Below the squiggle is a piece I did for Alternate Root magazine in 2012 on the Woody Guthrie Centenary July 14, 2012. My own title for it was "The Great American Songbook's Historical Bum," but the editor - who of course knows how to connect with his readers - gave it something far more conventional.
Since his publisher never paid me, I figure I'm entitled to circulate it on the 103rd anniversary of Guthrie's birth for free if I so choose. I'm proud of it, perhaps without justification. Admittedly, the money would have been nice and I probably should have sued. C'est la guerre.
The Great American Songbook's Historical Bum
Woody Guthrie, folksinger, songwriter, cartoonist, author, ad man, civil servant, blacklisted radical, Huntington's Disease casualty at 55, was a jumble of contradictions.
Understand, during the Centenary year of his July 14, 1912 birth, that much of what we know about the man is, if not wrong, then balanced by the opposite also being true. He was the “Great Historical Bum’” from his song “The Biggest Thing Man Has Ever Done,” boasting on behalf of bums through history of finding the Rock of Ages, founding the American Republic, freeing its slaves, and kicking Adolf Hitler “in the panzers.”
Bob Dylan called Guthrie his last hero. Pete Seeger considered him a traveling companion all the years since his death. He inspired generations of once amateur guitarists – Tom Paxton, Ray Wiley Hubbard and Justin Townes Earle are just a few – to take up songwriting. Similarly, generations of singers – Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Odetta, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Jimmy LaFave, Slaid Cleaves, many more – to embrace his songs.
More than anyone else in the alt- world of popular music, Guthrie deserves a place at the table among the crafters of the 20th Century's “Great American Songbook.” And yet, one of the reasons his life and work are viewed separately from those of Mssrs. Kern, Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers and others is a Cold War view of him as un-American.
“I got the opposite impression from the time I spent reading his notes, his correspondences, various records in Woody's archives,” Rounder Records founder Bill Nowlin said in an interview this spring.
Nowlin, whose own career as a recording entrepreneur began with a love for the old-time country soloists and string bands who shaped Guthrie's musicality, has spent much of the past year organizing what will be one of the centenary's lasting pieces: A multi-CD set, Woody Guthrie: America's Radical Patriot. Rounder has been responsible, over the last decade, for presenting some of the most coherently collected and best sounding issues of the songwriter's career, which generally spanned the 1940s and early '50s. The label has also added to the canon. A 2007 release, The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance, 1949, painstaking restored a long unknown wire recording by the folk singer. It won the Grammy Award for historical recordings.
Nowlin has worked closely with Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, named after his mother who had died from the degenerative Huntington's disease that would claim him in 1967, and director of the Woody Guthrie Archives in Mt. Kisco, N.Y.
“I think the happiest period in his life might have been when he was working for the federal government, writing songs for the Department of the Interior,” Nowlin said in a May interview. “He liked working for his country.” Guthrie had taken a job, in 1941, to write songs for the department's Bonneville Power Administration about its Grand Coulee Dam project on the Columbia River.
Some of Guthrie's most famous songs resulted from the period: among them “Roll on Columbia,” a song that integrated the power and flood control project with majestic nature; of course “Grand Coulee Dam,” a celebration of the massive public-works project; a somewhat ironic “Talking Columbia” narrative with the closing lines “I'm not big on dictators myself, but I believe the whole country should be run by E-lectricity,” and “Rambling Blues,” a benign sequel to his protest song “I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore.”
Above them all is “Pastures of Plenty,” a tribute to migrant farm workers and the land they worked sung to an English folk melody best known from the murder ballad “Pretty Polly.” The song would become one of his most covered by other artists, but back in 1941 was deliberately plain-spoken with a minimum of guitar chord changes. Its singer sounds happy.
“It wasn't just a paycheck for him. He believed in what he was doing,” Nowlin continued. “I think he'd have been happy writing songs like that for the rest of his life.
”
He didn't, of course. Huntington's Disease and the post-War political climate limited how much he could work for anyone. But when World War II broke out, he worked for the Office of War Information and enlisted in the Merchant Marine.
“That in itself is impressive,” Nowlin said. “The Merchant Marine had a far greater percentage of casualties than the Army, so you can't simply say he was giving lip service to the war.”
Some perspective on Guthrie's work for Interior comes from his life story. Born during the first years of statehood and during the throes of the 1912 election, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was not named after a president but rather a presidential challenger. His father sold real estate to a generation of farmers, families who had chafed at territorial governors appointed by Taft and presidents before him. Charles Guthrie had deals go bad, but economic hard times didn't push him to the brink. Physical disaster did, a house fire and then child's death from fire variously attributed to the odd behavior of his wife that the experts dismissed as mental illness.
The elder Nora Guthrie was put in a state mental hospital in 1927. At the same time, the parcels of farm land Charles Guthrie had sold over the years grew barren, soil depleted and then blown and washed away. He moved his children to the Texas panhandle in 1929 for a job, learning of his wife's death, according to Woody's autobiography Bound for Glory, when he received a check in 1930 from the state refunding her pocket change.
Woody learned to play guitar in Pampa, and at 23 he began to write and sing songs he sang to his guitar accompaniment. He pawned his guitar two years later for the supplies to work his way westward as a sign painter. His writing and cartooning interested mostly left-wing newspapers in search of a proletariat Will Rogers. His singing, his easy stage manner and his songs – the best early ones were about the Dust Bowl that reached national attention in the 1930s – landed him on the radio.
The Dust Bowl – soil erosion, barren farm land, eventually crippling wind storms – kicked up from the American impulse to produce past one's capacity. Prices plummeted and land was drained of its nutrients in the name of a few big harvests. Woody was clearly a New Dealer from the git, but if there was anything he supported out of passion rather than politics, it was the work the Departments of Agriculture and The Interior did to help farmers protect themselves (and the land) from themselves.
People and land mingled to form Guthrie's patois, as surely as Jazz Age mores were Cole Porter's, the language of the New York's theaters and speakeasies moved Rogers and Hammerstein and Hart, and a commonality between African Americans and second generation Jewish immigrants inspired Gershwin and Arlen and Kern and their various collaborators.
Oddly, though, Woody’s voice, his historical bum, places him in the most unlikely of pairings, with Irving Berlin, the Golden Age's most popular songwriter and the author of a song that would prompt Guthrie to angrily retort “God blessed America for me.”
The two men were salesmen. One migrated from Belerus to New York as a child, and hawked newspapers, then cigars and then plugged songs for a sheet music publisher before a 1907 copyright change prompted him try writing songs himself. The other migrated from Okemah to Pampa and then supported himself as a sign painter, working his way west by carrying a kit of paints and brushes up and down the main streets that would frequently interrupt Route 66. Once in California, he got newspaper work, and played old-time country music on the radio. The songs were a way of distinguishing himself, and like the song plugger, he found that they could pay the bills.
Both Irving Berlin and Woody Guthrie reveled in seeming dumbed down. Berlin famously could only play chords and melodies on a piano's black keys, while Guthrie is sometimes quoted saying “Anyone who uses more than three chords is showing off.” A sophistication of content, though, seemed to contradict the dumbing.
“I never really knew how unschooled Woody actually was,” singer-songwriter Peter Rowan said earlier this year. Rowan, who has played over the years alongside Bill Monroe, Jerry Garcia and Emmylou Harris, was inspired for his album Dust Bowl Children by Guthrie's landmark 1940 album Dust Bowl Ballads. “Often, one of his songs has sounded to me like it was a lot more complex than how he ended up presenting it, and I wonder how much of that was planned. There's a letter in the Archives that he wrote to Maybelle Carter apologizing for his guitar ability, and she replied pretty much, 'You're doing just fine.'”
Pete Seeger, in a 1983 interview, noted that that associating one's self with “the folk” would for some work against displays of musicality. “In the purest sense, folk music is what we play and sing for ourselves, to entertain ourselves,” Seeger said. “At the point you start doing things for an audience, it becomes something else.”
What keeps us from looking at Guthrie and Berlin's similarities – and really from viewing Berlin as the modernist and folk artist that he really was – is the enmity toward those two songs. Woody Guthrie heard Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” on the radio in 1939 and hated it. It sounded, he would say, “like giving up.” The Depression was a decade old at that point and Europe was going nuts. Pearl Harbor was two years away, and the song seemed to lack the human spirit.
Thing is, Berlin had reached the same conclusion more than 20 years earlier, when he had left “God Bless America” out of Yip, Yip Yaphank, a patriotic show he developed as an army sergeant to raise funds for a community-center building for Camp Upton in Yaphank, N.Y. One doesn't have to squint too hard to imagine Guthrie writing either the show's signature, “I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” with its rejoinder, “Someday, I'm going to kill that bugler.” The song would be Berlin's only foray as a singer-songwriter. There is definite human spirit at play in the song Berlin wrote to replace “God Bless America” as the show's finale, “We're on Our Way to France.”
Each wrote vernacular songs mixing the conventions of European music with American folk stylings. Berlin, in one of his earliest hits, borrowed a melody from ragtime composer Scott Joplin to seem to update an earlier melody by Stephen Foster.
Guthrie learned guitar and a couple of other instruments from the back porch conservatories of Oklahoma and Texas, and a literary flair for the vernacular from loads of reading and listening. Berlin was more likely to create new melodies, but his use – for instance – of the “Reveille” bugle call in “I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” is consistent with Guthrie's tendency to borrow from existing ones. (He clearly based “Union Maid” from the 1908 pop song “Red Wing” that Kerry Mills and Thurland Chataway adapted from Robert Schumann's piano piece “The Happy Farmer, Returning from Work.”)
The practice places both in a tradition of French musicians parodying familiar classical melodies to accompany often topical songs that were called “vox de ville” (“the voice of the village”) which came to North America as “vaudeville.”
Both songwriters, it turns out, were investigated for potential Communism by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.
Of course, contrasts existed as well. Berlin's music stayed in the limelight. His songs were reliable staples in musical reviews on Broadway, made the shift to Hollywood with the “White Christmas” vehicle Holiday Inn, and then returned to Broadway to conquer the book-musical form with Annie Get Your Gun. As the record industry took hold, singers after orchestras exploited the audience appeal of his songs. Billy Murray had “I Love a Piano.” Arthur Collins had “Alexander's Ragtime Band.” Paul Whiteman had “Marie.” Fred Astaire, Kate Smith, Bing Crosby and Ethel Mermen all had No. 1 hits premiering Berlin songs. The combined releases over the years for Crosby's 1942 and 1948 recordings of “White Christmas” sold more than 100 million units.
Guthrie was a radio performer, both on his own and with groups. Victor Records' 1940 release of his Dust Bowl Ballads likely counts as the first ever concept album (and it is one of the essentials in a well-integrated record collection). He didn't have Berlin's broad appeal as a songwriter, although two of his songs produced hits. The first, his cousin Jack Guthrie's recording of “Oklahoma Hills,” had a stigma to it because Jack re-wrote the lyrics and claimed the song as his own. It spent six weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard country charts in 1945. The Weavers' version of the Dust Bowl Ballads finale “So Long (It's Been Good to Know You)” peaked at No. 4 on the 1951 Billboard pop charts, and would also reach No. 21 by Paul Weston's easy-listening orchestra. Belafonte recorded “Pastures of Plenty” on the 1964 album Ballads, Blues and Broadsheets; moreover, when he decided to open his 1979 show with a disco selection, he re-interpreted “Pastures,” he said a the time because “I love how disco sounds, but I wanted a song with depth for that sound to push forward.”
Although it did not chart nationally, a western swing version of the humorous waltz “Philadelphia Lawyer” was a California hit for the Maddox Brothers and Rose. “Woody loved that record,” Arlo Guthrie said in a 1984 interview. “It's really wrong to think he didn't enjoy commercial music, because he did.”
The songs would survive through other means while the songs of Berlin and others populated the first two decades of television music and variety shows. “Woody's songs would have died without summer camps,” folksinger Tom Chapin said in 1998. “A lot of blacklisted musicians couldn't do concerts, had problems getting jobs, but could get on as camp counselors.” A certain number of the Catskill Mountains camps, he continued, were supported by the below-radar parents of red-diaper babies, and Guthrie's songs were consistently in their repertoires.
Similarly, the open-stage and open-mike trend at bars, churches and coffee houses has kept Guthrie's music alive in the karaoke era. Guthrie's music was such an important part of one that the late singer-songwriter Mike Meldrum used to host at Nitzsche's in in Buffalo, it would revert to an all-Woody format each year on the Monday closest to Guthrie's birthday. Another, hosted by Mountain Stage band leader Ron Sowell at Unity Church in Charleston, W.V., has often had participants confer before hand about who got to do which Woody song on a given Friday.
` The early '60s folk revival would sustain the songs, as would a search for roots by a budding singer-songwriter movement inspired by Bob Dylan's success. If anything, Guthrie's legacy was hurt by the 1976 film adaptation of his autobiography, Bound for Glory. Hal Ashby (The Last Detail, Shampoo) directed it, and David Carradine (Kung Fu) played Guthrie. Haskell Wexler won an Oscar for its cinematography.
“I didn't like anything about the movie,” Arlo Guthrie said in 1984. “Ashby didn't understand Woody's music enough to get it on film,” Little Feat leader Lowell George said in 1978. Oklahoma native Jerry Holt, a film historian on the Purdue University English faculty, said back in 1976 that “they cast the wrong Carradine.” Earlier this year, he elaborated: “Ashby and writer Robert Getchell's treatment of Guthrie's story was as a con man, and Keith Carradine proved that he played a con man well” in (the 1975 movie) Nashville.” (Keith would later get a Tony Award nomination for playing another famous Oklahoman, Will Rogers.)
From this perspective, the movie's repeated use of “So Long” drove home a partial truth, that the rambling spirit Guthrie embodies was about leaving. Oklahoma has attracted leavers for generations, but they were leavers headed somewhere. A Woody Guthrie story true to his music would focus on arriving, or as the book Bound for Glory does, on the journey itself.