"Mean Talking Blues", GOP theme song written by Woody Guthrie in 1945

Louisiana State University

Beginning in the late 1930s, Guthrie decided that the public needed to hear songs about the hardships of Americans’ minorities in an effort to expose the destructive power of racism. Some of these lyrics only briefly address the race issue. For example, by creating a highly ironic narrator in “Talking Meanness” (“Mean Talking Blues”), he offers some amusing blows against those who would encourage various forms of hate. In particular, he makes a none too subtle slap against those who would “get colors to fighting one another/friend against friend/sister against brother” or even “the stripped against the polkadots.”