Local musician Joseph Terrell stopped by Live & Local this week, following the release – and the viral popularity – of his latest single, “Genuine American Hero (Talking Blowback Blues).”
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“Genuine American Hero” is a classic folk protest song, in the vein of Woody Guthrie or Phil Ochs or Country Joe McDonald – using a jaunty melody and ironic, darkly humorous lyrics (“what’s good for the goose is good for the propagander”) to shine a spotlight on a great injustice and a disturbing moment in our history. In this case, Terrell found himself compelled to write after watching footage of the killing of Renee Good by a federal immigration agent, earlier this year in Minneapolis.
Infamously, the officer casually referred to Good as a “f—ing bitch” immediately after shooting her through the window of her vehicle – a moment that Terrell calls out verbatim in his first verse.
“Hearing the words that the officer said…the way that he described her, with a vulgar epithet – which I do sing, because it’s what I heard and it shocked me – it made me think right there in that moment, (that) that attitude is at the core of a lot of the things that our administration is doing,” he says. “There’s a real hatred against women that’s seething underneath a lot of these decisions.”
Joseph Terrell sings “Genuine American Hero.”
With its harsh denunciation of not only that one officer but also the rise of the surveillance state, the silencing of dissenting voices, and the far right’s willingness to cheer it all on, “Genuine American Hero” struck a chord (and a nerve) almost immediately after Terrell released it, with hundreds of thousands of plays – and quite a few strong reactions.
“I got some real nasty (comments),” he laughs. “(But) there was a lot of genuine appreciation, and folks who said, ‘I lived through the civil rights movement, and I’ve been waiting for a chance to feel like music is here with us again.’”
“Genuine American Hero” is the third explicitly political song Terrell has recorded since the start of the Trump administration. Last year, he also released “Deny Depose Defend,” a song about Luigi Mangione written in the style of an Appalachian murder ballad, and the anti-capitalist folk song “Every Dollar,” which was inspired by his auto mechanic Chris.
“I like to imagine a more perfect world where I wouldn’t be writing songs about the news of the day,” Terrell says. “But the truth is, I write songs about whatever I’m thinking about…(so) on an average day, I might write a song about my dog, or Antarctica, or whatever story I happen to come up with, and on other days, when I’m really kind of distressed about the state of the world, that’s what comes out…
“(And) you ask, who do I write these for? (Every Dollar) was a great example for me: like, Chris liked this tune, and I felt like that was all I needed. He just loves it. I mean, he’s a great fan of country music, which is part of how we got to be buddies. And he just was like, ‘man, I’ve been playing this while I work on stuff. I’ve been playing this at home.’”
Listen to Joseph Terrell’s music and purchase it on Bandcamp.
Terrell’s also been busy with life beyond writing new music: he’s getting married later this year, and in the spring he’s heading out on a nine-show West Coast tour, opening for I’m With Her along with his friend Jordan Tice.
And he’s also still enjoying the success of his latest tour with his band Mipso, which recently went on hiatus after a wildly successful run that lasted well over a decade.
“It was really fun and meaningful, exactly what we had hoped it would be,” he says of that tour. “We called it our ‘Farewell For Now’ tour, and that was the spirit of it: we’d been doing this full-time for 13 years, and it’s an all-consuming type of activity, traveling more or less full-time with four people in a van and making big creative projects together. And we all felt like it would be healthy for us to take some time away from it. And being able to announce that, and let folks come and celebrate with us – it just felt as good as I could have hoped for.”
Joseph Terrell stopped by Live & Local this week and played three songs: “Genuine American Hero (Talking Blowback Blues),” “Every Dollar,” and a new, still-unreleased song, “The Apple Song.” Listen:
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