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Eminentoes
Woody at 100
The Celebrated Dust Bowl Balladeer put politics over family and place.
Last weekend friends dragged me to a Woody Guthrie tribute show where a dozen local bands performed the songs of the Folky Okie in celebration of his 100th birthday. It was a star-spangled occasion: a night of red rhetoric, white hippies, and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
I would have been more open to the experience thirty years ago. Like many amateur guitar pickers, I went through a brief Woody Guthrie phase during my late teens after reading a paperback copy of his autobiography Bound for Glory. The sad, homespun tales of Woody’s childhood in the early 20th century Oklahoma boomtowns, of his land-swapping, fist-fighting father and ballad-singing, terminally-ill mother were moving and evoked a strong sense of family and place.
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie has gone on to inspire multiple generations of songwriters. And new Guthrie songs seem to be coming out all the time thanks to his daughter Nora’s decision to open up the late lyricist’s archives to a few select artists, like my fellow Belleville natives Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar. Tweedy, in particular, did a fine job putting Guthrie’s lyrics to music on songs like “Remember the Mountain Bed” and “Airline to Heaven.”
But for all the accolades, Woody was a far better storyteller than musician. Listening to his old recordings is — to use one of his favorite phrases — hard traveling. The listener is instantly struck by the flatness of Guthrie’s hillbilly twang, and the feebleness of his guitar playing. He never developed his technique beyond the level of beginner. As for the songwriting, nearly all of his melodies were lifted from older folk songs. Even his most enduring tune, “This Land is Your Land,” borrowed the melody to the Carter Family song “When the World’s on Fire.” Woody simply couldn’t be bothered to work up his own melodies. The tunes weren’t important anyway. He was interested only in preaching his gospel of wealth redistribution. His songs and his cornpone persona were but another way to spread his socialist propaganda to the masses, and went hand in hand with his column in The Daily Worker and his speaking engagements at Communist Party USA rallies. Guthrie was a fellow traveler first, and a musician second.
ALONG WITH HIS AFFINITY for socialism, Woody Guthrie suffered from another common malady of our age: rootlessness. He was raised in the town of Okemah, Oklahoma, but Okemah was too small to hold a giant talent like Woody Guthrie. After a lifetime of drifting, he finally ended up, not surprisingly, in New York City, where he continued to write wistfully about the poor folks he left behind in those Oklahoma Hills where he was born.
Like many fellow travelers, Woody suffered from a Messianic Complex. One is reminded of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov who said, “In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together.” Woody was interested only in saving the workingman in general. Nothing less deserved his time and energy. “He was for the down-trodden people,” recalled his first wife Mary. “But as far as something for himself, even for his family, it didn’t make that much difference.”
Woody’s three families were for the most part left to fend for themselves, though his first suffered most. The Friend to the Poor fathered three children by Mary Jennings (all of whom died relatively young). He routinely abandoned mother and children in their tiny north Texas shack, when they weren’t chasing after him from coast to coast. Even Pete Seeger, who visited with the first Guthrie family in Texas, was appalled by the way Woody treated his wife and kids. At one point, Mary’s mother begged Seeger: “You’ve got to make that man treat my daughter right!” But that quote hardly seems a fitting epitaph for an American Master.
Wendell Berry once wrote that a “couple who make a good marriage, and raise healthy, morally competent children, are serving the world’s future more directly and surely than any political leader, though they never utter a public word.” Woody Guthrie would have disagreed. To him, Politics were more important than his people and his place. An abstract duty to the downtrodden masses trumped his real responsibility to his home and his numerous downtrodden families.
Should it matter? Our pop cultural icons are often deeply flawed individuals with messed up priorities. Our popular culture, too, is thoroughly imbued with Leftist humbuggery. But that doesn’t mean you have to be ants at a picnic. My friends and I had a fine time at the Woody Guthrie tribute. And it was way less painful than the two Ani DiFranco shows I was dragged to.
About the Author
Christopher Orlet writes from St. Louis.
kokomoarnold| 7.19.12 @ 6:30AM
Always like pieces like this that bring them down to earth. Reminds me slightly of the Jerry Garcia "Dark Star" bio, but at least his kids aren't poor. I might quibble with the idea he was a beginner guitarist, but would at best claim him advanced beginner, on the way to intermediate, only because of his timing.
And I had to sit through Ani DiFranco once. Never again.
Brookschwarzenegro | 7.19.12 @ 4:02PM
"but at least his kids aren't poor"
You want radical families to be well off?? first you say defund the Left, then you don't know what you want.
Skippy| 7.20.12 @ 2:29PM
All liberals deserve to be poor.
It's what they want for the rest of us, so...you first.
Appleby| 7.19.12 @ 6:48AM
Congratulations for discovering what the rest of us knew in 1968. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, for sure.
Brookschwarzenegro | 7.19.12 @ 9:13PM
What doesn't make sense is how a guitar could have killed fascists-- or anyone-- unless Woody was El Kabong.
Skippy| 7.20.12 @ 2:31PM
Until you understand what a cold-hearted communist he was, little makes sense.
Next to Guthrie, Nixon was a loving Grandpa.
Art| 8.24.12 @ 1:11PM
Brooks, the funniest comment I've read in a while!
Bill84728| 7.20.12 @ 9:41AM
So true, Appleby, so true.
WRTolkas| 7.19.12 @ 8:27AM
Dear Mr. Orlet:
Bravo - an excellent editorial. I do think that Mr. Guthrie would have developed deep and lasting friendships with Marx, Engels, and obama.
merlin| 7.19.12 @ 8:40AM
Who is Wendell Berry? Never mind. I'll google him.
Thanks for the quote from him, whoever he is.
Bill84728| 7.19.12 @ 9:23AM
Wendell Berry is often characterized as a political libbie. But he also wrote this one:
Anglo-Saxon Protestant Heterosexual Men
By Wendell Berry
Come, dear brothers,
let us cheerfully acknowledge
that we are the last hope of the world,
for we have no excuses,
nobody to blame but ourselves.
Who is going to sit at our feet
and listen while we bewail
our historical sufferings? Who
will ever believe that we also
have wept in the night
with repressed longing to become
our real selves? Who will
stand forth and proclaim
that we have virtues and talents
peculiar to our category? Nobody,
and that is good. For here we are
at last with our real selves
in the real world. Therefore,
let us quiet our hearts, my brothers,
and settle down for a change
to picking up after ourselves
and a few centuries of honest work.
When I quote this poem to libbies, they always get quite exercised. It's funny.
KyMouse| 7.19.12 @ 12:55PM
That's one of his I hadn't read; thanks for it.
I've never
quite understood
what makes that kind of passage
a poem.
Seems to me that it works
just as well as prose, if one
takes out the line breaks.
Even I
can be a poet
if I use up lots
of lines.
Hey, that was easy.
Nah, I'll just
stick with
Emily Dickinson.
She packed so much
into so little, and
did it with rhymes,
too.
Bill84728| 7.20.12 @ 9:38AM
Personally, I think that such fame as Wendell Berry has achieved is way undeserved, and I agree with you about what I'm charitably going to call "free verse."
But I like that poem I quoted above, not for its nonexistent poetic qualities but for its content.
Gr0w1er601| 7.19.12 @ 8:57AM
To be named after that terminal Progressive Wilson says it all. Perhaps his parental units should've named him Vladimir Illych.
Bill84728| 7.19.12 @ 9:19AM
Woody Guthrie joined the Merchant Marine in World War II and risked getting torpedoed by German U-boats more than once.
He was a Stalinist Communist long after Stalin was known to the world for what he was. Even if he hadn't been a Stalinist, he was a Communist.
He was not a good husband; he was fiddle-footed and wandered a lot; as a folk singer he followed a widely-followed tradition, that of stealing other peoples' music and attaching his own words (Bob Dylan did a lot of that too, by the way), but in the end there's one thing about Guthrie that no one can downgrade: he earned his right to his freedom of speech the hard way, and as far as I'm concerned, he was free to say anything he wanted to. I'm free to disagree with him. And whatever his abilities as a guitar singer and his putting his own words to someone else's music, he wrote a lot of clever lyrics and catchy tunes.
Petronius| 7.19.12 @ 9:25AM
Arlo's annual people fry is more than meets the ear. The open stage admits all comers who roll their own so long as they don't bore the crowd and get the hook. My best friend took the open mike just as the skies opened up with a satirical number lambasting environmentalists he calls Green Wankers, sung to the Green Acres theme from the sitcom. He said it was too bad only a few stayed to hear him but his offering caused some good buzz after. To most people who aren't "folkies", the genre is a low echelon curiosity or an interminable collection of childish gripes in the form of jingles. Regardless of the political or social supplications that the world be ordered to the liking of the composer it wouldn't last if it was bad stuff. Maybe I'll run into Chris at Focal Point some evening.
Cobalt| 7.19.12 @ 9:54AM
Woody Guthrie wrote "Ths Land Is Your Land" as a rebuttal to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America."
Guthrie's original version of "This Land Is Your Land" contained some controversial words about "private property." These words were later changed and omitted, when the song was performed in later years.
However, the controversial stanza about "private property" was included, and performed byPete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen at Obama's inauguration.
This Land Is Your Land?
By Lee Habeeb / National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/.....abeeb?pg=1
Cobalt| 7.19.12 @ 5:22PM
Woody Guthrie's fellow traveler, Pete Seeger, is still around. Seeger says he is still a communist, and calls himself "a communist with a small c."
Pete Seeger has been called "America's most successful communist."
More information on Pete Seeger:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.....indid=1619
rightasrain| 7.19.12 @ 10:52AM
Guthrie shares the mindset of most liberal Messiahs: I love mankind; it's people I can't stand.
Tom Kyba| 7.19.12 @ 10:56AM
Is deserting your family and sponging and stealing from others a prerequisite for being a socialist?
Occam's Tool| 7.19.12 @ 12:01PM
He was a scumbag, a low life scumbag;
He loved the gulag, hated the heartland;
He lived hypocrisy, was a bad daddy,
Good that he died of Huntington's.
KyMouse| 7.19.12 @ 12:58PM
That's pure Cole Porter. Thanks for the laugh-of-the-day, O's T.
All together now, sing!
Pelleas| 7.20.12 @ 10:43AM
Tool:
ANYONE who spews the obscene vomit that "Good that he died of Huntingtons" is THE FUCKING SCUM OF THE EARTH...
AND--YOU claim to work in the mental -health sphere??--PHYSICIAN, HEAL THY SELF..
Since you opened this can of worms--I HOPE YOU DIE--of some real painful disease--tit fer tat, no?
Skippy| 7.20.12 @ 2:49PM
Don't hold back now, tell us how you really feel.
Pelleas| 7.20.12 @ 4:40PM
I ACTUALLY FEEL MUCH MORE STRONGLY about any PIG who is "HAPPY" about someone's death-especially from a gruesome disease as is Huntington's..BUT "being an (un)Christian person, I CAN't say it..."
ROT IN HELL, OT, is the most "polite " thing I can muster, right now...
Nick| 7.19.12 @ 2:41PM
Woody Guthrie was/is probably the most overrated, talent-less hack in the history of American music. And that includes Bob Dylan.
In my youth attending public grammar school, I forget which grade, I was forced to learn This Land is Your Land.
Probably from a former hippie, as I started school in the early '70s, when many of the hippie-protesters figured out that the only job they were qualified for was teaching. Plus, thanks to the teachers unions, they could stick-it to those stupid tax-payers who hadn't embraced their anti-war movement, when they were in college.
People like my parents, who supported the Viet Nam war (even though they couldn't stand LBJ or Nixon,) got married, started a family, and then started a business.
My parents lived the true American dream, even though the state and federal government kept heaping more and more burdens upon them, and succeeded. This was the antithesis of Woody Guthrie's utopian/socialist worldview.
Stuart Koehl| 7.19.12 @ 3:48PM
In grade school (PS 121, Brooklyn, NY), we rebelled by inventing our own lyrics:
This land is my land,
This land ain't your land.
If you don't get off,
I'll blow your head off.
I've got a shot gun,
And you ain't got one.
This land is private property!
Nick| 7.19.12 @ 7:09PM
Excellent, Mr. Koehl.
Did you make-up any lyrics for One Tine Soldier. We had to learn that one in 7th grade.
(Or was Billy Jack after your time? Ha-ha!)
Stuart Koehl| 7.19.12 @ 8:23PM
A bit. I had to wait for Pinky and the Brain to putt Billy Jack in his place.
http://watchseries.eu/episode/.....84037.html
soljerblue| 7.19.12 @ 2:48PM
The only Guthrie song of any substance, as far as I'm concerned, was his ballad of the sinking of the USS Ruben James. It's a story of heroism and sacrifice, worthy of retelling anytime.
Stuart Koehl| 7.19.12 @ 3:50PM
But, interestingly, until 22 June 1941, Guthrie, in line with the CP-USA and CPSU, insisted that the war in Europe was just a fight between decadent capitalists, and that the U.S. should stay above the fray, refusing the help Great Britain.
After 22 June 1941, it became an international struggle against Hitlerite Fascism, of course, and Guthrie did all he could to ensure the U.S. got involved.
The man was a toad.
Stuart Koehl| 7.19.12 @ 3:51PM
My hat comes off for those on the Left who were guilty of "premature anti-fascism"--that is, fighting against Hitler even when Hitler and Stalin were a$shole buddies.
Skippy| 7.20.12 @ 2:51PM
When it comes to the brutal butchery of innocents, next to Stalin, Hitler was a wannabee.
StanAmSpec| 7.20.12 @ 6:38PM
"An abstract duty" Isn't that always the case with the left? It's always an abstraction, "it didn't work in that case", "it will be different this time". Never facts or logic. By the way, the "Woodrow Wilson" Guthrie is enlightening!
SilkyWiley| 7.21.12 @ 11:57AM
The article does not deal with Guthrie's disease, Huntington Chorea. Having know sufferers of this disease, they are inept at most social functions and often focus on larger issues such as social injustice. After all life has been extremely unjust to them as they see it. They lose most ability to actually connect with others. Grandiosity is common. Their own needs are so huge, they cannot see beyond that. The Huntington's victim I knew well, also was fixated on social injustice.