This
year marks the centennial of America's greatest folk songwriter and
singer, Woody Guthrie. In his brief career, cut short by
Huntington's disease, the amazingly prolific Guthrie wrote thousands
of songs, a best-selling autobiography, and provided an incomparable
influence on subsequent generations of singer-songwriters. Even 45
years after his death, Guthrie's spirit seems ubiquitous. Tributes
from such musicians as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen,
Rosanne Cash, Ani DiFranco, Steve Earle and Guthrie's son, Arlo,
attest to his lasting influence. It also was announced recently that
Guthrie's unpublished novel, "House of Earth," will be
published next year, edited by historian Douglas Brinkley and actor
Johnny Depp.
Guthrie
was born July 14, 1912, in Okemeh, Oklahoma. Leaving home during the
Great Depression of the 1930s, he joined the exodus of Great Plains
farm families forced off their land by the environmental disaster of
the Dust Bowl and the economic policies of banks and other large
businesses. He spent much of the 1930s and 1940s traveling,
entertaining people in migrant camps and union meetings.
The
Depression was an era in which artists were discovering, and trying
to give voice to, "the people." From John Steinbeck's
classic novel "The Grapes of Wrath" to Carl Sandburg's epic
poem, "The People, Yes," the focus was on the dignity of
ordinary Americans in the face of extraordinary challenges. But
Guthrie was the real thing, Steinbeck's Tom Joad come to life, a
grass-roots intellectual who articulated the world-view of
dispossessed farm families, migrant laborers and workers struggling
for dignity and a living wage.
Guthrie's
genius lay in the way he spoke the language of the people he sang
about, as an insider and without affectation. He mastered a wide
range of musical styles, from cowboy and hillbilly songs to hymns and
popular tunes, and used this vernacular material to give voice to the
period's forgotten people. Often using well-known tunes, traditional
or popular, he wrote songs based on his experiences or those of
people like him, or taken from news stories or labor history. In
trying to find the workers’ voice, Guthrie sometimes literally used
their words. In his haunting "Dying Miner," based on the
1947 Centralia, Illinois, mine disaster, his lyrics are based on
notes left by the victims.
The
result was an authentic American radicalism, a populist disdain for
the power of corporate interests and a celebration of hard-working
people victimized by events beyond their control. In his tall-tale
"Talking Hard Work," Guthrie begins "I was born
working and worked my way up by hard work" and then goes on to
relate his attempts to impress a woman. "I chopped and carried
314 armloads of stove wood/ 109 buckets of coal/ Carried a gallon of
kerosene 18 miles over the mountains . . ./ All on account of cuz I
wanted to show her I was a man and I liked to work."
Despite
such an ethic, Guthrie's characters find themselves victimized by
predatory economic forces. ”Rich man took my home and drove me
from my door,” he says in “I Ain’t Got No Home.” In "The
Jolly Banker," he sings, "When the bugs get your cotton,
the times they are rotten . . ./ I'll come down and help you, I'll
rake you and scalp you/ Singin' I'm a jolly banker, jolly banker am
I." Or, in the final verse of his outlaw ballad, "Pretty
Boy Floyd,"
Guthrie contrasts Floyd's criminality with the practices of bankers,
"As through this world I've wandered, I've seen lots of funny
men/ Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen."
Even
in his most famous song, "This Land is Your Land," a
celebration of the country's natural beauty, Guthrie pondered the
impact of economic disparity on the land he loved. In the
seldom-sung final verse, he wrote, "In the shadow of the
steeple, I saw my people/ by the relief office, I seen my people/ As
they stood there hungry, I stood there asking/ Is this land made for
you and me?"
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