From his first song, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya” which he wrote about a huge dust storm while living in Pampa, Texas, Woody Guthrie chronicled the changing world that he saw. Best known for “This Land is Your Land” he was prolific and his output included more than songs. From his youth he was a cartoonist; beginning in California during the Depression he wrote essays, letters, and a regular column named “Woody Sez.” During this time he also became a social activist; this is the aspect of Guthrie that my paper will examine. His live radio show was heard at night as far away as the Texas Panhandle where his wife and children lived; one listener castigated Woody for singing a song called “Nigger Blues” and Woody apologized on-air. From that time on, racial justice was one of his causes as well. This became especially obvious from his actions and writings in the 1940’s in New York City. The Guthrie legacy goes far beyond the single song of his which everybody knows—at least the first verse—for it is in the later verses that the social justice for which Woody should be remembered is more obvious. His original lyrics asked, “Was this land made for you and me?” I propose that this should be the legacy for which his name is remembered: as one who lived hard times, and understood that it was hard times transcended race, or language, or national origin.
Back before radio, before phonographs, when people who wanted music had to create it for themselves, there was plenty to go around. Styles ran together; the same melodies might be used for many different sets of lyrics that covered a wide range of subjects. Songs could be sung with lyrics that were appropriate for children in the afternoon on the front porch, and with bawdy verses in the saloon that night, and with rabble-rousing lyrics at the local political rally or labor strike. But the music was everywhere.
That’s where Woody enters. He became a musician and songwriter while living in Pampa, Texas, writing new lyrics to old tunes in many cases, calling shots exactly as he saw them, and speaking truth to power in a way that regular folks could understand and appreciate. Later he explained:
"There on the Texas plains right in the dead center of the dust bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen there was plenty to make up songs about. . . . I never did make up any songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs or songs about what all's 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. And this has held me ever since." (Woody Guthrie: Dust Bowl Balladeer)
Woody used his songs and other creative works as social commentary, promoting social justice issues such as treating all people fairly no matter what color or economic status, political belief or place of origin. He was far more than a songwriter best known for one particular patriotic anthem. [2]
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie had seen everything that he wrote about. He was an authentic voice when people had gotten tired of falsehoods. He fit right in to the American folk music revival that had started when Aunt Molly Jackson and Leadbelly arrived in New York City in the early Depression years, creating a live music scene to bolster those folklorists who combed the rural areas looking for performers and songs. Because Woody had grown up hearing and performing folk music, he provided exactly what they wanted:
The rural Southwest of Woody's youth gave him an instinctive knowledge of ballad structure, folksong style, and the folk idiom. Migrant and hobo wanderings of his early manhood provided crucial themes for his pen, drawn from first-hand observation, to mold into verse and prose. (Reuss 282)
He became a prolific writer, with not just poems and songs but illustrated embellished letters that have been archived by a non-profit organization headed by his daughter and granddaughter in New York. His cartoons speak as clearly as better known political cartoonists of his day. [3]
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Woody was also outraged at the racism. He’d learned his own lesson a few years before when he was chastised by a radio-show listener who wrote to him about the song “Nigger Blues” he had sung on air, from “a young Negro in college, and I certainly resented your remark. No person . . . of any intelligence uses that word over the radio today.” Woody read the letter on his show, apologized and promised not to use it again, and ripped all the songs out of his book containing the word (Klein 96-97). Of his harmonica-playing Negro friend Sonny Terry, Woody wrote:
I talked to Sonny about these things in his art and he tells me that he is blind and that he still knows that his people can see a world where we all vote, eat, work, talk, plan and think together and with all our smokes and wheels rolling and all our selves well dressed and well housed and well fed. These are the things that Blind Sonny Terry knows and sees in his blindness. These are the upland echoes of the things that stir and sing along his big muddies. These are the plans and visions seen in the kiss and whisper of tall tree jack pines falling into the chutes to make your papery pulps. These are the freedoms. These are the samples of the kinds of soul art that the Negro, Indian, Mexican, the Irish, the Jew, the Russian, the Greek, Italian, all of us, have to bring to be seen and heard. (Guthrie 12)
Huddie Ledbetter and his wife Martha were often his host when Woody slept in their living room (Klein 163). His actions and words clearly showed that he was inclusive in his social activism. [9]
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