Feb 28
I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built.I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work."
--Ramblin Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie, by Ed CrayMuch different than uplifting others, which permeated the work of Woody Guthrie, what infuses popular culture today is an almost sociopathic anger and meanness that runs people down, making them feel like crap, big or small; the bigger the target, the more caustic the criticism. Listen to 10 minutes of sports talk radio, when hosts, many of them failed athletes themselves, out of shape and short on skill, fill the airwaves bashing athletes for no other reason than, it sells advertising and makes money for the corporations that issue their paychecks. Journalism, or what passes for it often is nothing more than that same kind of bashing of others. Who benefits when people are rife with division?Of course, while Woody didn’t go out of his way to run people down, if a banker (or rich man, or sheriff) got in the way of his guitar, which aimed to kill Fascists, then so be it, however. He was selective with his invective. In his song, “Jesus Christ,” it’s clear that Guthrie, who didn’t self-identify as religious, recognized who Jesus was siding with based upon reading the gospels and it wasn’t the rich of his day, and wouldn’t be the rich of our day, either.As we celebrate the centennial of Guthrie’s birth this summer, sentiment about the singer is much tamer than it was when Guthrie headed west with his fellow Okies, penning paeans about his brethren, from a populist viewpoint. Critics of Guthrie enjoyed lobbing the term “communist” at Guthie. While he did write a column in the The Daily Worker, the national Communist daily, Guthrie was never a member of the party.
****
I was reminded of Guthrie’s music when I watched John Huston’s, The Grapes of Wrath, this past weekend. The movie ran on Turner Movie Classics on Oscar Sunday, an Oscar winner in its own day. I’d say that Huston’s movie is arguably one of Hollywood’s most affecting and most revered films ever made. Based upon John Steinbeck’s novel, published in 1939, the story centers on the Joads, a family of sharecroppers from Oklahoma, who are forced from their home due to the economic deprivation visited upon millions of Americans due to the conditions prevalent in the Dust Bowl during the 1930s.
These Dust Bowl conditions were caused by severe drought, damage to the soil by over-farming of the land and practices that caused the soil to dry and turn to dust. As a result, large swaths of formerly fertile farmland literally blew away, resulting in huge dark storm clouds filled with dirt that darkened the sky, reducing visibility to a few feet. These immense storms were given names such as “Black Blizzard” and “Black Rollers.” The storms rendered more than 100 million acres of crop land fallow and useless for agriculture, mainly centered in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, as well as adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colarado, and Kansas.
The Joads, along with countless other farmers across the region, were unable to farm and make a living. This caused loan defaults and being forced off the land where many families had been for generations. Seeing handbills being distributed about opportunities in California for pickers and other laborers, the Joads pooled their resources and loaded their belongings in the back of an old broken down Hudson truck, striking out for California, along with thousands of other “Okies.”Steinbeck set out to tell a certain story in writing his novel. He had done a series of articles, beginning first with “A Dubious Battle in California,” published in The Nation, and then, seven additional articles for the San Francisco News. These articles were later republished by a non-profit organization in a pamphlet entitled, Their Blood is Strong. Accompanied by Dorothea Lange photographs and his essay "Starvation Under the Orange Trees," originally intended to be published in Life magazine, these articles sold ten thousand copies--with the proceeds going to help the migrants.Like Guthrie’s music, Steinbeck’s novel endures, still considered one of the great American novels, mainly for its literary achievements--it captures the reader and holds them across its pages. At the time of its release, it also caused an uproar. While it soared to the top of best-seller lists, and won a Pulitzer in 1940, it also caused a political backlash from both sides of the political spectrum. Powerful California landowners fought to discredit the novel, going so far as to brand Steinbeck as a communist troublemaker. This label would stick for years. Then, others, mainly in Oklahoma, organized to censor and ban the novel for allegedly presenting a derogatory view of the migrants. It’s always been hard, portraying the cause of the working class in America. Anyone that does gets push back or worse, from powerful interests.Contemporary musicians continue to “discover” Guthrie’s music, well into the 21st century. What is it about this unassuming Okie that still resonates with young and old today? Back before music was more about marketing than moxie, Guthrie, alone, just playing an acoustic guitar, with a nasal delivery and uninflected twang, what someone once compared to “tires on hot asphalt, the midnight howl of a coyote, the rhythm of a train clacking across the plains,” captivated audiences across the U.S. Guthrie knew this rhythm from his days riding the rails, personified grit and verve.Just last week, I found out that another group of rockers, people like Centro-Matic’s Will Johnson, Yim Yames of My Morning Jacket, Jay Farrar from Son Volt (and formerly, Uncle Tupelo, a band that captured my attention in the mid-90s w/ their gritty working class sensibilities ala Guthrie) and Varnaline’s Anders Parker, have recorded an album featuring previously unrecorded Guthrie lyrics. Entitled New Multitudes, comprised of 12 interpretations on Guthrie compositions, most of them written during his time in Los Angeles. Guthrie’s daughter Nora, who sanctioned the project inidcated that “lyric wise, it’s a part of the story that is still mostly unknown. From Woody’s experiences on LA’s skid row to his later years in Topanga Canyon, they are uniquely intimate, and relate two distinctly emotional periods in his life.” Still capturing the attention of current day musicians, nearly 50 years after he’s been gone.As StudsTerkel wrote for the jacket of Cray’s book on Guthrie, “Woody Guthrie was, is, America’s balladeer. During the epoch of our deepest despair, the Great Depression, his were the songs that lifted the lowly spirits of the ‘ordinary,’ the millions of dispossessed. They may have lacked for bread, but he offered them something else: self-esteem, hope, and a laugh or two along the way....”The America of today is vastly different than the America of the 1930s that shaped Guthrie’s outlook and politics. Instead of crossing the country by rail, we’re more likely to fly, or zip by via America’s super highways. At the same time, bankers are still running roughshod over “ordinary people,” income disparity is at an all-time high, and the message of Jesus is still being co-opted by the very same people he came to challenge with a message that infused much of Guthrie’s lyrics.Maybe that’s why Guthrie’s still offering hope for us today, a century after he first entered a world of hurt, and brought some hope to it.
The timelessness of Tom Joad
There are some foundational ideas and sentiments that never fade completely from our country’s cultural consciousness. Despite attempts by demagogues,ideologues, and pro-business news corporations to whitewash America of any reference highlighting capitalism’s darker past, symbols live on, often in our literature, movies, and in our music.
The songs of Woody Guthrie continue to be picked up, dusted off, and reinterpreted. Since Guthrie left us in 1967, new artists and troubadours have stepped forward, taking up his populist mantle and songbook. His music, rooted in the dust and economic woes of America’s working class past carries forward an idea and an ethic that’s all too often lacking in our air-brushed popular entertainment and sanitized news media. When a young folk singer from Hibbing, Minnesota traveled to New York to spend a few days with the folk singer, dying of Huntington’s disease, a transfer of some kind occurred. Bob Dylan had been handed a copy of Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, by a college classmate. He became obsessed. Like all of us looking to an idol, young Dylan incorporated elements of Guthrie into his life and music, including mimicking his hero's speech patterns, once telling a crowd at the Cafe Wha? when he arrived in New York for the first time in January 1961, "I been travellin' around the country, followin' in Woody Guthrie's footsteps." A composition that Dylan wrote to Guthrie and played for him when he visited him at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, “Song for Woody,” appeared on his first album the following year.Beyond Dylan, Guthrie’s music undoubtedly influenced many folkies prominent during the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s like Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and of course, Guthrie’s own son, Arlo, channeling the sentiments and ideas of the elder Guthrie. Some of these sentiments can be seen here, in what Woody wrote about songwriting and his approach to songcraft."I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built.I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work."
--Ramblin Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie, by Ed CrayMuch different than uplifting others, which permeated the work of Woody Guthrie, what infuses popular culture today is an almost sociopathic anger and meanness that runs people down, making them feel like crap, big or small; the bigger the target, the more caustic the criticism. Listen to 10 minutes of sports talk radio, when hosts, many of them failed athletes themselves, out of shape and short on skill, fill the airwaves bashing athletes for no other reason than, it sells advertising and makes money for the corporations that issue their paychecks. Journalism, or what passes for it often is nothing more than that same kind of bashing of others. Who benefits when people are rife with division?Of course, while Woody didn’t go out of his way to run people down, if a banker (or rich man, or sheriff) got in the way of his guitar, which aimed to kill Fascists, then so be it, however. He was selective with his invective. In his song, “Jesus Christ,” it’s clear that Guthrie, who didn’t self-identify as religious, recognized who Jesus was siding with based upon reading the gospels and it wasn’t the rich of his day, and wouldn’t be the rich of our day, either.As we celebrate the centennial of Guthrie’s birth this summer, sentiment about the singer is much tamer than it was when Guthrie headed west with his fellow Okies, penning paeans about his brethren, from a populist viewpoint. Critics of Guthrie enjoyed lobbing the term “communist” at Guthie. While he did write a column in the The Daily Worker, the national Communist daily, Guthrie was never a member of the party.
****
I was reminded of Guthrie’s music when I watched John Huston’s, The Grapes of Wrath, this past weekend. The movie ran on Turner Movie Classics on Oscar Sunday, an Oscar winner in its own day. I’d say that Huston’s movie is arguably one of Hollywood’s most affecting and most revered films ever made. Based upon John Steinbeck’s novel, published in 1939, the story centers on the Joads, a family of sharecroppers from Oklahoma, who are forced from their home due to the economic deprivation visited upon millions of Americans due to the conditions prevalent in the Dust Bowl during the 1930s.
These Dust Bowl conditions were caused by severe drought, damage to the soil by over-farming of the land and practices that caused the soil to dry and turn to dust. As a result, large swaths of formerly fertile farmland literally blew away, resulting in huge dark storm clouds filled with dirt that darkened the sky, reducing visibility to a few feet. These immense storms were given names such as “Black Blizzard” and “Black Rollers.” The storms rendered more than 100 million acres of crop land fallow and useless for agriculture, mainly centered in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, as well as adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colarado, and Kansas.
The Joads, along with countless other farmers across the region, were unable to farm and make a living. This caused loan defaults and being forced off the land where many families had been for generations. Seeing handbills being distributed about opportunities in California for pickers and other laborers, the Joads pooled their resources and loaded their belongings in the back of an old broken down Hudson truck, striking out for California, along with thousands of other “Okies.”Steinbeck set out to tell a certain story in writing his novel. He had done a series of articles, beginning first with “A Dubious Battle in California,” published in The Nation, and then, seven additional articles for the San Francisco News. These articles were later republished by a non-profit organization in a pamphlet entitled, Their Blood is Strong. Accompanied by Dorothea Lange photographs and his essay "Starvation Under the Orange Trees," originally intended to be published in Life magazine, these articles sold ten thousand copies--with the proceeds going to help the migrants.Like Guthrie’s music, Steinbeck’s novel endures, still considered one of the great American novels, mainly for its literary achievements--it captures the reader and holds them across its pages. At the time of its release, it also caused an uproar. While it soared to the top of best-seller lists, and won a Pulitzer in 1940, it also caused a political backlash from both sides of the political spectrum. Powerful California landowners fought to discredit the novel, going so far as to brand Steinbeck as a communist troublemaker. This label would stick for years. Then, others, mainly in Oklahoma, organized to censor and ban the novel for allegedly presenting a derogatory view of the migrants. It’s always been hard, portraying the cause of the working class in America. Anyone that does gets push back or worse, from powerful interests.Contemporary musicians continue to “discover” Guthrie’s music, well into the 21st century. What is it about this unassuming Okie that still resonates with young and old today? Back before music was more about marketing than moxie, Guthrie, alone, just playing an acoustic guitar, with a nasal delivery and uninflected twang, what someone once compared to “tires on hot asphalt, the midnight howl of a coyote, the rhythm of a train clacking across the plains,” captivated audiences across the U.S. Guthrie knew this rhythm from his days riding the rails, personified grit and verve.Just last week, I found out that another group of rockers, people like Centro-Matic’s Will Johnson, Yim Yames of My Morning Jacket, Jay Farrar from Son Volt (and formerly, Uncle Tupelo, a band that captured my attention in the mid-90s w/ their gritty working class sensibilities ala Guthrie) and Varnaline’s Anders Parker, have recorded an album featuring previously unrecorded Guthrie lyrics. Entitled New Multitudes, comprised of 12 interpretations on Guthrie compositions, most of them written during his time in Los Angeles. Guthrie’s daughter Nora, who sanctioned the project inidcated that “lyric wise, it’s a part of the story that is still mostly unknown. From Woody’s experiences on LA’s skid row to his later years in Topanga Canyon, they are uniquely intimate, and relate two distinctly emotional periods in his life.” Still capturing the attention of current day musicians, nearly 50 years after he’s been gone.As StudsTerkel wrote for the jacket of Cray’s book on Guthrie, “Woody Guthrie was, is, America’s balladeer. During the epoch of our deepest despair, the Great Depression, his were the songs that lifted the lowly spirits of the ‘ordinary,’ the millions of dispossessed. They may have lacked for bread, but he offered them something else: self-esteem, hope, and a laugh or two along the way....”The America of today is vastly different than the America of the 1930s that shaped Guthrie’s outlook and politics. Instead of crossing the country by rail, we’re more likely to fly, or zip by via America’s super highways. At the same time, bankers are still running roughshod over “ordinary people,” income disparity is at an all-time high, and the message of Jesus is still being co-opted by the very same people he came to challenge with a message that infused much of Guthrie’s lyrics.Maybe that’s why Guthrie’s still offering hope for us today, a century after he first entered a world of hurt, and brought some hope to it.
