The folksinger Arlo Guthrie likes to tell a story about his father, the legendary Woody Guthrie, who died in 1967, at the age of fifty-five. When he was a toddler, Arlo says, Guthrie gave him a Gibson acoustic guitar for his birthday. Several years later, when the boy was old enough to hold it, Guthrie sat him down in the back yard of their house—they lived in Howard Beach, Queens—and taught him all the words to “This Land Is Your Land,” a song that most people likely think they know in full. The lyrics had been written in anger, as a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which Woody Guthrie deplored as treacle. In addition to the familiar stanzas (“As I went walking that ribbon of highway,” and so on), Guthrie had composed a couple of others, including this:
“He wanted me to know what he originally wrote, so it wouldn’t be forgotten,” Arlo Guthrie has explained.
Like the defiant, vaguely socialistic original words to his best-known song, much of what Woody Guthrie was and did during his lifetime has been forgotten, supplanted by the stuff of nostalgic sentiment. “This Land Is Your Land,” purged of its earthy contrarianism, shows up with “God Bless America” on albums of patriotic music and in concerts by pops orchestras that accompany the fireworks on the Fourth of July, and its author’s face has been put on a United States postage stamp. Woody Guthrie, a contradictory man who vexed his family and his closest friends as much as he challenged the authorities—“I can’t stand him when he’s around,” Pete Seeger, his friend and also a bandmate for a time, once said, “but I miss him when he’s gone”—scarcely registers as a creature of human dimension. In the popular imagination, where he endures, more than half a century after his creative prime as a writer and singer, Guthrie seems more like Gypsy Davy, Rocky Mountain Slim, and other colorful folk heroes of the songs he sang. He functions as the embodiment of gritty American authenticity, the plainspoken voice of a romanticized heartland.
Guthrie was never really so authentic, as Ed Cray shows in “Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie” (Norton; $29.95), a work of tempered debunking that is the first notable Guthrie biography since Joe Klein’s “Woody Guthrie: A Life,” which started unravelling the lore in 1980. The Klein book, fans of classic rock will recall, was the beneficiary of a sweet plug on Bruce Springsteen’s 1986 boxed set of live recordings; in a halting, Okie-inflected voice, Springsteen complimented “this fella named Joe Klein,” before moving into an acoustic-guitar version of “This Land Is Your Land.” Springsteen was then in the process of molting his leather jacket and his urban ambitions to become a Guthrie-style troubadour of the mythic hinterland, a change that signified his maturation within the rock world.
John Steinbeck—“the Woody Guthrie of American authors,” as he has been called—revered his musical compatriot in polemical realism. In his introduction to “Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People,” a book of Depression-era folk tunes compiled by the folklorist and activist Alan Lomax, Steinbeck praised Guthrie’s music for capturing “the American spirit,” and noted, “He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people.”
Guthrie’s people were in fact the upper-middle-class American élite. His father, Charley Guthrie, was a prosperous real-estate speculator and aspiring politician (a conservative Democrat and vehement anti-Communist) in Okemah, Oklahoma, a boomtown in the oil territory of the newly annexed state; at one time, he and his wife, Nora, owned as many as thirty rental properties, and they were the first people in town to purchase an automobile. Their third child, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, was born on July 14, 1912, twelve days after that year’s Democratic Presidential Convention, and named for the freshly nominated candidate. “Papa . . . swapped and traded, bought and sold, got bigger, spread out, and made more money,” Woody Guthrie recalled accurately in his often fanciful memoir, “Bound for Glory.” “We all liked the prettiest and best things in the store windows, and anything in the store was [ours] just for the signing.”
The hard times of the early nineteen-twenties devastated the Guthries, claiming the family’s property and the children’s buying privileges. Unpersuaded by his parents’ faith in capitalism, Guthrie eventually fell sway to the socialist utopianism that was attracting the attention of intellectuals, the young, the poor, and other disillusioned or idealistic Americans during the late nineteen-twenties and early thirties. He was a convert to disenfranchisement and always advocated the underprivileged with a proselyte’s zeal.
“Woody Guthrie,” like “Bob Dylan” and “Springsteen,” was essentially a self-invention made for the electronic media: after a few years of scrounging, singing for change, and passing himself off as a seer and a faith healer, Guthrie made his name doing a comedic hillbilly act on Los Angeles radio in 1937. He had moved to the city in the mid-thirties, a time when outlandishly hokey cowboy singers were a novelty craze—a way for the music and movie industries simultaneously to exploit and ridicule rural culture for the pleasure of the urban audience. Cray describes a Los Angeles “awash in country-hillbilly-cowboy-western music,” with radio stations broadcasting the likes of the Stuart Hamblen Gang, the Covered Wagon Jubilee, the Beverly Hillbillies, the Saddle Pals, the Bronco Busters, the Saddle Tramps, and the Sons of the Pioneers. Woody Guthrie rode the marketplace like a saddle-sore poke on a long-tailed dogie (or some such), crooning cowboy songs with his cousin Oklahoma (Jake Guthrie) and a cowgirl, Lefty Lou (his friend Maxine Crissman), playing the spoons, spinning tall tales, and reciting what he called his “cornpone philosophy” in a theatrical Okie drawl that he employed to disarming effect for the rest of his life.
Guthrie’s inchoate socialist leanings grew into a deep commitment to the labor movement and to the social and political adventurism of the American Communist Party. (Guthrie never joined the Party—his independence was such that he “was not affiliated with anything,” according to his sister Mary Jo; he did follow the Party line, however, down to belittling Roosevelt as a warmonger during the period of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, and he wrote a column called “Woody Sez,” in hillbilly dialect, for the C.P.U.S.A. organs People’s World and Daily Worker.) The first of Guthrie’s three wives, Mary, lamented his politicization as “his downfall as an entertainer,” and she had a point: the more he focussed on rousing the masses, the less he pleased the crowd. Guthrie’s modest popular following diminished; at the same time, through politics, he found his voice.
“I never did make up many songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky,” Guthrie wrote in “Bound for Glory,” “but at first it was funny songs of what’s all wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in the country was thinking.”
In a letter to Alan Lomax quoted (with its creative grammar and spelling) by Klein, Guthrie expanded on this thought:
Indeed, folk music has traditionally served as an outlet for native discontent, often expressed in coded language (the boll weevil stands in for field hands, the farmer’s son is the government). Still, there is a great difference between the folk songs that circulated in Woody Guthrie’s day and the music he wrote; that is, the very fact that he wrote it. Folk music (including country, blues, and other vernacular styles) was supposed to be anonymous—a collective art passed along orally from singer to singer, generation to generation, sometimes culture to culture. From the vantage point of today, when kids with their first guitars start writing songs before they learn to play other tunes, it is difficult to process how exceptional it was for a folk artist such as Woody Guthrie to have created a vast repertoire of deeply idiosyncratic works. (Many Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood songwriters of the thirties and earlier were as skilled and prolific as Guthrie, but they were working in a different vein, writing to order for professional singers.) Guthrie brought the authorial imperative to vernacular music in America.
Guthrie, like many American musicians, was immeasurably indebted to black music. In an unpublished manuscript quoted by Cray, he recalled that one of his earliest childhood memories was of hearing a “Negro minstrel jazzy band blowing and tooting and pounding drums up and down our street,” a sound that inspired him to “sing out the first song I ever made up by my own self.” At the age of thirteen, he discovered the blues; according to what Guthrie told Lomax in an interview for the Library of Congress (released on a three-CD set in 1989), he studied a “big ol’ colored boy” shining shoes in front of a barbershop and singing what Guthrie found to be “undoubtedly the lonesomest music I ever run on to in my life.” Each experience informs one of the two main categories of Guthrie’s songs. His light tunes (many of them, such as “Car Song” and “Jiggy Jiggy Bum,” written expressly for children) have a free, joyful, improvised feeling; his ballads of hard life have the impenitent rawness of Mississippi Delta blues, along with the blues’ harmonic structure (three chords, tonic, subdominant, and dominant) and, in many cases, the blues’ metre:
The Popular Front saw artistic refinement as a mark of bourgeois élitism, and so did Guthrie. “Woody believed in simplicity like people in the Bible Belt believe in their scripture,” Guthrie’s schoolmate Matt Jennings tells Cray. Guthrie seemed to think of musical complexity as corrupt, and he wrote most of his songs with just a few chords, in the key of G. (He would slide a capo up the neck of his guitar to change keys, much as his nemesis Irving Berlin, who could play only in F-sharp, used a special mechanism built into his piano to transpose his songs.) Guthrie’s melodies, many of which were adapted from traditional sources, are as basic and memorable as schoolyard chants, and the words are just as biting. (The music to the opening phrase of “This Land Is Your Land” simply follows the first four notes of the major scale, making the tune a model exercise for beginning musicians.) His lyrics, similarly, seek to convey a guileless cleverness and intensity—a pridefully untrained intelligence. Grammar and syntax give way, rhymes miss, and accents fall awkwardly, all contributing to the songs’ effect of unadorned veracity, as in “The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done,” one of Guthrie’s many tunes about the Grand Coulee Dam:
Once Hitler ventured into the Soviet Union and Stalin joined forces with the Allied powers, Guthrie became patriotic; he supported the United States’ involvement in the Second World War and pasted a hand-painted sign onto the front of his guitar: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” He kept it there after the war, in reference to another target: the cultural power brokers who, in his view, oppressed folk artists by rewarding sleek professionalism. Guthrie, now living in New York, challenged the commercial aesthetic of the pre-rock era through a performance style that was not merely plaintive, like that of countless singing cowboys in the movies, but almost combatively anti-musical. In the dozens of recordings that he made between 1940 and 1952 (many of which have been reissued by Smithsonian Folkways in conscientiously engineered and annotated CDs), his singing and playing are jarring: his voice bone-gray, dry and stiff, and indifferent to pitch; his guitar work spare and ragged, and frequently out of tune. Aesthetically, Guthrie was less a socialist than an anarchist, contemptuous of the prevailing rules and standards.
For all his advocacy of the common man, Guthrie sought to be recognized as someone exceptional. Agnes (Sis) Cunningham, his sometime bandmate (along with Seeger, Bess Hawes, Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, and others) in the Almanac Singers, the leftist vocal group of the forties, told me a few years ago that Guthrie was “determined to become a legend in his own time.” (Cray quotes Hawes as saying that Guthrie was “desperate” to become “a big, important person.”) After all, he did not call his autobiography “Bound for Obscurity,” and the book is dense with folksy anecdotes that dramatize his innate superiority to government officials, businesspeople, other authority figures, and most of his friends. “Bound for Glory” captures Guthrie vividly; he was fearsomely gifted and ambitious, and also egalitarian—a most uncommon man.
Woody Guthrie succeeded in becoming a legend in the last years of his life, as young people of the postwar era, seeking their own cultural identity, veered away from the coolly sophisticated, urbane pop on their parents’ hi-fis in favor of more idiomatic music grounded in rural America—folk, country, the blues, and their hybrid, rock and roll. Students by the thousands massed in Washington Square Park each week to strum along to “This Land Is Your Land,” and to look for Woody Guthrie, the exemplar of the folkie ideal. He was unable to take active part in his newfound idolhood, however. Debilitated by Huntington’s disease, a degenerative disorder of the nervous system, Guthrie became a tragic figure to his young acolytes: an American original cut down before his time, seemingly gone mad (wildly erratic behavior being a symptom of the disease)—a living amalgam of Hank Williams and Friedrich Nietzsche. When the nineteen-year-old Bob Dylan arrived in New York from Minnesota in January of 1961, he told his friends that he was going to meet his god, Woody. “He’s the greatest holiest godliest one in the world,” Dylan said of Guthrie around that time—a “genius genius genius genius.”
Reflecting on the period later, Dylan explained, “Woody turned me on romantically. . . . What drew me to [him] was that, hearing his voice, I could tell he was very lonesome, very alone, and very lost out in his time. That’s why I dug him. Like a suicidal case or something. It was like an adolescent thing—when you need somebody to latch onto, you reach out and latch onto them.”
With today’s rock and pop feeling homogeneous, and with hip-hop now twenty years old, popular music is ripe for something new. Whatever comes will surely be something that challenges the complacency of the mainstream; something from disreputable sources; something critical of the status quo, harsh, simple, seemingly anti-musical, and doable without formal training—that is to say, something much in the vein of what Woody Guthrie did. If few nineteen-year-olds today think of latching onto Guthrie, his spirit may be closer than they know. ♦
