Protest Song Of The Week: 'Whistle Boeing' By Jesse Welles
The United States Justice Department offered Boeing a sweetheart deal in July that would allow current and former executives to avoid criminal charges for their role in 737 Max crashes.
Boeing whistleblowers Joshua Dean and John Barnett died in 2024. The tragic circumstances of their deaths—coupled with the multinational aerospace corporation’s scandalous acts—garnered widespread media coverage.
Inspired by what happened to Dean and Barnett and the corruption swirling around Boeing, guitarist and singer Jesse Welles wrote “Whistle Boeing.” It has a toe-tapping acoustic guitar riff and a rather infectious whistle part (just as any song about whistleblowing should).
The song begins with the chorus. “You can know a lot. You can know a little, but whatever you know just don’t blow the whistle."
In the first verse, Welles recalls both Dean and “Swampy” Barnett. Dean’s lungs turned to goo, and he had a stroke. Barnett found “over 300 reasons a plane couldn’t fly.” Now, he is dead.
The next time that he sings the chorus of this cautionary tale, Welles makes it more playful: “You can toot a flute. You can play the fiddle, but whatever you do just don’t blow the whistle, alright.”
The second verse revolves around the men that Boeing has on the ground to cut deals with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the U.S. government—“fantastic lawyers of the law.”
“A little blip of the whistle cuts [Boeing executives’] bonus a little,” Welles adds.
An instrumental break features harmonica and more infectious guitar-playing by Welles. That leads into another chorus and outro, where Welles sings: “Your life can be trash, completely dismal. It could always be worse if you just blow the whistle.”
In 2024, Welles released several protest songs, including “Whistle Boeing,” that went viral on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. “War Isn’t Murder” was his most popular. (As of December 1, the song against Israel’s war on Gaza has over 2.3 million listens on Spotify.)
Born in Ozark, Arkansas, Welles has not always recorded music geared toward making political statements. His debut album “Red Trees and White Trashes,” released in 2018, was described by NPR’s Ann Powers as an album that recalled “other 21st-century Southern rock survivalists like Cage The Elephant and All Them Witches—artists who've found inspiration in the region's woodsy cover and nighttime heat, and are keeping feedback-fed rock alive by not worrying about anybody else's idea of what's cool.”
With a tune like “Whistle Boeing,” Welles shows that he isn’t only concerned with challenging norms in the music industry. He is a roots rock raconteur, a kind of jester for our techno-feudalist world. In fact, he performed at Farm Aid 2024, an annual benefit concert for family farmers led by Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews, and Margo Price.
Listen to “Whistle Boeing” and receive updates on the latest music from Jesse Welles here.