Tag Archives: Woody Guthrie

Ending On a Question

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Last Fourth of July weekend, I attended church with some family friends. After the service everyone gathered in back to sing some patriotic songs together. One of those songs, I remember, was “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie. I didn’t find anything curious about it at the time–the lyrics were fitting for the occasion. But then I learned when the song was written and what the original lyrics were. (Spoiler alert: We were not singing all the original lyrics.)

Post-1944 lyrics taken from the official website of Woody Guthrie

During the Great Depression, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” became an optimistic anthem for the hard times. In 1940, Woody Guthrie wrote “God Blessed America for Me”, with the phrase repeated at the end of each verse, in response to Berlin’s hit song.1 The lyrics were meant to capture a more accurate image of the United States, still celebrating the land but “without glossing over its imperfections or pretending that all in America were blessed equally.”2 The last couple verses were especially overt in their political protest, and–what I find most fascinating–the song ended on a question: “I stood there wondering, if God blessed America for me.”3

When Woody Guthrie changed the title to “This Land Is Your Land” in 1944, he altered the repeated lyric to “This land was made for you and me.”4 Thus, his message became a lot more inclusive. This turned the ending question into “I stood there asking, Is this land made for you and me?” However, in his 1947 recording, he left out the two protest verses but added another verse (“Nobody living can ever stop me…”). While previous versions have been very difficult to find, this is the version that has become most well-known.5

Despite the changes it has undergone, the lyrics of “This Land Is Your Land” still promote inclusivity–a land for you and me, where no one should be left out. The song was even adopted as a campaign song for the NAACP in the 1950s.6 Because Guthrie supported the Civil Rights Movement, I’m sure he would be proud to know his words were used in the fight for equal rights. On the other hand, his words have also been adopted by military bands, big corporations, and presidential campaigns for the purpose of eliciting patriotic sentiments.7 (I even sang it in a church around Independence Day.)

It’s incredible how one song, originally intended to question the ‘blessed’ nature of this country, has become known today as an optimistic, patriotic tune, alongside “God Bless America”. I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, but I do believe it is important to keep in mind what this song originally stood for and what it asks: was this land blessed for you and me?

1 “This Land is Your Land.” Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200000022/.

2 Galyean, Crystal. “‘This Machine Kills Fascists’: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie.” U.S. History Scene. http://ushistoryscene.com/article/woody-guthrie/.

3 Songs 1, Box 3, Folder 27, Woody Guthrie Archives, 250 West 57th Street, New York, N.Y.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

The Ever Changing Traditions of Folk Music

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Woody Guthrie was a folk song singer and writer known for his honest and captivating works. Guthrie is considered to be one of the most influential people in the folk genre. He collaborated artists like Pete Seeger, Jack Elliot, Alan Lomax, Lead Belly etc.  He was known for his headstrong views about the world and in particular how he could share his views through music. He was very much interested in the idea of representing folk music as a “democratic force” and advocated for its recognition and appreciation over pop music and other genres.

In his letter to Lomax and Seeger, Guthrie’s political and social views on folk music overwhelmingly permeate through his writing. This sample is taken from Judith Tick’s Made in the USA: A Documentary Companion.

“Every pop song sings down into your brain and it asks your brain to quit its very thinking…What they see wrong with the world and how to fix it up by hard work, hard fight, and hard sweat, long visioning and tall talking, mixed in with a hatful of salty sweating, good funny joshing, kidding, topping and friendly competition in the affairs of work, love, etc., etc.” ~Woody Guthrie

It was Guthrie’s romantic idealism of democracy and his passionate advocacy for the American people that made him so appealing. Because Guthrie was so invested in the folk tradition, I decided to explore just how influential he was in folk music. Guthrie worked and sang with different people, but also composed many songs in the folk tradition.

Guthrie influenced many artists in his career including Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. In the January 1969 issue of The Minority Report, the newspaper article “Ramblin’ Jack tops ’em all” by Mike Hitchcock praises the album Young Brigham. Hitchcock periodically mentions Guthrie throughout his article portraying him as an influential, mentor-like figure to Elliot.

“At the beginning of the sixties, he had distilled down the essence of Woody’s vocal and instrumental style, added a liberal dose of Jimmy Rodgers, a touch of Leadbelly and Jesse Fuller, and a little bit of every down-home guitar picker that ever picked into a style that was, and still is, at once completely traditional and yet uniquely personal” (Hitchcock,7).

Elliot’s music is typically categorized as country yet Guthrie’s style and music unexpectedly influenced not only “traditional” folk, but also a popular county/folk artist.

Another unexpected way in which Guthrie exerted influence in American music was though his song writing. One of his songs, So Long, was performed by Big Joe Turner, a soul jazz and blues artist. Though Guthrie and Turner did not collaborate, Guthrie’s songs clearly found their way into the world of jazz and blues. How can we explain the fact that a folk artist was so influential in not only traditional folk music, but also in other genres that are not as outwardly similar to folk? One way to explain this connection is to consider the very nature of folk music itself.  Because Guthrie was influential in jazz, blues, country and other folk genres, it shows that folk music was always changing and was never confined to specific musical idioms or attitudes that are associated with other genres. Folk music always varies whether that is geographically, over time, or through different styles of music.  It is an inherently changing tradition because of its communal aspect.  Both folk and jazz reflect an honest human experience, and for Guthrie, the ideal folk song did just that.

Works Cited:

Hitchcock, Mike. “Ramblin’ Jack Elliot Tops ‘Em All.” The Minority Report, 1 Jan. 1969, p. 7.

James Lincoln Collier. “Jazz (i).” The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed.. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed October 7, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/J223800.

Joe Turner: Have No Fear, Joe Turner Is Here. Recorded January 1, 1996. Pablo, 1996, Streaming Audio. Accessed October 10, 2017. http://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic.

Stetson Kennedy and Ronald D. Cohen. “Guthrie, Woody.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed October 7, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2241373.

Tick, Judith, and Beaudoin, Paul, eds. Music in the USA : A Documentary Companion. Cary: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008. Accessed October 7, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.

The folk music monarchy: Bob Dylan & Joan Baez

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Perhaps the biggest stars of the 1960’s Folk craze, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez captured audiences performing duets in addition to their successful solo careers. Their relationship is filled with ups and downs, each giving and taking from the other over the years. This tumultuous relationship may have its roots in their motivations for performing this music.

Concert Poster for Joan Baez and Bob Dylan

Concert Poster for Joan Baez and Bob Dylan1

At first sight, Dylan describes the first time he saw Baez singing on TV while he was still in Minnesota, “I couldn’t stop looking at her, didn’t want to blink. . . . The sight of her made me sigh. All that and then there was the voice. A voice that drove out bad spirits . . . she sang in a voice straight to God. . . . Nothing she did didn’t work.” 2 Unfortunately Joan didn’t reciprocate Dylan’s admiration for him. She recalls being unfazed by what she heard when she first saw Dylan perform in 1961 at Gerde’s Folk City (a popular venue for the Greenwich village folk music scene artists in the 1960’s).

Joan Baez is originally from Staten Island, NY. Her father Albert, co-invented the electronic microscope as well as published a Physics textbook still commonly used today. Because of her father’s work in health care and with UNESCO, the family moved many times, living in towns across the U.S, as well as in England, France, Switzerland, Spain, Canada, and Iraq. Joan became involved with a variety of social causes early in her career, especially civil rights and an advocate of non violence. “Social Justice”, Baez says, “is the true core of her life looming larger than music.”3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqaD9DAO0yQ

Joan Baez performing “Mary Hamilton” at the Newport Festival in 1960, one of her earliest performances.

In contrast, Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Hibbing, MN. Dylan began attending the University of Minnesota in 1959, only to drop out a year later and move to New York City to pay tribute to his idol, Woody Guthrie who had taken ill from Polio at the time. Dylan’s motivations for writing and performing folk music seem less rooted in social justice and more in its connection to the human spirit. At the 1965 Newport Festival Dylan walked on stage with an electric guitar in hand and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band backing him up. He was booed offstage after only three songs, at which point he returned with an acoustic guitar and a message for all the folk purists: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”4 Dylan was later quoted as saying he switched from Rock n Roll to Folk because “it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.”

Bob Dylan covering “This Land is Your Land” in Minneapolis in 1961 before moving to New York City to meet his idol, Woody Guthrie.

It seems that Baez felt a stronger connection with the movement surrounding the folk revival of the 1960’s, while Bob Dylan saw it as more of a form of political expression as much as a way to make his living and see his name in lights. Perhaps this difference was so decisive, that it ultimately caused their romantic as well as professional relationship to end?

1 Ehrenreich, B. (2001, May). Positively 4th street: The lives and times of joan baez, bob dylan, mimi baez farina and richard farina. Mother Jones, 26, 105. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/213812109?accountid=351

2 “Joan Baez: How Sweet The Sound.” American Masters. October 14, 2009. PBS. Retrieved March 7, 2015. 

3 “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum.” Bob Dylan Biography. January 1, 2015. Accessed March 9, 2015. https://rockhall.com/inductees/bob-dylan/bio/. Retrieved from Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975. http://www.rockandroll.amdigital.co.uk

2 “Joan Baez: How Sweet The Sound.” American Masters. October 14, 2009. PBS. Retrieved March 7, 2015. 

Woody Guthrie: Such a famous…. Writer?

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Woody Guthrie is an iconic folk singer and performer in American history.  Most famously known for his performances of “This Land is Your Land,” Guthrie traveled the United States through the 40’s and 50’s singing anything from traditional folk music to anti-fascist songs about Hitler.  However, I would guess that very few people would mention him as a prolific writer, or perhaps know that he wrote an autobiography (bonus points for those of you who did know).

Woody guthrie news clipping.

This newspaper clipping (the rest of the issue found here) comes from the Salt Lake Tribune in its May 30th, 1943 publication.  The author of the article, initialed E.B.M., writes a sort of review or advertisement for Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, his autobiography published earlier that year.  Acknowledging his musical prowess, she tries to draw the reader’s attention to “a book that will fascinate you, keep you awake at night.”  She even goes on to call it “another of the great stories of America.”  The autobiography itself details his life of travels through 44 of the United States.  It tells a sad story of Guthrie starting out on his own at the age of 12 when his mother was placed in an asylum.  Never resorting to begging, he painted signs or played music and sang for the money he earned.  His story claims that he was even a fortune-teller in Texas at one point.  E.B.M strongly points out Guthrie’s aversion to riches, quoting parts of his story when he ran away from his aunt (who led him out of the Texas dustbowl) after seeing her mansion, and how he left his $75 per week singing job in New York.

So why is this all important?  The answer to that question lies in the ideals of folk music.  As folk expert and Folkway Records founder Moses Asch explains, “folk means people, and this in turn means all of us, folk represents all of us.”1 This is what connects Woody Guthrie’s music, but also importantly his story, to the rest of us people.  Asch goes on to say that “folk expressions are…so identified with the people who use them that they express conscious and subconscious feelings and experiences.”2 Guthrie’s story is that of a common man’s identity in folk — the story of a young, poor, boy who finds his life in music.  Turning away (at least he claims) from fame and riches for the authenticity of folk ideals, his story can indeed represent all of us.  Even without fame or riches, we can tell our own story, a book “bound” with glory.

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Romanticizing the Struggle of the Common Man in Folk Music

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For black Americans in the 1930s and 40s, Jim Crow laws made it impossible to forget the color of their skin, even for celebrated musicians performing in upscale venues.  Lead Belly, discovered in a penitentiary, was no stranger to these racial prejudices.  In a trip to Washington DC in 1937 requested by Alan Lomax, Lead Belly wrote the song “Bourgeois Blues” in response to the unfair treatment he received.

Me and my wife went all over town
And everywhere we went people turned us down
Lord, in a bourgeois town
It’s a bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around …

I tell all the colored folks to listen to me
Don’t try to find you no home in Washington, DC
‘Cause it’s a bourgeois town
Uhm, the bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around

Prison compound in Louisiana, Lead Belly in front.

Prison compound in Louisiana, Lead Belly in front.

Although his life contained many of the hardships described in blues and folk songs, Lead Belly was never quite portrayed as a poor folksperson.  Instead, to gain the respect due his talent, he adopted a more professional persona, working extremely hard and finding passion in every aspect of life.  In an interview with PBS, Alan Lomax said that “he simply felt that he triumphed over everything”  (PBS).  In this, he left his early life in the penitentiary far behind.

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Huddie Ledbetter and Martha Promise Ledbetter. Wilton, Conn., Feb. 1935.

 

Woody Guthrie, on the other hand, tried to embody the folky image, but never achieved it fully.  He became a spokesperson for the hardships of ordinary Americans but due to his popularity was never a common man himself.  And, as a white American, his persona never needed the sort of professionalism that Huddie Ledbetter needed to adopt.

Woody with his guitar.

Woody with his guitar.

Alan Lomax, a champion of folk music and a believer in its romanticism, spent years recording both Ledbetter and Guthrie and championing their cause as remnants of true American voices.  Many Americans who listened to folk music idealized the singers as tortured souls moaning out their troubles.  But while Lead Belly and Guthrie experienced the sorrows of racial prejudice, the Great Depression, and dustbowl-era America, neither one completely represented the hardworking common man so heavily lauded in the work of the Lomaxes.  Their fame and status as alternative folk heroes lifted them way beyond the label of common man.  Instead the common man remains in his dusty home, toiling his hours away and singing folk songs to bring up his spirits.

Sources:

Lomax, Alan.  [Prison compound no. 1, Angola, Louisiana. Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) in the foreground].  Photograph.  Louisiana, 1934.  From Library of Congress: The Lomax Collection.  http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/lomax/item/2007660073/

Lomax, Alan.  Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) and Martha Promise Ledbetter, Wilton, Conn.  Photograph.  Connecticut, 1935.  From Library of Congress: The Lomax Collection.  http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/lomax/item/2007660385/

Aumuller, Al.  [Woody Guthrie, half-length portrait, facing slightly left, holding guitar].  1943.  From Library of Congress: Prints and Photographs Division.  http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95503348

So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh

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Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) was an American singer-songwriter whose folk music gave voice to people’s struggles and considered his songs as his weapon in the fight against injustice and hardship among many other things.

Woody Guthrie experienced enough tragedy and hard times to inspire thousands of songs. Alongside his passion to voice his own trials, Woody became a voice for more than just himself.

woody_guthrie

Wilson, Charles Banks. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.oksenate.gov/senate_artwork/images/artwork/woody_guthrie.jpg

He crisscrossed across America and made ends meet playing guitar and singing in saloons and work camps during the Great Depression. As he would follow his insatiable wanderlust, Guthrie would absorb certain ballads and styles of the folk style he heard on the road and would write song after song that reflected the struggles and good times of the ordinary people he would meet. Listeners responded immediately to Guthrie’s heartfelt, down-to-earth style.

In the mid-1930s, The Great Depression had already swept across the nation, and a drought had hit the plains of the United States. The prairie grasses had been over-plowed and the dust that collected would sometimes blot out the sun. From his experiences in the “Dust Bowl”,  Woody had realized the power that music had to capture the core of individuals and the events and places he understood.

Woody-Guthrie-Dust-Bowl-Ballads-495806

eli.com [Photograph] Retrieved from http://eil.com/images/main/Woody-Guthrie-Dust-Bowl-Ballads-495806.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“In thinking back about this time, he wrote, ‘there on the Texas plains right in the dead center of the dust bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen there was plenty to make up songs about.’” 1

Behind the simple song, a rich and complex personality that Guthrie instilled, still exudes. One of his first songs to reflect what he saw happening around him became one of his most famous songs. “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You”

1 Jackson, Mark. “Rambling Round: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie — Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song: Correspondence, 1940-1950 | Collections | Library of Congress.” Rambling Round: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie — Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song: Correspondence, 1940-1950. Library of Congress. Web. 2 Mar. 2015. <http://www.loc.gov/collections/woody-guthrie-correspondence-from-1940-to-1950/articles-and-essays/rambling-round-the-life-and-times-of-woody-guthrie/>.

Woody Guthrie’s Letters

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Letters from Woodie Guthrie to Alan Lomax on September 25, 1940 reveal many insights into the personal beliefs and character of Woodie Guthrie and help shed light into his music and philosophy behind it. As direct writing from the composer itself, it provides the least biased source available and gives Woodie Guthrie’s exact words, and a helpful context for them. Woodie Guthrie’s conviction of using music as politics can be seen in his writings here. He states that “if you see something thats wrong and needs to be fixed, and you get up and tell it just how you feel, that makes you a showman.”

He writes later that, “you cant entertain nobody unless you can do two things be yourself and forget yourself and imagine you’re helping everybody, cuss the ones that don’t like.”  you, by what you do.”

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His somewhat cynical view of politics comes out in another letter to the same recipient written a couple of months later. He writes that, “I am writing this [letter] on Christmas paper and I think all election speeches ought to be wrapped in gift boxes with a red and green string tied around them, and that a way we would be sure at least of a Christmas package whether there was anything in it or not.”  He desires to fix things and make the world a better place and states that his purpose in voting is to fix things, “and if I dont fix it by a voting one way, I’ll vote another way, and finally, I’ll find out the right way.”

These letters of Woodie Guthrie help shed light on his passion, philosophy, and music. And as primary source material, as well as Guthrie’s own words, they can be relied on quite strongly to gain insight into Guthrie’s understanding of his life and musical career.

sources:

http://www.loc.gov/resource/afc1940004.afc1940004_036/?sp=1&st=text

http://www.loc.gov/item/afcwwgbib000038/