Late last week, Pittsboro singer-songwriter Joseph Terrell uploaded a new song to social media. Titled “Genuine American Hero,” the folk protest song is written in the style of John Prine or Phil Ochs and struck an immediate chord: As of Monday, the video has racked up more than 2.5 million views on TikTok and 17,000 views on Instagram.
“I don’t think it’s a great sign for our country when folk music gets this good,” wrote one commenter on the video.
Terrell’s song centers on ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who shot and killed 37-year-old Minneapolis resident Renée Good on January 7. It doesn’t pull any punches, beginning, with a warm conversational twang: “Well we taught him how to kill on the streets of Iraq / and he’d been missing that job since he’d came back,” before continuing, “Well, after My Lai, Guatanamo, and Abu Ghraib, / He’d got used to putting people into unmarked graves / … He saw a 37-year-old mother of three and shot her in the face in her SUV / and by way of explanation said, “What a fucking bitch.””
“I’ve been thinking about ICE and how horrifying this stuff is for months now,” Terrell said over a phone call on Saturday, just hours after federal immigration officers unloaded ten shots at Alex Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse at a Minneapolis V.A. hospital who was working as a legal observer at an ICE raid. Pretti was killed less than a mile from where Good was.
“Seeing that video they released of the guy’s body cam, where he said those words after killing [Good], was a sucker punch,” Terrell continued. “It distilled something about the recent years and this administration so much. There’s some core hatred of women at the center of a lot of shit that’s happening.”
Terrell, who was raised in a Quaker family outside High Point, is the guitarist for Mipso, an Americana band that got its start in Chapel Hill. (Last fall, the group announced it was going on “indefinite hiatus” after thirteen years.) His solo debut, Good for Nothing Howl, was released in 2023.
Terrell’s solo output has a politically responsive throughline: Last year, he wrote another song “in the heat of the moment,” as he put it, about the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson; an event that galvanized nationwide anger around structural violence and the rising cost of healthcare.
Written as an Appalachian murder ballad, that song also doesn’t mince words: “Your life is weighed in three words / deny, delay, depose / … they’ll profit from the sickness of people / till the people make it end.”
In November, Terrell played activist musician Woody Guthrie in a Winston-Salem production of Walk a Mile in My Shoes, a play about the 1947 tobacco workers’ strike at R.J. Reynolds that Guthrie sang at. Protest songs are undoubtedly on his mind.
But if Guthrie often gravitated toward earnest songs of unification like “This Land Is Your Land,” Terrell’s “Genuine American Hero” has a bit more bite. That may be why people have connected so strongly with it: the song’s ironic undercurrent offers an entry point for anyone who feels fatigued and angry about the current administration and is seeking new ways to say so.
The day after posting “Genuine American Hero” on Instagram, Terrell shared a second rendition of the song, which also quickly took off, with over 113,000 impressions and counting on Instagram, and attention from celebrities like Patricia Arquette.
Virality never has an exact science, but it’s clear that ICE raids and the federal occupation of Minneapolis has had a seismic impact on public consciousness—from the January 23 large-scale General Strike in the city and protests that have drawn tens of thousands out in record-low temperatures, to the far reaches of the digital sphere where protest music has also seen a timely resurgence.
And in case it’s not abundantly clear that the tone of “Genuine American Hero” is a satirical indictment of Ross, ICE, and the American government’s exacting imperial boomerang, there’s this clever turn of phrase: “Now this old bald eagle’s gone blind too and can’t see his chicken’s coming home to roost / what’s good for the goose is good for the propagander.” It feels like the kind of quip that can stick to the moment and travel, the way so many other protest anthems have over the years.
“Part of what’s interesting to me is getting at that tone that’s ironic. It’s a really delicate, difficult thing to get at a tone that hits that balance of serious and meaningful—but also, at like, ‘these guys are fucking clowns,” Terrell said. “My song felt like not just some screed about today, but [something] getting at the history of American imperialism and how that’s coming home.”
Terrell recorded “Genuine American Hero” with local band Viv & Riley on Friday and says the song will be available on streaming services in the coming week.
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