My Daddy (Flies A Ship in the Sky)

12. My Daddy (Flies a Ship in the Sky)
(Woody Guthrie/Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc., BMI)

Track 12 – My Daddy (Flies a Ship in the Sky) (MASTER MA 14)
While the Almanacs wrestled with Guthrie’s unsingable rollcall of the names of the men lost aboard the U.S.S. Reuben James (see the notes to Track 7), Guthrie was writing one of his most appealing of songs. Yet for all of its child-like charm,“My Daddy (Flies a Ship in the Sky)” was intended as a tribute to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Arsenal of Democracy – then supplying Great Britain and Soviet Russia with desperately needed military supplies. Guthrie recorded it on April 19, 1944, and a year later wrote “…this is a song that run in at my ears one day when I heard some kids on a vacant lot telling what their daddys and mommys were doing to help win this war.”