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Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie

1 H A l I OF F A M E

Woody Guthrie

OODY GUTHRIE WAS A STUBBORN, MOODY, IRRESPONSIBLE AND monica and jew s-harp, H e was a fair pointer and an excellent cartoonist But just plain ornery soul; a hard-drinking egomaniac who ''bor­ words were Woody’s great strength and consuming passion. For most of his rowed^ nearly all of the melodies of his many songs; an irregular life, words poured out of him in songs, poems, letters, books, articles and news­ source of support to his wives and children; and one of the paper columns. A voracious reader, he combined his natural gifts as a storytell­ world’s worst house guests. er and lyricist with a wry delivery and impeccable timing. was also one of America’s greatest folk poets Woody never cared much about money and would do almost anything, and the author o f literally thousands o f songs, including "Pastures o f Plenty,” from sign painting to street singing, to avoid the tedium of a regular job. He "Reuben James,” ",” "Do Re Mi,” "So Long, It’s Been spent the first twenty-odd years of his life hanging around Okemah or in Good to Know You” and ".” Woody Guthrie was Pampa, Texas, where the family later moved. H e made his first semiprofes­ the original source of an image as familiar to us, now as that of Marilyn sional music with the Corncob Trio, playing old-time country songs by the Monroe or : the working-class singer-songwriter, rambling and Jimmie Rogers. across the continent with his on his back. Woody Guthrie has been During the Great Depression, Woody hit the road. H e hitchhiked and rode an inspiration to three generations of American musicians, from Pete See- freights across the West and Midwest, singing the old songs to the migrants ger to to . and . H e slept on the ground, went hungry, was rousted by the cops and W oodrow W ilson Guthrie was bom July 14th, 1912, in Okemah, Oklaho­ railroad bulls. From these experiences came not only the source material for his ma. His father, Charles Guthrie, was a prosperous real-estate agent and aspir­ songs but also a lifelong commitment to radical politics. ing politician. But during Woody’s boyhood, Charlie Guthrie went broke, and In 1933, Woody married M ary Jennings in Pampa. They had three chil­ his wife, Nora, who suffered from Huntington’s chorea, was committed to a dren, but his constant traveling eventually led the couple to divorce. In 1934, state mental hospital. W oody grew up an eccentric loner, always on the go, fu­ Woody published his first booklet of original songs: two years later, he left eled by an impetuous creative drive and a boundless curiosity about his world. Pampa for good. Arriving in Los Angeles, he made his first break into radio. In adolescence, he picked up the rudiments of guitar, , , har­ Southern California was newly populated with thousands of refugees from die farm lands, and Woody’s songs and stories spoke to them as nothing else could. By the late Thirties, he was a self-proclaimed Communist (though never a diligent party member) and the composer of songs like "Dust Bowl Refugees” and "I Ain’t Got N o Home.’*4.: Woody Guthrie arrived in in 1940 and took the city’s thriving left-wing community by storm. It was as though Tom Joad had come to life, straight from die pages o f T he Grapes o f W rath. Woody performed on network ra­ dio; contributed a regular column to the ; pub­ lished an autobiography, ; played for strikes, benefits, subway crowds and anti-Nazi rallies; recorded pro­ fusely for ’s nascent Folkways label; and turned out song after song after song. In November 1945, after a lengthy courtship interrupted by his stints in the merchant marine and the army, W oody married Matjorie Greenblatt Mazia. They had four chil­ dren: Cathy (who died in a fire at age four), Nora, Joady and Arlo. But Woody had already begun to suffer the spasms of depression and disorientation of Huntington’s chorea. His illness, combined with alcohol abuse and the postwar decline o f the , made the rest o f his life a cruel anticlimax. T he years leading up to his death in Brooklyn State Hospjital on October 3rd, 1967, were char­ acterized by painful separations from his family, aimless trips to old haunts, desperate attempts to write and bedside visits from youthful admirers like Bob Dylan. In 1964, wrote: "I think that, of Woody’s thousands of songs and verses, quite a large number are going to outlive this century, and this is a rare thing for a songwriter. . . . I think maybe several dozen of Woody’s songs are going to be sung by my grandchildren and their grandchildren. W hat better kind of immortality could a man have?” "Flarsh-voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim,” was how described him in 1940. "There is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about die songs he sings. But there is some­ thing more important for those who will listen. There is the will o f the pieople to endure and fight against oppression. I Born Ju ly 14th, 1912, Okemah, Oklahom a; died October 3rd, 1967, Queerut, New York think we call this the American spirit” ■

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John Lennon in Hamburg 0 P I ^ ROCK AND ROLL 1 RAIL OF FAME Ah :1958-63 By Arthur Levy ÜM

h e r e s a h o o t e n a n n y c o m i n e v e r y osi week on ABC/Starrin’ folk music singers H from the mountains to the sea.” M 3* ^ H i aU'-*'

vd\U- In 1963, Jack Linkletter presented the T h e a c tio n s o f a s m a ll T latest entry in the Saturday-night variety- Tc r show sweepstakes, ABC-TV s Hootenan­ but vocal group o f young W i , «C* n y . The timing couldn’t have been better: bloods, arm ed with gui­ Peter, Paul and Mary had just notched up three tars, could be read about JO*** H E 1 consecutive Top Ten singles iflt less than six in the pages o f “Sing 6 ^ 0 months: "Puff the Magic Dragon,” "Blowin’ in Out!’ Broadside’and M e the W ind” and "Don’t Think Twice, It’s All T attle Sandy Review.’ Right” To see how far folk music had come in five years, consider that "Puff” was a thinly o tti veiled pot smoker’s jingle and "Blowin’ in the W ind” had been adopted as the rallying song was snuffed within a year, on "the day the music died.” for Martin Luther King’s August on It is precisely within that year that we see the emergence of the Kingston W ashington and soon became the unofficial Trio, who were soon followed by an entire new generation of young folk theme song of the entire civil-rights movement Did TV programmers need personalities. In 1959 folk singers pxtured out of every nook and cranny of more justification to throw folk music into the lineup? North America and the British Isles. For them, John Jacob Niles and Burl Clearly, the advent of the H ootenanny series, along with an avalanche of Ives were no less influential than Maybelle Carter and Bill Monroe. H ootenanny one-off (one favorite was by vibraphonist Terry Gibbs) The new folk singers drew from traditional forms and from fresh musical and even a short-lived magazine named afer die show, signaled some epochal ideas. And there were enough pxp-music fons searching for something new to change about to take place. T he folk boom soon affected food (ethnic cuisine assure folk music the modest popular support it needed. The key was coexis­ was in), fashion (who dared go without A1 Block sandals or Fred Braun tence with rock and roll, an issue with which the folk community would grapple shoes?), dance, arts and crafts, summer camp», even college curricula. If the for the next two decades — and then some. music itself hadn’t made such a leap in popularity, perhaps its chances of surviving The commercial folk-music boom started with ’s Number unspindled and unmutilated would’ve been better. But once it became an important One song of 1958: "Tom Dooley,” the first folk hit truly to coexist with rock part o f the entertainment business, with its requisite support systems of records, and rolL The isolated hits of such disparate entertainers as concert tours and media exposure, folk music would never be the same. ("Banana Boat”) and Scottish man ("Rock Island To understand folk’s appeal at the dose of the , one must appreciate a Line”) had been regarded as little more than novelties. But with "Tom D oo­ retrain disenchantment with pop music that was felt by a specific segment of ley,” the San Francisco-based trio’s honest and simple performance struck a do- America’s youth. Such now widely heralded developments as the Brill Building it-yourself nerve that intrigued susceptible youth. The Kingston Trio’s studious phenomenon, the surf bands, even die flowering of New Orleans, were all seen appropriation of songs and arrangements from the workbooks of die Weavers by the early devotees o f folk music as frivolous diversions in the face of the rev­ and the N ew Lost City Ramblers represented pop homage at its most earnest olution that was on its way. These young people had folien under the spell o f The prospect of a career in folk had presented itself to those lads who were W oody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac, Bergman and Fellini, Kafka and Camus, proud to thumb their nose at rock and roll, which had become big business by Seeger and Salinger, Gandhi and Ginsberg. Alienation, anomie and relevance the end o f the Fifties. T he gates o f folk Eden may have opened, but the lines of were on the agenda, ramalama-dingdong was not demarcation were just as swiftly being drawn. N or were socially consdous young people the only ones disenchanted with On die one side were the purists who were uncompromisingly devoted to the evolution o f pxp in the late Fifties. There is a hard-core school o f rock and Appalachian of English and Celtic origin. Since they held day jobs, they roll pxirists who insist that the great groundbreaking work o f Elvis Presley (and, didn’t fear any commercial exploitation o f the music A t their most expansive, by extension, all of the first-generation rockers) began with Elvis’s first Sun they might let a song from Hank Williams or the Delmore Brothers into the records in 1954 and ended abrupdy with his army induction in the spring of 1958. As perceived by these hard-core purists, rock’s wild, untamed nature began to slide hard and fast after the King’s departure, and its magic fire P n \ ]4 AL. OUT SECTI N IO T C E S T U -O L L U P . L IA C E P S ;][4 L J W EE EGRS AEEL HMR Y O GTLE; RK ALN O GUITAR ON DARLING ERIK GOTTLIEB; LOU BY HUMOR FAREWELL; SEEGER’S PETE YIS F L-IE OK OG FAVORITES SONG FOLK ALL-TIME OF LYRICS Thefinale o f the 1963N ewport Folk F estival

repertoire; otherwise, they clung steadfastly and parcel of folk music long before it was ac­ to a traditional form of song that hadn’t knowledged on the rock and roll side. The been much tampered with for, say, 200 deaths o f (1958) and Blind years. Folk purists regarded the advent of Willie McTeD (1959) were felt most strongly Elvis Presley and as nothing in folk circles and led to a time of feverish re­ more than a ripple that would soon go away. discovery. T he legacy o f recording from die O n the other side was a network o f out­ Twenties and Thirties left by country and casts to whom the notion of straight employ­ Delta bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Charley ment was preposterous. This colorful subcul­ Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sonny Boy ture of pickin’ and singin’ "fellow travelers,” as Williamson, Pee tie W heats traw, Leroy Carr the House Un-American Activities Commit­ and Scrapper Blackwell were a treasure-trove tee pegged them, comprised disenfranchised for the tough young performers in 1960. college students like Cambridge’s Eric Von At the same time, the careers of living Schmidt, Brooklyn cowboys like Ramblin’ Jack bluesmen were experiencing a revival greater Elliott, art-school hell raisers like Bob than anything since John Hammond’s Spir­ Neuwirth, well-bred and gifted singers like ituals to Swing concerts in 1939. T he New­ , classical buffs like Paul Rothchild, port Folk Festival exulted in the newly dis­ LightninH opkitw expatriates, beat poets, novelists, journalists, covered sounds of Lightnin’ Hopkins, Son photographers, political organizers — and more than a few rank opportunists. House, Skip James, Mississippi John H urt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bukka Their role models came from many sources, but all converged into a single in­ White, Jesse Fuller, Furry Lewis, Big Joe Williams, Memphis Minnie, Sippie candescent image: the lone singer onstage, a one-man (or one-woman, more often Wallace, Mance Lipscomb, Sleepy John Estes, and Brownie than not) band, with an acoustic guitar slung proudly — preferably a J-50 or McGhee and the greatest teacher of them all, the Reverend Gary Davis, from Martin D-28. They were separated from the folk purists by their musical sources, whom a generation of singers learned "Samson and Delilah” and "Candyman.” for they drew upon not only traditional balladry but also the rich reserves of imme­ It was only a short jump from the rough-hewn Delta to the gritty elec­ diate forebears like Woody Guthrie and the , the New Lost City trified Chicago, Memphis and Detroit styles of Jimmy Reed, , Ramblers, Leadbelly, , Pete Seeger and . Elmore James, , Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Spann, Willie Dixon and Into this eclectic mix was poured Bill Montoe’s bluegrass and the of B.B. King. Most folk musicians eagerly adapted the songs to acoustic and Na­ Dock Boggs and the Carter Family, children’s sing-alongs learned at the feet of tional steel guitar. But in 1960, electrification was out o f the question in even Guthrie, Seeger and Elizabeth Cotten, the house-rockin’ hymns of the Reverend the most liberal folk camps. The closest acceptable hybrid forms were the Thomas Dorsey and Clara W ard, the white-hot gospel of the Stanley Brothers and washboard and jug bands (skiffle bands, in England) that popped up at the Sacred H arp Singers, ’s old-tdmey , the Landreneau Cajun beach-party hoots and at late-night jam sessions in college dorms and dress­ Band’s Creole swing and more — Tin Pan Alley, , and Caribbean, ing rooms. Still, the image of the vagabond bluesman provided a viable role Spanish, Yiddish, Israeli, French and African songs. model for yet another breed o f alienated youth. Best of all, there were the city and country bluesmen, whose influence was part The bluesmen found their audience on white college campuses and the bur- ROCK AND ROLL HALL OL FAME

georung coffeehouse scene. W ithout exception, they were shunned by the urban ing) the notion of idealism and black community, whose embrace of R&B had already reshaped die commercial morality must have seemed to Top Forty. Nonetheless, the bluesmen were always an integral part o f the folk pop-music observers, it was the scene - in fact, they were integrated into the fabric of the folk movement in a sole raison d’etre for singer- way that presaged the coming of a more resounding land of integration. songwriters, whose numbers All this was being transmitted in the spirit of "the folk process,” a cross-fer­ flourished. The recordings of tilization of ideas that, as 1960 rolled around, reflected the expanding world Bob Dylan, Peter LaFarge, Mal­ view o f a minority o f the new players. T he narrow position o f die purist elite vina Reynolds, , was being challenged on musical grounds, and the controversy was vigorously de­ Bob Gibson and (soon after) bated wherever folk music got a toehold. Over the next three years, in Greenwich Eric Andersen, , Tom Village, Philadelphia, Coconut Grove, Berkeley, Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, Paxton and Bufly Sainte-Marie provided a Top Forty of their own. Inevitably their concerns roamed beyond the confines of the conscience-bound folk movement After aH, songwriters are romantics too, and beside rT ... .. r Cisco Houston the all-consuming problems or the bomb, desegregation, strip mining, the welfare state, political corruption, free speech, apartheid, death and taxes, there’s always room for a . T he first golden era (all five years’ worth) o f the modem, commercial folk­ song movement was heading for its denouement. New singer-songwriter al­ bums were few and for between in 1962, and each one was considered a mini­ manifesto in its own right In the following year, the number of new recordings skyrocketed, with Elektra, Vanguard, Folkways, Prestige, RCA, Mercury and especially Columbia actively courting young performers. W hile many deny it, a subtle competition had taken shape, and a hierarchy was establishing itself. The power of folk music was displayed for all to see when Peter, Paul and Mary sang "Blowin’ ” at the March on . For young people whose social and political convictions may not yet have solidified, it was a time for heart and mind to come together. The powerlessness of youth in the The New L ost C ity Ram blers Forties and Fifties gave way to a positive feeling o f strength and identity in the Sixties. And folk music provided the marching beat for this transformation. Los Angeles, Kansas City, Cambridge and London, the conscience of the youn­ , which refused to allow Pete Seeger and the Weavers to appear, ger practitioners continuously tested the patience of the elders; it is to their became the white elephant of folk music when Bob Dylan, the Kingston Trio, eternal credit that, in one of Western music’s rare moments of cooperative nur­ Carolyn Hester, Joan Baez and others agreed to boycott it The show didn’t turing, the old embraced the young. miss a beat though, filling its ranks with , H oyt Axton, That set folk music apart from any movement that came before, ensured its , Mike Settle and the New Christy Minstrels. T he viewing public, growth and set its path for the future. Given this blessing, die movement’s pri­ generally unaware of the boycott and its attendant controversies, supported the orities quickly revealed themselves, propelled by the promises o f the New Fron­ show for one season before it was canceled. Folk music had rid itself of an alba­ tier, as the Kennedy administration’s agenda was nicknamed. In the pages of tross and, in the process, safeguarded its roots. Sing Out!, Broadside and Paul Nelson’s Little Sandy Review, on radio programs The final two events that signaled the end of this magical era of folk mu­ hosted by in New York and in Chicago, in the clut­ sic were the assassination of John F. Kennedy and, soon after, the coming of tered storefront headquarters of Israel Young’s Folklore Center in Greenwich , when the country lifted its veil of mourning and radio’s frozen Village, a curious scenario was playing itself out for all to see and hear. playlists were thawed. It was time for the music to move on. Woody would The action centered around a small but vocal group of young bloods, armed have been the first to warn his children about staying in one place too with , typewriters and — long, but the warning wasn’t by 1962 — a respectable number really necessary. N o one want­ of recording and publishing con­ ed to go back to 1962, and no­ tracts. They also had well-con­ body ever did. nected and influential managers and producers and the means to Read more about it: This era and turn their thoughts into deeds. the years before and after it are Chief among their many con­ capsulized by Lenny Kaye (a.k.a. cerns was the stalled civil-rights Doc Folk) in his liner notes to his movement. "W hich Side Are indispensable four-volume folk series You On?” was as applicable to on : 'Bleecker and their fellow singers and song­ MacDougal: The Folk Scene o f the writers as it was to the world at 1 9 6 0 s; r Crossroads: White Blues large. Sparked by fierce deter­ in die 1960s’; rO Love Is Teasin’: mination and quixotic devotion Anglo-American Mountain ­ to the human spirit, the words ry’; and rElektrock: The Sixties.’ and music of the folk singers After twenty years, rThe Face of identified the issues and then Folk Music,’ by David Gahr and allied public commitment Reverend Robert W ilkins, G aither Carlton, Skip Jam es, Arnold , has retained its val­ vhere it was needed. W atson, M ississippi John H urt, Yank Rachel, H am m y N ixon, Doc W atson ue as a primary source material for However quaint (or threaten­ (standing, from left) and Sleepy John E lites this era.

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