party at Hoffman’s tiny apartment in Greeley, students took turns performing songs for their musical hero.Īuthor Tim Hernandez spent seven years tracking down the names of 28 Mexican passengers from a plane crash in 1948 and buried in a mass grave in Fresno, Calif.Īccording to accounts from family members, Hernandez said a sleepy Seeger began nodding off when Hoffman began playing a song he’d just written using Guthrie’s poem as the lyrics. On April 23, 1958, the club hosted a concert with folk singer Pete Seeger on the largest stage in town - the Lincoln Junior High School auditorium (now Fort Collins performance venue the Lincoln Center). He also was a founder of the university’s Ballad Club. In the late 1950’s, Martin Hoffman was an English major at CSU. “Everyone attributes this song to Woody Guthrie,” Hernandez said. It took another 10 years before Guthrie’s words would find a melody thanks to a Colorado State University student named Martin Hoffman. It turned out that soon after the crash, folk singer Woody Guthrie was so struck by the anonymity of the Mexican victims that he penned the poem Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos). “That was part of the research from the beginning, because I knew that the song was vital to this.” “I wanted to find the origins of the song,” said Hernandez, who went on to write the book All They Will Call You about the victims and the song from which the book takes its title. But it also led him to one more story that needed to be told - one that began in Greeley, Colo. It set him on a path to find out the names and stories of those 28 passengers. While doing research for a book in 2010 author Tim Hernandez happened upon newspaper clippings about the accident. In many of the news accounts, only the four white crew members were listed. claimed the lives of 32 passengers, including 28 Mexican farm workers. In 1948 a plane crash in Los Gatos, Calif.
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