"If you'll gather 'round me, children, a story I will tell." So began many a Woody Guthrie ballad, invoking the huddle around the campfire, the community of the road, the generation that rode the rails during the Depression. Guthrie's songs gave...
[more]"If you'll gather 'round me, children, a story I will tell." So began many a Woody Guthrie ballad, invoking the huddle around the campfire, the community of the road, the generation that rode the rails during the Depression. Guthrie's songs gave a voice to that uprooted generation and to the struggles of their era. Taking the folk tradition as his jug and kettle, he filled it alternately with the sorrowful voice of exile and the nasally voice of protest. Guthrie's songs vented the frustration of the downtrodden, but they also celebrated populist heroes and the resilience of the common man.
Guthrie knew life on the road firsthand. When he was only 16, the dust-bowl drought forced him to quit his hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma, and head out on a quest for paid work and hot meals. Rambling through Louisiana and Texas, he found menial jobs as a farm laborer, sign painter, spittoon washer, and newsboy. Along the way Guthrie got a hard-knocks education in the rudiments of economics and politics. When he began to play guitar on the street for spare change, he protested the injustices he'd seen, describing the dismay, the toughness, and the spirit of the people he had met.
Times were as hard as they get, and Guthrie captured the experience of exile and homelessness in songs like "Dust Bowl Blues" and "Tom Joad" (based on Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"). Other songs, such as "1913 Massacre," focused on the working poor -- miners and factory hands who were bullied by anti-labor forces. Sometimes Guthrie attacked politics directly, as in "The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti," which sympathized with the Italian-born anarchists. Other times he celebrated folk heroes like Jesse James and Pretty Boy Floyd. Guthrie cast these outlaws as contemporary Robin Hoods who would pay the mortgages of starving farmers or pose as beggars at the doorsteps of the poor, only to leave a thousand-dollar bill under the napkin after they'd been given a meal.
As the Depression wore on, Guthrie's politics leaned ever further to the left. He moved to New York (then a hotbed of socialism) and tried to join the Communist Party. He failed admission because he wouldn't disavow his religious faith, but The People's Daily World found room for him to write a regular column. He also continued to write songs, eventually leaving a legacy of more than a thousand tunes.
Guthrie's music wasn't put on tape until 1940, when Alan Lomax recorded him for the Library of Congress. The sessions were later released by RCA and Electra, allowing his influence to reach the next generation -- without Guthrie, there would be no "Minnesota hobo" with the traveling name of Bob Dylan, no Bruce Springsteen to immortalize the yearnings of New Jersey's working class.
Ultimately Guthrie's voice spoke to Americans of every political bent, reminding them that this land was their land, and suggesting that big money and big government better not stand between the people and their rightful claim to those golden valleys. Guthrie might have been speaking for himself when he set Tom Joad's words to music: "Wherever little children are hungry and cry, wherever people ain't free, wherever men are fightin' for their rights, that's where I'm a-gonna be, Ma."
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