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.
