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Woody Guthrie
March 2007
By PAUL ZOLLO
 hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.
I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.
I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you've not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow."
--Woody Guthrie
"Woody Guthrie was the first alternative musician. While Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley were busy peddling escapism for the masses, Woody was out there writing songs from a different point of view with a lyrical poetry that captured the awesome majesty of America's scenery and the dry as dust humor of its working folks."
-- Billy Bragg
"This machine kills fascists."
-- Inscribed on Woody's guitar
"Woody is just Woody. He is a voice with a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people… there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit."
--John Steinbeck
"Civilization is spread more by singing than by anything else, because whole big bunches can sing a particular song where not every man can join in on the same conversation. A song ain't nothing but a conversation fixed up to where you can talk it over and over without getting tired of it."
--Woody Guthrie
I'm a-chasin' my shadow out across this roadmap
To my wheat fields waving, to my cornfield dancing
As I go walkin' this wind keeps talkin'
This land is made for you and me.
I can see your mailbox, I can see your doorstep
I can feel my wind rock your tip-top treetop
All around your house there my sunbeam whispers
This land is made for you and me.
From "This Land Is Your Land"
By Woody Guthrie
Woody's work was remarkable -- some 2000 amazing songs -- songs of love, outrage, beauty, faith, humor, death, sex -- and pretty much every other human experience under the sun. Some became famous, such as "This Land Is Your Land," "So Long, It's Been Good To Know You," "Roll On Columbia," "Deportees," "Union Maid" and "Do Re Mi," but most of his songs have hardly been heard once, if ever. And there was also so much else that he created: volumes of poetry, love letters, journals of erotica, books, drawings, doodles, paintings, and stories. When he was married to the beautiful Marjorie Mazia, he was so thoroughly in love with her that he'd write her entire inspired daily notebooks of love poetry and cosmic musings while on the subway, hurtling through the subterranean tunnels towards their Coney Island home. Marjorie kept all of these, and every letter he ever wrote, and every song he composed, along with every crayon, pencil and pen he used to conjure his magic, in her New York archives, where she'd share it with his admirers, a legion of artists, musicians and vagabonds that increased every year, and continues to expand.
In 1912 he was born in the heart of the Dust Bowl - Okemah, Oklahoma, which he later wrote was "singiest, square dancingest, drinkingest, yellingest, preachingest, walkingest, talkingest, laughingest, cryingest, shootingest, fist fightingest" town in Oklahoma. His childhood was spent in the oil-boom town of Pampa, Texas. In the depression-ravaged Thirties he hitched and rode the rails along with thousands to reach the world of their dreams, the promised land - California.
Of all those wanderers, thousands more than there were jobs, Woody was one of the fortunate few, able to make money by singing, playing guitar, and painting signs. He managed to get a 15-minute daily radio show which paid him a dollar per show. And when he wasn't broadcasting he could be found singing at saloons, parking lots, rallies, and union meetings -- anywhere people would listen. Their struggles were the impetus for his talent - he always knew that his mission was to translate their hearts and minds into song. Using what his pal Pete Seeger called the "folk process" - writing new words to old songs - he gave these people a voice.
Radio gave many people their first taste of Woody's songs. One listener, Ed Robbin, commentator for the Communist newspaper People's World, was surprised to discover that the man he had pegged as a hillbilly was actually quite politically savvy. He invited Woody to perform at rallies, first warning him that they were left wing. "Left wing or chicken wing, it's all the same to me," Woody said. And with that he connected with a new audience, one that was charmed and inspired by his unique fusion of country simplicity, Okie humor and political sophistication. His popularity spread quickly across the country and even preceded him to New York City, where he eventually fell in with new friends such as Josh White, Leadbelly and the actor Will Geer.
Opportunity kept knocking. In an attempt to cash in on the popularity of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, Victor Records hired Woody to write a song about it. Though he didn't read the book, Woody saw and loved the film, and understood its subject matter better than most. With his guitar and a jug of wine, he got behind a typewriter in Pete Seeger's apartment and proceeded to work into the night. The next morning Pete found him slumped over the typewriter with 26 verses of "The Ballad of Tom Joad" still in the typewriter.
"I learned a lot about songwriting from Woody," Pete said. "I learned something that was awful important. And that was: don't be so all-fired concerned about being original. You hear an old song you like but you want to change it a little, there's no crime in that."
It's a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed
My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road
Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled
And your deserts were hot and your mountains were cold
I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you'll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind
From "Pastures of Plenty"
By Woody Guthrie
By today's standards, Woody's records sound rough. Mostly guitar and a ragged, often off-tune voice, recording on the spot by Moses Asch for his Folkways label. But each of these recordings contains the essence of pure and brilliant songwriting, the marriage of music with words.
Woody well-understood the inherent power of this combination - words to express the timely and timeless needs of the people, and music to underscore that expression while engaging the soul and lifting the spirit. He knew few forces were as effective in uniting people as a good song, and as he constantly traversed America by walking, hitching or riding the rails, he would constantly connect with new people and translate their lives and dreams into songs.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"
From "Deportees"
By Woody Guthrie
Woody wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land," as a response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." Woody felt Berlin got it wrong - that America was already blessed by God, and wrote "God Blessed America for me." He kept fiddling with it for a full decade, and eventually realized that if he substituted the line "This land was made for you and me" for his title line, that he had a song not just about himself, but about all of America.
As Woody got older, it gradually became clear that something was wrong with him - he had severe tremors throughout his body, and it became increasingly difficult for him to think coherently. In time he was diagnosed with Huntington's Disease, for which there was then no cure and little treatment, and he spent the final fifteen years of his life confined to a hospital bed.
He died in 1967 at the age of 55. But his songs have lived on, performed and championed by a big range of singers, including Arlo, Dylan and Seeger, but also by Ani DiFranco, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Ry Cooder, and even U2, who cut Woody's song "Jesus Christ." Though Woody's been gone now for nearly half a century, his songs, and the spirit of human hope instilled in them, have been resounding with more force than they have for years. And the world's a better place for it, for his message was pure and revolutionary, and as affirmative as anything that has been written since. His songs continue to inspire as they have for years, and to provide a platform on which so many of our greatest songwriters have built their careers. "The worst thing that can happen is to cut yourself loose from the people," he wrote. "And the best thing is to vaccinate yourself right into the big streams and blood of the people."
(continued ...)
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