“Woody Guthrie was the songwriter as advocate. He saw the song as a righteous sword and that inspired me.”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
“It’s as close as people are going to come to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.”
STEVE VAN ZANDT on Springsteen
Here’s a curious thing. Bruce Springsteen apparently got turned onto Woody Guthrie by, of all people, Ronald Reagan. The election of the 40th President of the United States in November 1980 horrified Springsteen; it was, he recalled, “a critical event to me and I started to address it on stage immediately”. The story goes that someone had presented him with a copy of Joe Klein’s Woody Guthrie: A Life, and that after Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter, he immersed himself in what is properly regarded as the quintessential biography of the American folk hero.
“He was funny and entertaining,” Springsteen said of Guthrie. “He knew you can’t get on a soap box, you can’t tell anybody anything. I remember at the time a far-left political group approached me and showed me some of their material and I said, ‘The ideas are good but it isn’t any fun’. You have to feel human. You can’t just harangue.”
American folk music earned its stripes in the Thirties when hard times hit. No more the minority pursuit of the learned, the interior monologue of native communities, it became the medium through which the struggles of all the people were articulated, banging the drum for the advancement of social justice and hollering in protest at iniquity. This was the time of the Great Depression, an unprecedented global economic slump that began in 1929 and ended 10 years later.
The whole thing was precipitated by the catastrophic collapse of prices on the New York Stock Exchange. Apart from ruining many thousands of individual investors, the decline in the value of assets (by 1932 they had dropped to about one-fifth of their 1929 value) forced banks into insolvency. Sound familiar? It should. The consequences of the slump in the United States were drastically falling manufacturing output and drastically rising unemployment, with between twelve and fifteen million out of work.
Meanwhile, in the agriculture sector, which had increased productivity through mechanisation and the cultivation of more land following the First World War, many financially overextended independent farmers lost their holdings and tenant farmers were turned out as a result of the stock market crash. As if the situation couldn’t get any worse, poor soil conservation practices led to a seven-year drought, followed by the coming of the dust storms in which farms literally dried up and blew away, creating what became known as the Dust Bowl. Impelled by these factors, thousands of farmers packed up their families and journeyed across the country to California in search of a better life. Popular songs and stories, which had circulated in the oral tradition for decades, heralded the state as a veritable Eden. But the reality was starkly different, for California too was reeling from the Depression. The labour pool was disproportionate to the number of available openings, while migrants who did manage to secure a job were paid low wages; even with entire families earning, they couldn’t support themselves. Camps were set up along irrigation ditches in fields, where poor sanitary conditions caused a public health problem.
Refugees within their own borders, the folk found some solace in song. Recreational activity in such impoverished circumstances was concentrated on the playing of and dancing to Anglo-Celtic ballads like ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘The Brown Girl’, ‘Pretty Molly’ and ‘Little Mohee’.
Among the refugees was one Woodrow Wilson Guthrie from Okemah, Oklahoma, the second-born son of Charles and Nora Belle Guthrie. Charles, better known as Charley, was a cowboy, land speculator and local politician. He taught Woody Western, Indian and Scottish songs. Nora, too, was musically inclined and made an equally profound impact on the boy.
He would wait for the sound of his father’s horse on the hard clay street and then run to meet him. Charley would sweep the boy into his lap. Woody was always “hopping around the house, making up snatches of rhyme and trying to sing them like his mother”, Joe Klein recalls in Woody Guthrie: A Life.
Tragedy though blighted his childhood. His older sister, Clara, was killed in a house fire. There are two versions of how the fire started. In the version cited by Klein, Nora had kept Clara home from school to do housework and Clara, gone crazy with the anger that was a symptom of the as-yet undiagnosed Huntington’s Disease, drenched her dress with coal oil, setting it alight. Indeed this was the version Clara herself told when, displaying remarkable fortitude, she granted an interview to the Okemah Ledger while lying on her death bed.
In a radio interview years later, Woody said, “My 14-year-old sister either set herself afire or caught afire accidentally – there were two different stories got out about it. Anyway, she was having a little difficulty with her schoolwork and she had to stay at home and do some work. She caught afire while she was doing some ironing that afternoon on the old kerosene stove. It was highly unsafe and highly uncertain in them days, and this one blowed up and caught her afire and she run around the house about twice before anybody could catch her. Next day, she died.”
The loss to Woody was pronounced. “She was like a surrogate mother to him,” according to his daughter, Nora Lee Guthrie. “Nora (Woody’s mother) was actually, without anyone knowing it at the time, showing symptoms of Huntington’s Disease, probably for many years before it was diagnosed. It’s very slow and incremental. So little events, little episodes, little breakdowns, maybe 10 years previous to the actual diagnosis, were happening. Clara stepped in as the older sister. She was eight years older than him. She really stepped in as a surrogate mother in the sense that she was the bright spot in his life. She was that positive, bright light, whereas his mother, Nora, was already shades of grey.”
After Clara’s death, Nora, prey to depression, began to descend deeper into the well until she was committed to a mental institution, where she eventually died.
In his autobiography, Bound For Glory, Woody remembered how the Huntington’s manifested itself: “She would be all right for a while, and treat us kids as good as any mother, and all at once it would start in – something bad and awful – something would start coming over her, and it come by slow degrees. Her face would twitch and her lips would snarl and her teeth would show. Spit would run out of her mouth and she would start out in a low grumbling voice and gradually get to talking as loud as her throat could stand it; and her arms would draw up at her sides, then behind her back and swing in all kinds of curves. Her stomach would draw up into a hard ball, and she would double over into a terrible-looking hunch – and turn into another person, it looked like, standing right there before (brother) Roy and me.”
He would go to sleep nights and dream “that my mama was just like anybody else’s. I saw her talking, smiling and working just like other kids’ mamas. But when I woke up it would still be all wrong, all twisted out of shape, helter-skelter, let go, the house not kept, the cooking skipped, the dishes not washed.”
While Nora was institutionalised, Charley relocated to Pampa in Texas, finding work to repay his debts from failed real-estate deals. Woody and his siblings were left to fend for themselves. The resourceful teen came into his own, using his nascent musical ability to procure money or food.
In 1931, Woody joined his father in Texas. It was there he met and fell in love with Mary Jennings, the youngster sister of musician friend Matt Jennings. The couple married and went on to have three children together. It was with Matt, meanwhile, that Woody made his first serious attempt at doing something in music, forming the Corn Cob Trio and later the Pampa Junior Chamber of Commerce Band.
The Great Depression cut short his burgeoning career. Struggling to support his family, Woody, like the thousands of desperate others, made for Route 66, hitchhiking, jumping freight trains and even walking his way to California, picking up whatever employment he could in transit and playing his guitar, singing in saloons and painting signs in exchange for bed and board.
In Los Angeles, Woody landed a job on KFVD radio, performing both traditional and original songs. Together with his partner Maxine Crissman, alias Lefty Lou, he began to garner a following among the dislocated Okies in the migrant camps. Rather than restrict himself to the role of radio entertainer, Woody began using his programme to berate corrupt politicians, lawyers and businessmen and acclaim the compassion and humanism of Jesus Christ, outlaw hero Pretty Boy Floyd and the union organisers fighting for the rights of the workers in California’s agricultural communities, becoming an advocate for truth, fairness and justice.
His peripatetic nature next took him to the east coast and New York, where Woody’s authenticity saw him embraced by the city’s folk music fraternity and leftist intellectuals. Author John Steinbeck, in a memorable quote, gushed: “Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh-voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tyre iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who still listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.”
In New York, Woody was recorded by Alan Lomax in a series of conversations and performances for the Library of Congress in Washington DC; he also recorded his first album of self-penned compositions, Dust Bowl Ballads, for RCA Victor, and hundreds of discs for Moses Asch of Folkways Records. Here too, Woody befriended the likes of Leadbelly, Cisco Houston, Burl Ives, Will Geer, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Josh White and Pete Seeger, all of whom featured in a loosely-knit folk outfit that went by the name of the Almanac Singers, crusaders for various social causes.
Seeger, the son of a musicologist and concert violinist, had sat in the same class as John F Kennedy at Harvard University before dropping out and dedicating himself to folk music, what he referred to as “the music of the people”. Like Woody, he served in the Second World War, at the end of which conflict he formed The Weavers with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman. They turned Woody’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’ into an American standard and topped the charts with Leadbelly’s ‘Goodnight Irene’.
Unlike Woody, however, Seeger’s “actual experience in relating to the American people was zero”. By his own admission, he had “a rather snobbish attitude” until Woody taught him different; as an initiate into the tradition that was manifest in Woody’s very gait, that came out of his every pore, Seeger was, in the words of Alan Lomax, possessed by a “pure, genuine fervour, the kind that saves souls”.
His Damascene epiphany came on a cross-country trek with Woody that exposed him to privations of the people. Bryan K. Garman, in A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-Class Hero From Guthrie To Springsteen, contends that hereafter Seeger changed his modus operandi. He became fascinated by Woody’s radicalism, his knowledge of folk music, and his ability to interact easily with working people, Seeger mimicked Woody’s working-class attributes and tried to eschew the wealth and privilege of his Harvard pedigree. There was, Garman notes, “more than a hint of affectation in Seeger’s pose”,
Affectation maybe, but Seeger never forgot that he didn’t belong to the working class – mainly because Woody never let him forget. Garman again: “When Seeger would try to blend the American folk tradition with international folk songs so that the Almanac Singers might appeal to a more diverse audience, Guthrie insisted that only he, a self-proclaimed member of the working class, had the authority to speak on behalf of his constituents and dismissed his friend’s efforts as being too commercial.”
This is an apposite juncture at which to pause and consider the elemental influence of Woody and Pete on a young Bruce Springsteen. By his own admission, Springsteen grew up a rock’n’roll fan and didn’t know much about either man’s music or their political activism. Certainly this is borne out by his first two albums, Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle. But by Born To Run there’s a very discernible influence in terms of the earthier language he uses, while the narratives depict, if not the American Nightmare, then an American Dream shattered by harsh reality. Such narratives exposing the lie at the heart of the aspirational myth had already been written by Woody. Springsteen must have been aware of Woody and Pete, he must have assimilated their songs, absorbed them on some level; he must have known, even superficially, about their reputation as bulwarks of blue-collar America.
Bryan K Garman claims Woody developed into the mature Springsteen’s most important cultural ancestor, acknowledging the former’s politics, “emphasising that Guthrie had ‘a dream for more justice, less oppression, less racism and less hatred’. By performing a song (‘This Land is Your Land’) written by this well-known labour activist and anti-racist, Springsteen placed himself squarely within a cultural struggle for social justice, explaining that he covered Guthrie’s song ‘because that is what is needed right now… I sing that song to let people know that America belongs to everybody who lives there: the blacks, Chicanos, Indians, Chinese and the whites’.”
When Nora Guthrie discovered a store of more than 2,000 of her father’s unfinished songs in his archives, she looked around for suitable candidates to complete them with a view to recording an album. Springsteen would have been a candidate, but “I didn’t know Bruce at the time, so the idea of working with him wasn’t really an option,” Nora recalls.
She plumped for Billy Bragg, a British political singer-songwriter and activist who came to prominence during Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministerial reign in Eighties Britain. It was Thatcher who once dismissed the very notion of the existence of society, who presided over the decimation of the country’s coal mining industry and who sent a task force to fight Argentina for ownership of the disputed Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean.
“I first began thinking of the idea of working with Woody’s unpublished lyrics around 1994. And I wasn’t at all sure the idea was going to work,” Nora admits.
“So I wanted to work a little under the radar, scouting around for who I might be able to pull this off with. If I worked with someone who was in the spotlight, too high-profile, and the project got trashed it would get so much bad press that it would make it much harder to continue with other musicians and projects. So it was better to stay humble and look for people who really shared a love of Woody’s values and lyrics. That’s how I found Billy. He was the perfect ‘outsider’, much like Woody, sharing Woody’s values, politics, sense of humour, even on stage much like Woody. And he was willing to take the chance. Punk guys can be like that – they enjoy taking chances! It was an alternative idea that needed an alternative approach.
“Since then, I’ve got to know Bruce and love him lots. We’ve done some work together, and I’m sure somewhere down the line we’ll do one or two of these lyrics together.”
Nora hears Woody in the way Springsteen shows empathy for the people he writes about, nowhere more so than on Nebraska. “Both Woody and Bruce are compelled to write about people who usually don’t get much press coverage. Paris Hilton gets a lot of press, so we all know about her. But no one really gets to know much about anyone else – people that aren’t gorgeous, rich or on camera don’t get much coverage. And therefore, we don’t often get to hear what they think about, how they’re doing and so on.
“So Woody and Bruce both share a real love of writing about these ‘other’ people, because they want us to know something about them. And they want us to know something about them because maybe we’re like them in some way, or maybe we’ll think of something we can do to help them out. Or maybe we can learn from them in some way, or joke with them about something, or cry with them over something. It’s all about loving people, individually and collectively. That’s why they both write songs.
“At the bottom of the lyric, ‘This Land is Your Land’, Woody wrote: ‘All you can write is what you see.’ That’s exactly what Bruce does. He tells us what he’s looking at, how he feels about it and what he thinks about it. And that’s the Woody Guthrie school of songwriting, 101.”
Back to Woody, then. When we left him he was an integral part of New York’s counterculture decades before the sociologists coined the term. But that innate restlessness got the better of him again, a restlessness given impetus by his increasing disillusionment with the machinations of an industry intent on curbing freedom of speech.
“I got disgusted with the whole sissified and nervous rules of censorship on all my songs and ballads and drove off down the road across the southern states again,” was how he rationalised his decision to decamp with wife and kids to Portland, Oregon to go on the payroll of the Bonneville Power Authority, writing songs about the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam.
It wouldn’t be his last commission. Serving with the Merchant Marine and the Army during the Second World War, Woody was enlisted by the military to compose songs warning soldiers of the dangers of venereal disease.
In the late Forties, Woody’s behaviour was characterised by erratic mood swings and a tendency towards violence, as the Huntington’s that had destroyed his mother began affecting his body and mind. His debilitating condition was exacerbated by misdiagnoses, as he was treated for symptoms that suggested alcoholism and schizophrenia. Arrested on a vagrancy charge in New Jersey in 1954, Woody was admitted to the state’s Greystone Psychiatric Hospital where an accurate identification of the degenerative nerve disorder was finally provided.
The pilgrims came in their droves to pay homage to him, many of them – Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Phil Ochs – by this time helming the Sixties folk scene that revolved around Greenwich Village, the bohemian enclave of New York. Woody died on 3 October 1967 at Creedmoor State Hospital in the city’s Queens district.
His legacy is immense, his cultural proportions “as great…as those physically more imposing men such as the athletic Paul Robeson or the lanky Pete Seeger”, according to folk historian Robert Cantwell. In his essay, Fanfare For The Little Guy, Cantwell hails Woody as “essentially a poet and intellectual at a time when a nationalist embrace of grassroots imagery and expression, mixed up with an urban romantic conception of an heroic American people in whom one might detect the unquiet ghost of a revolutionary proletariat, had prepared a place for him, as Steinbeck observed, to be that People”.
He elaborates, “Guthrie was a westerner, out of the old Indian territories, with Scots-Irish – read ‘hillbilly’ – roots, and like his hillbilly-musician brethren he had a knack for the African American way of diddling a tune, especially that down-home, make-do, hip-pocket instrument the harmonica. Once converted to New York, however, the ‘clever little man’, the ‘bantam rooster’ as his friend Jimmy Longhi called him, the ‘real dustbowl refugee’ and ‘the great American frontier ballad writer’ could never again be seen in his mundane aspect, or even as a man with any history of his own; instead he would inevitably be woven into an essentially mythic web of a socialist heroic, replete with images and ideas of a glorified working people, of labour union triumphalism, wobbly millennialism and, especially out of this last, the still unsung frontier epic we seem to glimpse in Woody’s songs.”
When you navigate your way through Cantwell’s dense prose, what he’s getting at can be summarised thus: Woody was more than flesh and blood, he was the personification of a socially inclusive ideal, in which the little guy (and gal), as stakeholders in society, had access to the same rights, the same rewards as the big enchiladas. The tragedy of such an ideology, Cantwell concludes, is its elusiveness, especially in a world gone wrong, a world in which the power resides not with elected political representatives of the people, but with corporate wealth.
“Woody Guthrie embodies, not an eventual triumph over injustice and inequality, but the awful depth and tenacity of them in the human scheme; even as we thrill to his moral idealism and luminosity of his vision we feel, as a kind of instinct, with the example and the person of Guthrie before us, the impossibility of any realisation of them, or at the very least, the spectre of that impossibility, in a world that seems daily more inhospitable to his social and political vision.”
For Nora Guthrie, ascribing a legacy to Woody is problematic, a task for which she’s “not really qualified to answer”. But she has no doubt that “he’s given a lot of people courage, hope and even some ideas. He’s not the originator of any of these, but he was a wonderful communicator. He got you engaged. And he could make you feel strong, even when others told you that you weren’t. He could make you laugh at injustice, and therefore take away its power. Once that was broken down, you felt like you really could do something about it.
“His songs don’t have to keep his name alive – rather, they’re meant to keep ideas alive. So, I think he’s remembered for being an American philosopher, working the streets, back alleys, harbours, fields, train stops and bars, who taught consistently by writing songs and singing them to whoever would listen, to whoever was looking.” Seeger, meanwhile, continues to be, as Springsteen described him, “a walking, talking, singing reminder of America’s history”. Speaking at the folk grandee’s 90th birthday celebration in New York’s Madison Square Garden, Springsteen said, “He’d be a living archive of America’s music and conscience, a testament of the power of song and culture to nudge history along, to push American events towards more humane and justified ends. He would have the audacity and the courage to sing in the voice of the people.”
High praise indeed. And there’s more. “At 90, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of the country’s illusions about itself. Pete Seeger still sings all the verses all the time, and he reminds us of our immense failures, as well as shining a light towards our better angels in the horizon, where the country we’ve imagined and hold dear, we hope, awaits us.”
Springsteen could just as easily have been extolling the attributes of Woody Guthrie. For both he and Seeger sang all the verses all the time, both reminded us of our immense failures and both shone a light towards those better angels. And they did it through the medium of American folk music, taking it from the scholars and giving it back to the people. The folk song became their song, whatever that song was about.
As Guthrie himself asserted, “A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it, or it could be who’s hungry and where their mouth is, or who’s out of work and where the job is, or who’s broke and where the money is, or who’s carrying a gun and where the peace is.”
As the winds of radical change swept through America in the Sixties, a new generation of American folk music exponents took their cue from the Lomaxes and from Woody and Pete, reaching deep into the rich soil of the American past in a bid to help build an American future befitting a nation whose constitution declares itself to be the land of the free.