Headin' South: A Songwriter Looks at the Auto Industry

Danny Schmidt is an Austin, Texas-based singer-songwriter. He drives a beat-up 1990 Honda Civic that is a hand-me-down from his father, who is a mechanical engineer at the University of Texas (and incidentally, a sometime technical media consultant to Toyota on the ultra-green Prius).

Schmidt has just recorded what might be the best song ever about how globalization affects the auto industry. It’s called “Southland Street,” and it appears on his new CD Instead the Forest Rose to Sing (Red House Records). It uses Henry Ford as its central figure, though the word “Ford” never appears in the song:

“Henry was a man of steel
He built his cars in twos and fours
With a Motown sort of soulful feel
And phatter than before”

The song perfectly captures Detroit’s golden years, when a rising tide of car sales lifted all boats, and workers prospered through union contracts:

“The factory was made of gold
And all the workers loved him so
And 13-hour days are slow
But they kept the children fed

Every year at Christmas time
He’d send ‘em home with pork and wine
So sound the horn and ring the chimes
It’s Christmas time again”

But then the picture darkens, and the song’s refrain is:

“They had it all ‘til it all went south to Southland Street
They had it all ‘til it all went headin’ south”

The factories close and the work takes off for Mexico, but even there the jobs aren’t safe—“Southland Street” moves to Asia. And the song ends with:

“They had it all ‘til it all went south to Southland Street
They had it all ‘til it all went headin’ south
Hammer fall and strike the steel and bend the beat
They had it all ‘til it all went headin’ . . . east”

“The line ‘It all went south to Southland Street’ just popped into my head,” Schmidt told Bnet.com. I had been down to Monterrey, Mexico and seen closed factories—it was a boomtown but the jobs have gone somewhere else with lower labor standards. The song isn’t only about the auto industry, but about globalization in general. I once played a house concert for a group of professional globalizers—people who make the deals that decide where the companies should next move—and I was worried about how that song would go over. But it got a good reaction. I’m not against globalization—ultimately, I think it is good—but the growing pains are really bad.”

A video of Danny Schmidt performing “Southland Street” can be viewed here.