hen Woody Guthrie arrived in New York City in 1940, he called himself “The Dustiest of the Dust Bowlers.”
It was an enticing moniker for the urbane crowd that had gathered at the Forrest Theatre at West Forty-Ninth Street on March 3 for “A ‘Grapes of Wrath’ Evening.” While the devastating drought that was turning farmland to dust across the nation had been going on for ten years by then, Steinbeck’s novel had renewed interest in the farmers’ plight. The crowd knew that proceeds from the event would go to helping the dispossessed farmers thousands of miles away.
Now, here before them was a man who seemed to have been blown straight off the pages of Steinbeck’s book, all the way across the Great Plains until he came to rest there on the stage, a guitar in his hand and homespun ballads on his lips.
The Woody Guthrie onstage at the Forrest Theatre was a folksinger in the purest sense, a character of the American vernacular. In the tradition he was faithfully carrying on, the term “singer” was used broadly, since the performer was likely to talk as much as he sang. What the slight and diminutive folksinger represented was a living piece of western folklore—a road-traveling Dust Bowler, just passing through.
But he was much more than a caricature of a dusty migrant. There was depth to his act. The mixing of message through ballads and stories was immediately memorable to the crowd—and he certainly knew how to put on a show. In that sense, what Woody was doing was “telling you something you already knew,” which would be his calling card for many years to come.
Flyer for Steinbeck benefit concert at the Forrest Theatre in New York City, 1940
He wore a five-gallon Stetson pressed down over his wild thatch of curly hair, a work shirt on his back, and blue jeans over his boots. He needed a shave but gave no hint of feeling out of place in front of the small crowd of well-heeled easterners.
Considering the regional nature of music and culture in 1940, to attend this concert and witness an unheard-of “Okie” ballad maker from a faraway place must have been exotic, to say the least, for the New York crowd.
Of course, there was plenty of showmanship involved in Guthrie’s stage presence—he had never worked on a farm; he had really never labored at all. Still, he knew what he was talking about, and he perfectly channeled the mood of the nation: down but not out, laughing to keep from crying. He told the crowd that he had relatives under every bridge in California and earned a good chuckle with his gee-whiz take on New York City.
“New York sure is a funny place,” Guthrie drawled out at one point. “The buildings are so high the sun don’t come out until one thirty in the afternoon, and then it’s visible for seven minutes between the Empire State Building and the shoe sign over there.”
“It was an act, obviously, but it felt so fantastically real,” singer and composer Earl Robinson recalled of the performance.
When Woody got to singing, it was a combination of old cowboy songs from Oklahoma and Texas and new songs he’d written about the Dust Bowl and the plight of workers in California.
The crowd was enthralled.
“It was terribly understated,” Robinson said. “It didn’t look like much. But he made you look twice.”
Also on the bill that night at the Forrest Theatre were a host of racially mixed singers and players who later came to have their own place as vital chroniclers of the American experience. There was Lead Belly, the Louisiana blues singer; Aunt Molly Jackson, just off the labor lines in Kentucky coal country; the gospel group the Golden Gate Quartet; and new blues singer Josh White.
And in Woody Guthrie, they had a Dust Bowl refugee, ready to regale them with stories of life at the very center of the American Great Depression.
In New York in 1940, there was widespread interest in folk music in the intellectual and academic scene. Political liberals and social progressives wanted to know more about this vernacular music from the invisible pockets of otherwise unpublicized places. The urbanites’ world view was getting bigger as interest in rural traditional voices grew via the new documents of “the people’s idiom”—in film, literature, photographs, and songs.
The Forrest Theatre concert was a demonstration of the oral tradition—that musical phenomenon in which songs have been transmitted from one generation to another for hundreds of years. From the Old World to the New World, traditional songs have traveled the so-called “carrying stream” to find new interpreters and new adaptations in a shared community over and over again.
Before radio and recording technology, songs were passed from person to person for many years until they were eventually written down. Song manuscripts were sold on street corners in old England as a way of telling the news, often as parody. These “broadsides” evolved into songbooks that popularized folk songs—often citing a known melody in which to sing. This is how people shared songs.
When new American immigrants settled in specific mountain valleys, rural stretches of plains, and southern plantations, the songs went with them and thus music became highly regionalized, both in style and subject matter. And this led naturally to adaptation as songs passed through the hands of successive generations. Like all stories, each person who touches it puts his or her own stamp on it. This has become known as the “folk process.”
But by the 1930s, radio was having an effect on young performers. More and more talented musicians coming from the country seemed intent on styling themselves after Jimmie Rodgers, the yodeling cowboy singer, rather than people they grew up with. For not the last time in its history, folk music was considered at risk of becoming an academic exercise, something preserved only by oddball collectors, rather than a true reflection of the culture of the American working class.
Aunt Harriett at the microphone with John A. Lomax Sr. near Sumterville, Alabama
Eastern academics and music collectors had thought the tradition was dying out in the 1930s, that authentic American voices could not survive the onset of mass media. Indeed, the federal government created an initiative to send archivists across the country to record regional music before it completely vanished. What they found, though, was an amazing wealth of vernacular music, representing real, unrecognized Americans in a variety of rural places.
By the time Woody Guthrie took the stage in New York, fears that folk music would soon be completely dead had eased. Still, students of folk music were uneasy about the state of the people’s music. Big bands, swing, and Hollywood cowboy singers were getting all the play.
The exoticness and uniqueness of the rural performers on the Forrest Theatre stage partly explains why a crowd had come out in the first place. They were hoping that their patronage could keep the folk tradition alive.
What was happening in New York was the emergence of a folk revival; it would fully blossom later, in the 1950s and early ’60s, with a new generation of musicians who would find American vernacular music exotic and fresh. Just like the crowd at the Forrest Theatre that March evening, they were looking for the true unfiltered sound of real people.
Will Geer’s CBS promotional photo, 1940
The folk revival of the 1930s was heavily influenced by politics. Academics felt that folk music could imbue the working class with a pride that popular music could not, and raise broader awareness of the social injustice faced by poor people across the country. The labor movement, the preeminent liberal cause of the prewar years, was carried out to a soundtrack of folk songs.
Woody, no country rube, was keenly aware of the political weight music carried at the time, evidenced by a song he started in February 1940 while living in a run-down hotel near Times Square. With war seemingly on the horizon, there had been a revival of patriotic songs, among them Irving Berlin’s 1918 anthem “God Bless America.” Guthrie found the song to epitomize a conservative mind-set that turned America into something sacred and not to be meddled with. Music should inspire people to take control of their lives, Guthrie thought, and demand what’s rightfully theirs. Sitting there in New York, he wrote five stanzas to a song with the refrain “God blessed America for me.” Only four years later did he change that line to “This land was made for you and me.”
The concert at the Forrest Theatre had been organized by Guthrie’s communist friend Will Geer, who was staging the benefit on a dark night of Tobacco Road, a play in which he was starring. The crowd was primarily influential leftist thinkers, fellow travelers, and those who saw folk music as expression for a new, reformed America.
Alan Lomax’s publicity photo for Mutual Radio’s Your Ballad Man, 1948
And at the center of all this, and the ultimate spark for this folk revival, was Alan Lomax. His twenty-year-old intern at the Archive of American Folk Song, Pete Seeger,* also performed (a rather shaky version of “John Hardy”).
Alan, twenty-five, was the son of John Lomax, a former college professor who grew up in Texas and was one of the first archivists employed by the federal government; he is credited with discovering and publicizing the cowboy song “Home on the Range.” Pete was the son of Charles Seeger, a musicologist and the person most credited for advancing the theory of folk process.
These two families, with their second-generation folklorist sons—enthusiasts, collectors, and players themselves—ultimately proved to be the figureheads of a movement that defined and shaped the popularity of folk music as a commercial genre in the twentieth century.
Along with other central figures like Moe Asch, the founder of Folkways Records, the pillars of a folk revival were in place when Woody came blowin’ down that dusty road for his second-ever performance in New York City, onstage with the Martin guitar he’d indefinitely borrowed from Geer’s wife.
By all accounts, Lomax’s first experience hearing Woody Guthrie sing was nearly a religious one. His immediate impression was that Guthrie was a reincarnation of Will Rogers, the political humorist—also from Oklahoma—who’d died in a plane crash in Alaska five years earlier. Just like Rogers, Guthrie could spin simple yarns about simple folk, running his hand through his hair the whole time, and make it all sound profound.
But on a larger scale, Guthrie struck Lomax as the rare folksinger who was actually writing new ballads. For a miner of folk traditions like Lomax, Woody onstage represented a mother lode of material that Lomax felt he had to get on tape. Lomax seemed aware that Guthrie was in part an act. But he found him to be authentic enough. The ballads Guthrie was writing were good enough “to fool a folklore expert,” he said.
Alan Lomax would have known. He was eighteen when his father was brought on by the Library of Congress as an archivist of folk music. John Lomax brought his son along on his first folksong-gathering expedition, during which they traveled across Texas collecting music. They visited farms, prisons, and small towns, asking people to share their music with the archive. That expedition was the first of countless for Alan Lomax, who in 1937 was officially hired by the federal government as the Archive of American Folk Song’s assistant in charge and soon thereafter was recognized as the preeminent collector of American folk music. The Lomaxes eventually collected more than ten thousand sound recordings. Along with Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie, they recorded artists including Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton, and Big Bill Broonzy.
Young as he was, Alan Lomax was already a strong-headed, opinionated, and forceful man. Henrietta Yurchenco, a fellow collector of folk music, described his personality in choice terms: “Alan had the most colossal ego I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Needless to say, he wasn’t shy about approaching Guthrie backstage after the Forrest Theatre concert. It would be wrong to say that the two couldn’t be more different—Lomax had been born and raised in Texas, only later moving to Washington, DC, to work for the government. Still, the two men weren’t exactly cut from the same cloth. In publicity photos from the time, Lomax appeared clean-cut in a suit, his black hair combed over with a neat part; Guthrie reveled in looking like he just got off the road. Lomax was forward to the point of being brash; Guthrie feigned shyness. Lomax prided himself on being an intellectual; Guthrie rarely admitted to reading a book (the key word being “admitted”).
Lomax later recalled that Woody seemed a bit put off when he first introduced himself, that Woody was “somewhat skeptical” of the urbane folk enthusiast. But he managed to talk him into playing him a few more songs backstage—among them, a ballad he’d written about the outlaw Pretty Boy Floyd.
If Woody was an anachronism in his role as folk balladeer, Floyd was a throwback of another type, a Robin Hood criminal from the hard-hit Oklahoma farmlands. Floyd was a bank robber by trade, but he gained the sympathy of farmers by donating food to the poor and destroying mortgage documents in the banks he robbed, thus freeing countless families from their debts. Repeating the lore he heard in the Oklahoma countryside, Guthrie also contended that Floyd didn’t rob nearly as many banks as he was accused of, that banks about to go bust anyway claimed Floyd had robbed them in order to have an excuse. Floyd was a classic folk hero—“Pretty Boy Floyd is sung about on more lips and more mouths, and thought better of in more hearts, and is all around more popular than any governor Oklahoma has ever had,” Guthrie once said—and Woody Guthrie was Floyd’s troubadour.
If Lomax had any doubt about Guthrie’s bona fides as a folksinger before hearing the ballad “Pretty Boy Floyd,” he didn’t any longer. As Guthrie biographer Ed Cray notes, the song to Lomax hit all the right notes; it was “a protest song,” yet “a subtle, even sly protest song, that sprang from working class roots.”
In Woody Guthrie, Lomax “found the kind of everyman he was looking for, who was a seasoned musician and also was close enough of the folk that he could pass for it,” said Todd Harvey, curator of the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center. “That was really good for Alan.”
Lomax soon won Woody over, convincing him to be a guest on his national radio show and to record some of his songs for the Library of Congress archives.
A week later Woody was in Washington, DC, staying with Lomax and his wife.
Always the performer, Woody poured on his country-folk ways during that first visit to “Warshington,” even at the Lomaxes’ home. His hosts recalled that he ate over the sink and refused to sleep on a feather mattress—“I’m a road man. I don’t want to get soft,” he said. He also played folk records continuously and refused to take off his boots.
He was a tiresome houseguest, but Lomax didn’t wane in his enthusiasm for the singer. Woody must have felt almost like a zoo animal as he was paraded around to other New Deal folklorists in Washington, including John Lomax, Benjamin Botkin, and Charles Seeger.
On March 21, 1940, Woody Guthrie sat down for his first recording session with Lomax in the Department of Interior’s studios. They recorded for three days, and the collection represents the first professional* recordings of Woody Guthrie music.
Lomax styled his recordings as more of a chat with Woody Guthrie than a straightforward song-recording session. Says Nathan Salsburg, curator of the Alan Lomax archive, “Lomax frequently devoted space after performances during his field-recording sessions for brief interviews with the singers about where and how long ago they’d learned the song, who the source singer was, how long they played such and such instrument, etc. The Woody sessions were very much inspired by the long musical oral history sessions he’d conducted (previously) with Jelly Roll Morton and Aunt Molly Jackson.”
The speaking interludes last longer than the songs, with Lomax practically gushing about the new friend he knew so little about, even his age. “Woody Guthrie is, I guess, about thirty years old from the looks of him, but he’s seen more in those thirty years than most men see before they’re seventy,” Lomax says on the recordings. (Woody was actually twenty-seven.) “He hasn’t sat in a warm house or a warm office. He’s interested in looking out. He’s gone into the world, and he’s looked at the faces of hungry men and women.”
The recordings are amazingly personal. With a tight throat, he shared that his sister had died after catching on fire, his mother had died in an insane asylum, and his father was severely burned in another mishap. Earlier in the session, Lomax had offhandedly said he wished he’d had the experiences Woody had had, so he could sing folk songs like him. This emotional interlude must have suggested to him otherwise: Woody’s music was forged in a hot kiln of terrible hardship.
They wrapped up recording on March 27 and then headed back to New York. Woody’s amazing run in the big city wasn’t over—it had barely even started. On April 2, he was a guest on Lomax’s educational radio show, American School of the Air, on CBS. He was paid $200 for that first appearance on national radio. On April 21, he was a guest on another national radio program, called The Pursuit of Happiness. In an introduction that slightly twisted the truth of Woody’s origin, host Burgess Meredith told listeners that Woody was “one of those Okies who, dispossessed from their farms, journeyed in jalopies to California.… Not long ago, he set out for New York and rode the freights to get here.”
Soon, Guthrie was the toast of many far-left American commentators, who saw him as the human manifestation of their homegrown socialist dream.
“Sing it, Woody, sing it! Karl Marx wrote it, and Lincoln said it, and Lenin did it. Sing it, Woody, and we’ll all laugh together,” wrote a columnist for the People’s Daily World. Another wrote that Guthrie was “the most sparkling philosopher that ever hit the Grapes of Wrath trail.”
Indeed, his identity was tightly intertwined with Steinbeck’s work. And it was that April that Woody wrote the ballad “Tom Joad,” which puts the story of Grapes of Wrath to verse and remains one of his most enduring songs. Even Steinbeck was an admirer. “That fuckin’ little bastard, in seventeen verses he got the entire story of a thing that took me two years to write!” Steinbeck is said to have quipped about the song.
That same month, with the help of Lomax, Guthrie got a one-record contract with Victor Records, the company that cut the second recording of his life, resulting in his first commercial release called Dust Bowl Ballads. He got paid $400 or $300 (Woody wavered on the figure) and 5 percent royalties.
The record came out in July to critical praise but poor sales, the bane of countless other folksingers who followed Guthrie. Again, it was Guthrie’s depiction of the hard-hit that caught the critics’ attention. One critic said the album showed “that life as some of our unfortunates know it can be mirrored on the glistening disks.”
Dust Bowl Ballads album cover, Victor Records, 1940
The poor sales were a drop of failure in a flash flood of success. Woody had taken a road trip down to Texas to see Mary and the children in June, and upon his return he was booked solid with performances. He was also getting on the radio more often. Radio producers weren’t immune to the fever for folk music that was sweeping the city, and advertisers weren’t ignorant of the sales potential that homespun performers could have for their products. Lomax, looking to move on from his educational programming to a more serious presentation of folk music, convinced CBS in August to try out a half-hour program he’d been developing called Back Where I Come From, and Woody was paid eighty-three dollars to be part of the pilot. CBS executives liked it enough to continue on, and Woody was signed on as a regular contributor.
Then came the ill-fated deal with Model Tobacco. From the distance of more than seventy-five years, it’s easy to trace the fatal trajectory of Woody Guthrie’s first run in New York, as it tells such a common story of art versus commerce. But at the time, the money was just too good to pass up for the Guthrie family. Woody said the salary offered by Model “beats owning six farms in Oklahoma” and that he wasn’t out to rock any boats with his newfound radio platform.
“It means so much not only to me but to my friends and relatives that I’ll be able to help,” he wrote Lomax after getting the deal. His wife and three kids were “feeling pretty good for the first time in a long time … down there in the dust bowl.… If I thought for two minutes that anything I do or say would hurt America and the people in it I would keep my face shut and catch the first freight out of the country.”
Guthrie was referring to whispers that had been going around New York—mostly in letters to the editor responding to the positive press he’d been receiving—saying that he was anti-American on account of his politics. It was a prelude to the more serious red-baiting that would affect him, Lomax, and many others after World War II, but at the time it was more of an annoyance than anything else. Indeed, that someone like Guthrie, who had known associations with communists, could get a national radio program shows how much attitudes toward such matters had changed by the time the winds of the Cold War started to brew and Senator Joseph McCarthy entered the scene some eight years later. Still, it showed the pressure Guthrie was under to toe the line, even in the early ’40s, if he wanted to make a living from his art. Ultimately, it wasn’t saying something controversial but not saying anything that had Guthrie catching a proverbial freight train out of town, he and his family heading back West almost as quickly as they’d left.
For most of his run in New York, Mary and the kids had stayed in Pampa with relatives. But when he got the hosting gig, he sent Mary train fare and told them to make their way to the city. Woody rented an apartment and threw a party for his newly arrived wife that lasted days. Mary was suddenly wealthy enough to keep a few hundred dollars on her at all times.
But the constant artistic oversight Guthrie was subjected to proved too much for him, and he quietly put in his notice at Pipe Smoking Time.
“He just walked away,” his son Arlo—who wasn’t born for another seven years—said of this chapter in his father’s life. “I mean, here was a guy who had basically nothing, who was offered a nationwide radio broadcast, and as soon as he was told that he would have to write the kind of songs approved by other people, he was out of there like that.”
The family’s first stop was Washington, DC, where they visited the Lomaxes and Woody sat for a second recording session for the Library of Congress. Then it was on to Los Angeles for their ultimate winter of discontent.
It seems Woody had some remorse for his impulsive decision to split New York City just as things were going so well. Facing unemployment in Los Angeles, he wrote some letters to his old colleagues, sniffing around about getting his spot back on Back Where I Come From. But by that time CBS had apparently given up on its project of bringing authentic folk music to the airwaves.
Writing to Lomax from California in February 1941, Woody offered his condolences. He saw it as just another sign that no one really wanted to hear the truth about what Americans actually think.
“I’m sorry as hell to hear that Back Where I Come From is kicked off of the air,” he wrote. “Too honest again I suppose? Maybe not purty enough. Oh well, this country’s a getting to where it caint hear its own voice.”
*Pete Seeger was exposed to traditional music and folklore through the involvement of his father, Charles Seeger, with the Resettlement/Farm Security Administration’s music projects in the 1930s, including folk festivals where he first heard the banjo. By 1939, he had dropped out of Harvard and taken a job in Washington, DC, assisting Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Seeger’s job was to help Lomax sift through commercial “race” and “hillbilly” music, and select recordings that best represented American folk music. He has often been called the archive’s first intern.
*The Library of Congress recordings were eventually released commercially in 1967. Guthrie’s first-ever recordings, however, were done at the radio station KFVD in Los Angeles in 1937 and 1939. These 78 rpm “air-checks” were recently discovered by Peter LaChapelle and are housed in Southern California’s Library of Social Studies and Research.
“Pastures of Plenty” by Woody Guthrie. WGP/TRO – © 1960 and 1963 (copyrights renewed) Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY (administered by Ludlow Music, Inc.)
