"The Song As We Found It Down There Was...Naughty" - "Zombie Jamboree"

I was struck by a phrase in a Jeopardy! clue the other night about the KT - the Kingston Trio was described as "clean-cut," which we all know was exactly the image that Frank Werber and the guys wanted to cultivate, at the very least to distinguish themselves from the vaguely shadowy politics of The Weavers and probably more especially from the parent-infuriating gyrations and pelvic thrusts of Elvis Presley.

But the Trio started its life as a nightclub act, and that suggested some - suggestiveness, I guess you'd say. Your average 1950s club was a place neither for the wholesome nor the easily-offended. If the comedians' humor had not yet descended to the scatological and obscene level that it routinely has today, it was nonetheless implicitly edgy - Tom Lehrer and the Smothers Brothers and Lou Gottlieb and George Carlin and Lenny Bruce all started out around the same time as the Trio did. Except for Bruce, who was up and in your face, the comics played for "naughty" - and the Trio fit right in, not least because their initial genre was calypso music.

Calypso music proper originated in Trinidad and Tobago, and some purists maintain that Caribbean music from other places like Jamaica and the Bahamas should not be termed calypso. But thanks mainly to New York City's Harry Belafonte, born there of Jamaican parents, the term came to be an all-encompassing word to mean most Afro-Caribbean music.

It's a bit of a wonder that calypso music took off in the relatively uptight world of 1950s America because virtually all of it includes sly double-entendres, political commentary, and really off-color humor. I've always guessed that those Puritan-bent Anglophone ears that we grew up with just didn't pick up on the meanings very well any more than our parents' Big Band generation quite got what those "great balls of fire" were or where Johnny B. Good was go go going. But go back to those three great Belafonte albums from the mid-50s - "Calypso," "Belafonte," and "Belafonte Sings Of The Caribbean" - and listen to the songs with adult ears. You might be surprised. "Judy no drownded Judy lie in bed" indeed, and "Matilda run Venezuela" with more than the guy's money; "Angelique-O's" mama got to take her back to teach her all the things she lack - and so on.

While Kingston Trio fans recognized the sly, eyebrow-raised humor of "Ah Woe, Ah Me" from Back In Town - I wonder how many picked up on Lord Intruder's little quips in "Zombie Jamboree." Intruder was the stage name of Winston O'Connor, born in Tobago into the original calypso tradition. (There really was a Lord Invader, but he didn't write "Jamboree" - and the 12 Penetrators never existed except in Dave Guard's scripted and slightly bawdy song intro. The "Conrad Eugene Mauge, Jr." of the copyright is just another of O'Connor's stage names.) Lord Intruder is poking fun at expatriate Caribbeans (like Belafonte's parents) who lived in New York - hence the Long Island locale of the song and other pretenders to his throne ("some of them great Calypsonians"). But Intruder's reference to the "season was Carnival/They got together in Bacchanal" leaves no doubt about the song's intent.

Carnival, of course, is the Latin name for Mardi Gras, a slightly naughty event in New Orleans that in its roots and in its most famous manifestation in Rio De Janeiro reaches heights (or depths) of debauchery that conservative Louisianans could scarcely imagine. Just take a look at the costumes that the dancers wear in Rio and you'll see what I mean. And for a little refresher vocabulary - Bacchanal means an alcohol-drenched orgy.

Take the lyric from there. The female zombie of the song is clearly bent on seduction with her quart of wine - and Intruder's humor becomes clearer when you consider the rather literal implication of "an old bag of bones I cannot love" when being "belly to belly." The unexpurgated lyric also apparent had a different one syllable word than "after you kiss this dead zombie."

But our "clean cut" Trio weren't going to belabor those points. They sang the song for fun and money and let the audience make of it what they wanted:



This has always been one of my all-time favorite trio performances.

The current Kingstons also do a delightful job, showing respect to their predecessors' arrangement while leaving their own distinctive stamp on it:



Many Gen Xers are unaware of the KT's connection to the song and know it primarily from the 1990's vocal group Rockapella, who has perhaps fifteen different recorded versions on YouTube. They keep the song fun but take it further from its roots:



Brazilian vocalists Jack Jeans use Rockapella's words but give us a video a bit more in keeping with Intruder's off-color humor and the inescapably erotic rhythms of calypso:



Last December I included Alvin and the Chipmunks' version of "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" as an antidote to the Everly Brother's turgid rendition of the same. We close today with that legendary trio's version of this classic:



I saw Dave Guard live with the Modern Folk Quartet at the Ice House in Pasadena CA in 1976, and the group's closing number was "Zombie Jamboree." It was also, as noted in KTOR and on the Capitol twofer of the KT's first two albums, a song that Dave specifically requested be played at his funeral - the KT Hungry i version. I was delighted to read that the late great Dave Guard thought as highly of that cut as I and countless other fans did.

Appendix - 6/20/09

This humorous video on YouTube uses as its musical background the version by Lord Jellicoe & His Calypso Monarchs:



Appendix 2 - 6/16/10

And a rare video of a live performance of the song from the greatest popularizer of calypso music, Harry Belafonte:

"The Colorado Trail"

"The Colorado Trail" is one of those folk songs in the American tradition that appears as a genuine surprise, like maybe "Shenandoah" and "The Streets Of Laredo" and "Coffee Grows On White Oak Trees." American frontier culture has given rise to rough-hewn ballads like "Jesse James" and fiddle and dance tunes like "Old Joe Clark" and "Turkey In The Straw" and topical/historical pieces like the hundreds of Civil War songs and railroad songs and sea chanteys. We're not generally known, though, for the lyrical beauty of the Celtic songs of Ireland, Scotland, and Brittainy or the stately and often melancholy classics of England (think "Greensleeves" or "Barbara Allen").

Every so often, though, some anonymous American worker came up with a melody and some words of genuinely aching beauty, real polished diamonds set sparkling against the rough and grainy backdrop of American folk tunes. Such a song is the very real cowboy ballad, "The Colorado Trail."

We owe our knowledge of this obscure ballad to classic American poet Carl Sandburg and Weaver Lee Hays, the same pair who gave us "The Wreck of the John B" and dozens of other traditional songs that found their ways into public consciousness through the books of Alan Lomax and the records of Burl Ives and The Weavers. The story goes that Sandburg "collected" (as they say in the folk music biz) the song in 1927 (about the same time as "John B") from Dr. T.L. Chapman, an old surgeon in Duluth, Minnesota who maintained that some decades earlier he had treated an anonymous cowboy for "bones of both upper and lower legs broken, fractures of the collar bone on both sides, numerous fractures of both arms and wrists, and many scars from lacerations." According to Chapman (from Sandburg), the cowboy spent several weeks convalescing, singing "The Colorado Trail" several times daily to other patients who just couldn't get enough of it.

And no wonder. The song is pure (if a bit schmaltzy) genius and includes one especially fine technical point - the rise in the melody of the chorus where the meaning of the words rises - "wail, winds, wail" - with the subsequent gradual stepping down of the melody as the words return to earth - "all along, along, along - The Colorado trail." [Lomax's published musical setting gives you the option to sing the word "wail" at either the high end of an octave as the Kingstons do below or the lower as with the Bar D Wranglers - Ives did the high octave.] You generally don't hear that kind of sophisticated gambit in any kind of music outside of the really serious pop and classical stuff. That ol' cowpoke knew what he was doing.

I first heard it on what may have been the earliest commercial recording by Ives, who put out literally hundreds of 45rpms and 78rpms before the mid-Fifties debut of LPs. The Weavers may also have waxed it in the Gordon Jenkins sessions with Decca, though I can't say for sure or find direct evidence of it.*

It's safe to say, though, that the awesome commercial punch of the Kingston Trio in 1960 brought the song its widest attention to date, appearing as it did on their album String Along, the fifth consecutive (and final) album of the original trio's to go to #1 on the Billboard charts, where it stayed according to The Kingston Trio On Record for an impressive ten weeks. The Trio's reading stands after nearly fifty years as one of the loveliest cuts that they ever recorded:



Given the single source for the song from Sandburg, there are still major variations in the lyrics because a)Lee Hays added two verses of his own to Sandburg's find, including the last verse that the KT sings, and b) most of the other artists who have recorded it (Johnny Cash, Don Williams, Tex Ritter, and more) have felt free to write their own verses as well.

We have some fine performances of the song from amateurs and professionals alike. For a pure and simple folk arrangement featuring only vocal, guitar and recorder, I would like to start with one of my favorite singers of all time, Cisco Houston, who died at 42 years old in 1961 just as his career was taking off in the folk boom. Houston had the best baritone voice in roots music, one that some traditionalists felt was "too good" for the simple tunes he sang. I disagree most emphatically:



Rick Devin is a multi-faceted and thoroughgoing professional who has had different incarnations as a rock, folk, and blues performer. Since 1985, though, he has focused on cowboy songs, teaming up with Michael Martin Murphey, among others. This video is a bit of a commercial but still a fine performance:



Marshal Bailey and The Silver Bullets put a definite and very melodic country spin to the song - this was recorded last June at the Colorado Bluegrass Festival:



Mike Iverson gives a genuine and authentic-sounding reading at last year's Western music Alliance meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico - the mouth harp makes you nearly smell the campfire smoke:



A lovely, understated melody, melancholy tone, haunting lost love theme - "The Colorado Trail" includes for me just about everything there is to love about traditional music.

*4/21/12

Well, here's some pretty direct evidence - The Weavers with Lee Hays on lead. Seeger is playing the recorder, but the brush drums and strings are the work of Gordon Jenkins, so this is indeed from the 1949-52 Decca era of the group.



Updates, April 2013

In the nearly four years since this post first appeared, the number of videos of all kinds posted to YouTube has more than tripled, and despite the occasionally problematic actions by record companies to enforce copyright restrictions (as has happened with the Kingston Trio video above), this has been good news for music lovers of all stripes. In May of 2009 when I wrote this, I had a hard time coming up with YT renditions of "The Colorado Trail" that I liked enough to include in an article such as this. The ones in the original posting above are of genuine excellence - but they were all that I could find. Recently, though, especially in the last year, a substantial number of outstanding versions of the song have been uploaded to YouTube. Here are several of the best of those, all by major artists whose work was not available in video form four years ago.

Don Edwards



Connie Dover



The Norman Luboff Choir - 1955



Noël Wan, Harp - 2007

Variations From The Theme: "The Best Of The Kingston Trio"

The previous 39 posts in this series have more or less adhered to the same format of presenting different interpretations of songs traditional and modern that might be termed at least loosely as "folk."

However, as the margin note to the left indicates, all of these pieces appear originally on the Kingston Crossroads message board, and last week and this week I've posted essays there that don't quite fit the pattern. Last week's post was simply a collection of YouTube videos of the twelve songs included on the 1962 album The Best Of The Kingston Trio, and this week's is a consideration of the Rod McKuen/Jacques Brel song "Seasons In The Sun," which cannot be stretched in any way to be called folk or roots or Americana.

But Kingston Crossroads doesn't archive posts, and a few friends have asked that these two entries be preserved, so I'm uploading them here.

Next week - back to CompVid.

In celebration of the fortieth post in this series and twenty-ninth consecutive weekly entry, I've decided to forgo the "comparative video" approach just for this week and use the miracle of the internet to present a video version of the 1962 album The Best Of The Kingston Trio.


When I began uploading videos to YouTube in July of 2006, about seven months after it came into existence, a search for "Kingston Trio" was likelier to pull up my Chilly Winds group than anything by the KT, simply because nothing at the time had been posted of the greatest of all folk groups. In fact, I attribute the (to me) astounding ongoing popularity of Chilly Winds videos on YT to that fact - people found us early on and continued to look in even after the KT began to appear in first dozens, then scores, and now hundreds of video uploads.

A telling point is that of the twelve videos herein presented, ten were already on the internet when I conceived of doing this a couple of weeks ago. Only "Everglades" and "Billy Goat Hill" were created by me specifically for this post. The rest of the videos include seven actual (if not always complete) performance videos by the Trio, one amusing home movie, and two video montages.

It's a testament to the amazing popularity, longevity, and durability of the Trio and its music. So, without further ado and presented in order by side of the original LP -The Best Of The Kingston Trio.


Side A









(Note: The original KT video of "Rasberries, Strawberries" was removed, so here's the current KT.)





Side B

Ewan MacColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"

A few months back, I mentioned in one of these weekend videos posts that I didn't intend to do any really high profile songs by the Kingston Trio that became famous in subsequent versions because I thought there just wouldn't be enough variety in the performances to justify the time and effort - and I specifically mentioned "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" as an example of such a song.

Well, doing these video reports has been an education for me, and I've found a wide variety of interpretations in songs that I would have guessed had really only one basic arrangement, even really common ones like Scotch and Soda or Greenback Dollar or Someday Soon.

So it was a revelation to me to find out just how many different ways that artists have found to present this classic love song, penned by the late great Ewan MacColl as a paean to his great love (but at the time, not his wife) Peggy Seeger (the couple pictured at left) and first brought to wide attention in the U.S. by the Kingston Trio, whose New Frontier album including the song sold several hundred thousand copies.

I had heard of MacColl several years before this because one of the treasures of my boyhood was the pair of Vanguard albums from the Newport Folk Festival of 1960, which featured MacColl as a solo (doing what many consider the definitive recorded version of the classic Scots traditional ballad "Lang A-Growing," though Liam Clancy's version is also highly regarded) and as a duo with Seeger, performing a topical song that was one of my favorites of the era and covered by many other folk artists, "The Springhill Mine Disaster" about an actual event in Nova Scotia in 1958.

MacColl had a fine, strong, masculine voice with a burr that you could cut with a knife (see appendix), and he projected the same kind of image through a tumultuous fifty year career as a radical labor organizer, street actor, folk song collector, performer, and composer of excellent traditional-sounding songs like "Springhill" and "Dirty Old Town" and "Freeborn Man" and my favorite, "The Shoals of Herring." He was in an unhappy second marriage when he met Peggy Seeger in Britain, and the two began an open affair that created a scandal at the time that even a subsequent marriage never quite completely erased. According to legend, Seeger phoned MacColl requesting that he write a love song for a play that she was to appear in; he wrote the song both for and about her in less than an hour, called her back, and taught it over the phone.

So the first public performance of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" was actually by its inspiration, Peggy Seeger, who performs it here from about 1961:



and more recently in a live performance here:



Intrepid song sleuths Shane, Reynolds, and Stewart knew a good number when they heard it, but they also knew that the slightly PG rating of the third verse ("the first time ever I lay with you") probably wouldn't fly with their wholesome image, so they changed the wording to "ever I held you close" in addition to shifting the tempo and emphasis of the melody a bit. Combined with a stunningly effective guitar duet (and I'm betting on a John Stewart arrangement of that) and impeccably tasteful harmonies, "The First Time" is one of the prettiest numbers that the Kingston Trio ever recorded:



A wonderful version now from the other great folk trio of the era, Peter, Paul and Mary - here from a 1965 BBC show when the group was at the height of its popularity and prestige:



After the KT but before Roberta Flack ten years later, Johnny Cash recorded a version that some feel was among his most effective ballad recordings. This video is a personal montage of anniversary pictures set to Cash:



Later in his career - but before he lost his voice and became a caricature of himself - Elvis Presley came to the song and put his distinctive, soulful stamp on it. Like Bob Shane, Elvis had a marvelously rich, natural baritone with an instinctive vibrato - a truly gifted singer:



You can't talk about this song without acknowledging the truly inspired singing and fabulous, operatically-trained voice of Roberta Flack, with whom this song will ever be associated:



Sublime is the only word for this. Would you like a barometer of how far popular culture has sunk since 1972? Without the Kate Moss anorexic, Barbie-doll looks preferred today - how far would Flack get on American Idol? Let Celine Dionne and Lauryn Hill and the rest of them over-sing their over-produced versions - Flack's is the benchmark performance.

I want you to know that I searched thirty-plus pages into the YouTube results to find these next videos. Three instrumentals - first - acoustic guitar in an open tuning, derived from Bert Jansch by Chumblefish:



Jazz sax by CooolJazzz - really sweet:



Finally, slide guitar from "Shakey":



I have to say that I'd take any one of the least of these renditions over any of the aforementioned hyper-orchestrated mishmashes that come out of pop music today.

Appendix:

Here's what Ewan MacColl sounded like - nice radical union song,"My Old Man":

"Hobo's Lullaby"

"Hobo's Lullaby" is one of those songs that most people associate with a particular artist - in this case, Woody Guthrie - and are usually surprised to find out that that particular artist is not the actual creator of the piece. Certainly Woody popularized the song, and his well-known adventures riding the rails always lent a degree of credibility to his performance of it.

But "Hobo's Lullaby" was actually written by an obscure early folk singer named Goebbel Reeves, known as "The Texas Drifter," born in 1899 in Texas and died fifty years ago here in southern California. "Half-written" might better describe the composition. Wikipedia attributes the melody to an earlier Carter Family song (though Reeves was clearly a contemporary of the Carters and not a later artist), but somebody over there just didn't do his or her homework (so I added a little bit to the article, including a KT reference).

Reeves, whose life seemed to rotate among stints in the armed services, flirtation with commercial success (he did a good number of early recordings and was part of the cast at the Grand Ol' Opry for a time), and long stretches as a real hobo, clearly and cleverly re-worked the melody line of one of the greatest songs to come out of the American Civil War and one of the most popular during it (especially for Union troopers), George F. Root's "Just Before The Battle, Mother." [You'd also know of Root for his most famous and stirring march, "The Battle Cry of Freedom," sometimes called "Rally 'Round The Flag, Boys." Yes, as I've said here before, I am a complete Civil War nerd, down to the music.]

Just to see where Reeves got the melody - and because any excuse to post a quality artist will do for me - here is the great Marty Robbins doing a superb version of Root's song:



Reeves had great material to work from, and his lyrics do his effort justice. Woody Guthrie just didn't cover that many songs by other writers, and it has been said by son Arlo and others that "Hobo's Lullaby" was WG's favorite of all songs. The gentle, almost romantic rhythm, the little indictment of the Establishment, the compassion for simple people fallen on hard times - pure Woody Guthrie - and my don't we need him today! So Goebbel Reeves wrote a great song, but one boosted to a wider audience by the popularity of Woody, much as last week's Tom Paxton owed much to the Chad Mitchell Trio's covering of his songs.

For what may be the most sensitive recorded interpretation, we turn to Nick Reynolds, whose solo leads on quieter songs are among the most memorable in the entire catalog of the group. This upload, of course, is from the 1989 video An Evening With The Kingston Trio:



Nick Reynolds' self-effacing nature allowed his enormous talent, here on display as a supremely tasteful guitarist as well as an outstanding vocalist, to seem at times overshadowed by the easy and apparently effortless natural ability of Bob Shane, the fiery artistic temperament of John Stewart, and the witty intellectual brilliance of Dave Guard. But Nick's #1 fan was Shane himself, who described Nick at KingstonTrio.com last October not only as his "best, best friend" but also as "pure genius." And Stewart remarked at nearly every Fantasy Camp that Nick's playing was "the real rhythm of the Kingston Trio" and echoed a comment that he made in his essay in The Kingston Trio On Record - that a roomful of trained musicians could study for a lifetime and never acquire the talent that Nick Reynolds had to entertain people and perform music.

For some other versions now - the voice of an angel sojourning here on earth for an era that we are blessed to be living in - Emmylou Harris:



Arlo Guthrie changes the words slightly, and his voice has a richer and more mellifluous timbre than his dad's - he, too, has always been a great singer:



For a pure folk sound, absolutely nothing tops Pete Seeger, vocal and banjo only:



Michael Jonathon, the host of the Woodsongs Old Time Radio Hour, which has archives on the site that include shows with John Stewart and Ian Tyson among scores of others, is also an accomplished folk musician and here does a fine duet with fiddler Gabriel Witcher:



Finally - Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits will go down in rock history as the writer of one of the great opening guitar riffs in history (with Clapton's "Layla" and Keith Richards' "Satisfaction" among others) in "Money For Nothing," - but like Clapton is a protean guitarist who can play damn near anything on the instrument. Here Knopfler adds a tasteful guitar wash behind the blues-flavored vocals of one of his bandmates,* not identified in the video:



The joy for me of doing these weekly articles is finding great and unexpected performances of songs I've always loved. This week - well, nothing great by Emmylou Harris or Marty Robbins could ever be said to be unexpected - but what a joy to find them nonetheless.


*note stgermain's comment below for information on the other musicians in the Knopfler video - thanks stgermain!

-JKM

And Justice For All: Woody Guthrie/Martin Hoffman's "Deportee"

I'm not sure that Woody Guthrie ever wrote a piece more direct and powerful than "Plane Wreck Over Los Gatos," more commonly known by the more succinct "Deportee." I say "piece" deliberately because I learned via email a couple of years back from our good friend and too-occasional Xroads poster Peter Overly that Guthrie penned this and published it as a poem in the months following the incident, a January 28, 1948 plane crash in Fresno County, CA that killed 32 people, 4 American crew members and 28 Mexican farm laborers who were being returned to their country. It wasn't until nearly 10 years later that a Martin Hoffman (a teacher and someone I believe that Peter knows) put the words to music.

The incident is as described in the lyric, and I think most of us of a certain age are well aware of the braceros program of the 1940s through the 60s that set the stage for the disaster. The braceros (from the Spanish "brazos" or arms - Gregory Nava's powerful 1980s film El Norte makes an ironic comment on the word) were legal laborers who today would be termed "guest workers," though the use of "guest" obscures both the desperation of the people driven to this most extreme expedient to stay alive and the often harsh and dishonest treatment afforded them by the "hosts." A common trick of the time was to bring the low-paid workers over the border from Mexico with contracts that were intentionally flawed (in English) so that they would have no legal force. Following a season of backbreaking work in California's orchards and fruit fields, the braceros would at times be rounded up as illegals because of the invalid contracts and deported without being paid at all.

Even when the farm owners were just and humane - which I suspect they were far more often than they are credited for being - the wages were so low that the braceros would need to spend much of their money as a fee to a labor contractor to secure work for the next year's harvest.

But it wasn't that fundamental injustice that angered Guthrie the most, again as the song attests. Newspapers across the country reported the incident by naming the four members of the flight crew but listing the others as "deportees" - who were buried in a mass grave near Coalinga and only 12 of the 28 of whom were ever identified by name. (Until 2013, that is; please see the note below the post.)*

It was this dehumanization of flesh and blood people that stirred Guthrie to write his most directly polemical piece. I can think of no other Guthrie song so visibly angry or as direct as the last verse here is - "Is this the best way we can harvest our orchards?" His point remains well-taken, and whatever side of the ongoing and likely eternal and international dispute that you find yourself on, Guthrie's implicit plea for basic decency and humanity transcends the politics and is hard to deny.

We are fortunate to have recordings here of some of the major artists of our time performing the song, each in a style unique to their own form of music.

The Kingston Trio's arrangement from their themed Time To Think album is IMHO the best of their later years and one of the best of the whole initial ten year run. What makes it so, I think, are unique contributions from each member. John Stewart's lead vocal demonstrates the same youthfully idealistic passion that also characterizes another great cut on the album, Stewart's own "If You Don't Look Around." Nick Reynolds had a certain intonation in his upper register - a kind of wail, almost - that could sound impassioned and tragic (think of his marvelous vocal on "The Wanderer"). And Bob Shane's rhythm strumming (as well as the use of sixth and minor chords instead of the major chords of the original) is wonderful, creating the only recorded version of a song about Mexican people that actually sounds similar to a Mexican song:



Capitol Records Studio B never sounded better than it does here.

I suppose it might seem odd to follow this impassioned performance up with a version by Dolly Parton. But her diminutive size, kewpie doll looks, good humor, and decades of Johnny Carson jokes about her figure all may make us forget what a powerful singer and great performing artist that she is. She does the lyric here with a great artist's passion:



Arlo Guthrie here has his usual interesting take on one of his father's song - similar to dad's but still very much his own:



Now I don't know who Michael Pickett is - clearly a blue-eyed bluesman. But he does a flat-out sensational and mesmerizing blues version of the song, here from 2007:



At the dawn of his mega-popularity in 1981, Bruce Springsteen foreshadowed his later-developing interest in folk music leading to the 2006 "Seeger Sessions" CD and tour with this emotional (but truncated) bootleg from a Los Angeles concert:



Now for another duet, more musical - Arlo again with the angelic Emmylou Harris with the incredible Sam Bush on mandolin. This is how harmony is supposed to sound:



The Good Book asserts that "The poor ye have always with ye," and I suppose you could add immigration problems to that as well. But I don't think that the Biblical verse is a simple statement of fact - it's more of an indictment, and admonition, a call to action. In this song, using his own tools and talents, Woody Guthrie stepped up and answered that call.

*Note 7/15/13

In the four years since this post first appeared, ongoing research has finally established the names of all 28 of the Mexican workers who perished in the crash. They were -

Miguel Negrete Álvarez. Tomás Aviña de Gracia. Francisco Llamas Durán. Santiago García Elizondo. Rosalio Padilla Estrada. Tomás Padilla Márquez. Bernabé López Garcia. Salvador Sandoval Hernández. Severo Medina Lára. Elías Trujillo Macias. José Rodriguez Macias. Luis López Medina. Manuel Calderón Merino. Luis Cuevas Miranda. Martin Razo Navarro. Ignacio Pérez Navarro. Román Ochoa Ochoa. Ramón Paredes Gonzalez. Guadalupe Ramírez Lára. Apolonio Ramírez Placencia. Alberto Carlos Raygoza. Guadalupe Hernández Rodríguez. Maria Santana Rodríguez. Juan Valenzuela Ruiz. Wenceslao Flores Ruiz. José Valdívia Sánchez. Jesús Meza Santos. Baldomero Marcas Torres.

The full story from The Los Angeles Times: "Names Emerge From The Shadows"

Addendum, August 2015

Certainly one of the most affecting and moving renditions of the song was recorded by one of our American masters and national treasures, Judy Collins. When I wrote this piece six years ago, Collins' version was not yet on YouTube, an oversight corrected in 2013. With thanks for the timely reminder of this marvelous version to my French friend M. Fanchbrezoneg: