790 The Journal of American History December 2013 you may be asking, why is this important?”—is key to what makes this fashion exhibit unique. The racialized history of “Inspiring Beauty” is more than the sum of its aesthetics. Natasha Barnes University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, Illinois doi: 10.1093/jahist/jat456

The Woody Guthrie Center. Tulsa, Okla. http://woodyguthriecenter.org/center/. Permanent exhibition, opened April 2013. 12,000 sq. ft. Deana McCloud, executive director and chief curator; Ali Stuebner, opening exhibit curator; Kate Blalack, archivist, Downloaded from Gallagher and Associates, designer.

“The world didn’t mean any more than a smear to me,” Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) wrote in his 1943 autobiography, Bound for Glory, “if I couldn’t find ways of putting it down on something” (p. 177). This powerful urge to express himself would assume multiple forms over http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ the course of his life. Before he was felled by Huntington’s disease following a fifteen-year decline, he produced more than three thousand songs—some with as many as eighty-seven stanzas—plus short stories, novels, letters, articles, hundreds of pieces of artwork, journal entries, postcards, manuscripts, radio programs, newspaper columns, thousands of letters written in composition notebooks, and more than one hundred diaries and assorted essays. He also left behind more than five hundred photographs, ranging from publicity images and concert photos to family pictures, dating from 1938 to 1954. at Knox College on April 3, 2014 Nora Guthrie assumed responsibility for the vast corpus of Woody’s creative legacy when her mother, Marjorie, Woody’s second wife, died in 1983. In 1990 Nora opened the Woody Guthrie Archives in Mount Kisco, New York. The decision to establish a permanent home for the collection in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sixty-four miles from Woody’sbirthplaceinOkemah,was made possible when the George Kaiser Family Foundation purchased the collection and installed it in a repurposed warehouse, located in the controversially named Brady Arts District. (The dis- trict is named after W. Tate Brady, a prominent businessman and Tulsa’s first alderman, who had associations with the Ku Klux Klan.) According to Nora, most of the material in the collec- tion had never been orchestrated, seriously studied, or even viewed by anyone outside of the Guthrie family besides a handful of archivists, scholars, and journalists. The Woody Guthrie Center () opening was the culmination of many 2013 centennial celebrations focusing on his one hundredth birthday. It is the actualization of Marjorie’s vision for Woody’swork.Today a new Brady Arts District is emerging in Tulsa with multimillion-dollar Kaiser Foundation– sponsored investments and local small-business development linking with cultural institutions such as the Oklahoma Museum of Music and Popular Culture, the University of Tulsa, the Gilcrease Museum, the Philbrook Museum of Art, and the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa. The  is across the street from Guthrie Green—an “eco-scaped” public space equipped with a sloping natural amphitheater and a stage, a sound system powered by a solar roof, and a geothermal underground field. Nora Guthrie announced at the April opening of the  that the center was named to appeal to audiences who might not think that museums and archives were spaces they could occupy and explore. Bob Santelli,the executive director of the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles Exhibition Reviews 791 and a longtime music researcher, commented that the  is intended to be a place where people have opportunities to learn about the life, times, and legacy of Guthrie, and where people can gather for town hall meetings centered on community issues. In addition to the exhibits, the center houses the Guthrie archives, which are open by appointment to researchers. Once past the lobby, which includes an information and ticket counter and a refreshingly modest sales area offering Guthrie books, compact discs, and t-shirts, visitors ascend a wide and welcoming platform stairway to a second-floor pavilion. A bank of embedded monitors introduce Guthrie, using photos, words from his songs, and notations on an adjoining wall. The other side of the scrolling wall holds a huge, interactive map of “Your Land”—the conti- nental United States. Visitors touch the map and railway lines appear, tracking Woody’stravels

as a hobo riding the rails through most of the country. Headphones placed near the map Downloaded from invite the visitor to listen to short narratives about the songs, poems, and essays Woody pro- duced and accumulated in notebooks on and off the road. A display on another wall, “Woody and His World,” begins in the 1920s in his birthplace of Okemah and then traces his life, decade by decade, from Pampa, Texas, to Los Angeles and New York City. A music bar holds

suspended headphones and individual kiosks that allow visitors to digitally summon songs and http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ listen to them in their entirety. The headphones are arranged so that two or more people can share the experience. In addition, there are kiosks with songs organized by the themes that con- sumed Woody—travel, immigration, the environment, children, human rights, sports, love, war and peace, and Oklahoma. Visitors can hear the song while looking at the words as they actually appeared in one of Woody’s notebooks, or they can listen to interpretations rendered by other artists, and then write their own songs, poems, and essays. Five freestanding plastic cases provide an opportunity for a 360-degree examination of some of Woody’s instruments—four guitars and a fiddle. Engraved on the fiddle is a version at Knox College on April 3, 2014 of the motto Woody made famous: This Machine Killed 10 Fascists. He carried the fiddle with him during World War II on U.S. Liberty ships, where he served as a cook and an entertain- er. One of his ships was torpedoed twice, and both times he jumped to safety, managing to take his fiddle with him. Also encased is a guitar he gave to his son Arlo and another recov- ered from a secondhand store; on the guitar’s inside label, Woody wrote Property of Woody Guthrie OK. Pete Seeger confirmed that Woody often wrote those words on the inside labels of his guitars. Long before modern psychologists began studying children, Woody kept daily journals of conversations he had with his own. Their questions, rhymes, and inventive language became inspirations for his children’s songs, which he saw as tools to teach children about the world around them and as aids for adults curious about their concerns. With songs such as “Little Seed,”“Sleepy Eye,”“All Work Together,”“Build My House,” and “Pick It Up,” Woody urged parents to listen closely to their kids. The original “Rosalee” doll, a gift to his daughter Cathy Ann from Martha and Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, is on display. Also displayed is a 1946 Guthrie quote in which he urges parents: “Don’t just buy these records and take them home so your kids can play around with them while you go off and do something else . . . . I want to see you join right in, do what your kids do.” Turning left at the top of the stairs, visitors enter the theater, where a looping, polished, thirteen-minute clip summarizes his life. The film is interspersed with riveting testimonials from several generations of troubadours, including musicians such as Billy Bragg, Del McCoury, Ani DiFranco, Donovan, and Jimmy LaFave. Strains of Woody’s guiding light exist in all corners of American music, from folk, rock, punk, and country to classical. 792 The Journal of American History December 2013 Downloaded from http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ at Knox College on April 3, 2014

Following World War II Woody Guthrie labeled a few of his instruments, including the guitar shown here and a fiddle on display at the Woody Guthrie Center, with antifascist messages. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-113276.

TheimportanceofWoody’s music was realized early on by Pete Seeger. Woody was in the middle of his long period of decline when Bob Dylan, just beginning his career, was singing Woody Guthrie’s compositions exclusively. In addition to Seeger and Dylan, others directly influenced by the “Okie” include the New Lost City Ramblers, the Weavers, Glenn Yar- brough, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Morello, Natalie Mer- chant, Rosanne Cash, Wilco, Jay Farrar, Will Johnson, the Klezmatics, and David Amram. In 2012 the Guthrie biographer Ronald Cohen used the present tense when he wrote that Woody “is the most famous and influential folk music composer and performer in the history of the United States” (Ronald Cohen, Woody Guthrie: Writing America’sSongs,2012, p. 1). Woody’s first major album, Dust Bowl Ballads (1940), and an original copy of his essay “Dust Bowl Refugees” are showcased in a stunning exhibit on “the greatest ecological disaster Exhibition Reviews 793 of the twentieth century.” Visitors pick up headphones and listen to “IAin’t Got No Home in This World Anymore,”“Do Re Mi,”“So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh,” and the seven- teen-verse song “Tom Joad,” while viewing images from the Ken Burns documentary The Dust Bowl (2012). The exhibit includes a map showing the regional scope of the dust bowl and actual clothing, tools, and other artifacts collected from refugees. While linking Woody’s work to the greater dust bowl experience, the exhibit argues that Dust Bowl Ballads was the album that “cemented Woody’s reputation as a talented troubadour whose songs shed a new light on America.” This exhibit alone is worth the trip to Tulsa to visit the . Nora Guthrie often asks fans of Woody’s music if they realize that Woody was also a visual artist. The  features a wide variety of Woody’s art. Letters illustrated with watercolors and

drawings that appeared in his notebooks of songs are on display at the center, as are pen-and- Downloaded from ink, pencil, crayon, and pastel drawings and illustrations. Scores of silver metal plates—each engraved with an example of Guthrie’s illustrations—cartoons for children and for news editori- als, and sketches line the outside of two curved walls at the center. The rounded showcases below the engraved plates contain his paintings, illustrated songbooks, and family photos of

Woody and his children. Included is a copy of the 1947 journal Woody started for his daughter http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ Cathy Ann, who died one month later in a fire in their New York City apartment. The show- cases also include Woody’s lyric journals and notebooks, which allow visitors to explore his song topics and creative process. Many of the lyric journals contain early drafts of songs that Woody later reworked into final versions. Also on display are postcards, letters, telegrams, drawings, and photos he sent to loved ones holding down the home front during the war, as well as a rich sampling of the sixty-six pen-and- ink drawings he created for the book. The last showcase in this set features a copy of the 1943 New Yorker review of Bound for Glory by Clifton “Kip” Fadiman. Fadiman wrote, “Someday at Knox College on April 3, 2014 people are going to wake up to the fact that Woody Guthrie and the ten thousand songs that leapandtumbleoffthestringsofhismusicboxareanationalpossession,likeYellowstoneand Yosemite, and part of the best stuff this country has to show the world” (Clifton Fadiman, “Min- strel Boy—Japs,” New Yorker, March 20, 1943, p. 68). The two curved walls frame what is Woody’s most tangible and readily accessible legacy to date: his song “This Land Is Your Land”—the “country’sunofficial national anthem, known to every school child since the 1960s” (Cohen, Woody Guthrie, p. 2). The original copy—a typewritten, lined piece of three-hole-punched notebook paper with white cloth reinforcers— is enshrined in a rounded, glass-covered stand inviting visitors to read the words, line by line. Lighting radiates softly from a circular chandelier of fourteen Gibson guitars some ten feet above, as well as from inside the rounded alcove. This august setting is encircled with rounded displays of artifacts and texts tracing the lineage of the song from its creation to its place in the American musical pantheon. Among the artifacts are a few of the awards attesting to the impact of Woody’s legacy, including four Grammy Awards, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Award, and official recognitions from the states of Oklahoma and Texas. In 2000 the Record- ing Industry Association of America cited “This Land Is Your Land” as essential for teaching the appreciation of music. The National Literary Landmark Program partnered with the Friends of Libraries  and the Friends of Libraries in Oklahoma in 2001 to name Okemah Oklahoma’s first recipient of the Literary Landmark honor, which recognized the literary achievements of Okemah’snativeson. The link between the past and the present is not always tangible. However, the creation of the  coincides with a time when the world is again facing issues that would be familiar to 794 The Journal of American History December 2013 activist-artists such as Woody Guthrie: human-created ecological and financial collapse, the role of working people and the contributions of unions to working life in the United States, the increasing power of financial institutions, and the symbolic significance of Occupy Wall Street. To study the work of this artist, poet, and troubadour is an invitation to understand the creative process and to write our own poems, compose our own songs, draw our own pic- tures, and explore our personal possibilities for expression. As John Steinbeck wrote, “Songs are the statements of a people. You can learn more about the people by listening to their songs than in any other way, for into the songs go all the hopes and hurts, the angers, fears, the wants and aspirations” (John Steinbeck, preface to John Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest, 1953, p. vii).

Elizabeth Sharpe Overman Downloaded from University of Central Oklahoma Edmond, Oklahoma doi: 10.1093/jahist/jat462 http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ at Knox College on April 3, 2014