Bound for Local Glory at Last

By PATRICIA COHEN

New York Times: December 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/arts/music/woody-guthrie-gets-a-belated-honor-in-oklahoma.html?_r=1&src=dayp

TULSA, Okla. — Oklahoma has always had a troubled
relationship with her native son Woody Guthrie. The
communist sympathies of America’s balladeer infuriated
local detractors. In 1999 a wealthy donor’s objections
forced the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City to cancel a
planned exhibition on Guthrie organized by the Smithsonian
Institution. It wasn’t until 2006, nearly four decades
after his death, that the Oklahoma Hall of Fame got around
to adding him to its ranks.

But as places from California to the New York island get
ready to celebrate the centennial of Guthrie’s birth, in
2012, Oklahoma is finally ready to welcome him home. The
George Kaiser Family Foundation in Tulsa plans to announce
this week that it is buying the Guthrie archives from his
children and building an exhibition and study center to
honor his legacy.

“Oklahoma was like his mother,” said his daughter Nora
Guthrie, throwing back her tangle of gray curls as she
reached out in an embrace. “Now he’s back in his mother’s
arms.”

A watercolor and a typed lyric sheet in a 1952 notebook,
part of a rich trove of personal material that makes up
the Guthrie archives.

The archive includes the astonishing creative output of
Guthrie during his 55 years. There are scores of notebooks
and diaries written in his precise handwriting and
illustrated with cartoons, watercolors, stickers and
clippings; hundreds of letters; 581 artworks; a half-dozen
scrapbooks; unpublished short stories, novels and essays;
as well as the lyrics to the 3,000 or more songs he
scribbled on scraps of paper, gift wrap, napkins, paper
bags and place mats. Much of the material has rarely or
never been seen in public, including the lyrics to most of
the songs. Guthrie could not write musical notation, so
the melodies have been lost.

The foundation, which paid $3 million for the archives, is
planning a kickoff celebration on March 10, with a
conference in conjunction with the University of Tulsa and
a concert sponsored by the Grammy Museum featuring his son
Arlo Guthrie and other musicians. Although the collection
won’t be transferred until 2013, preparations for its
arrival are already in motion. Construction workers are
clearing out piles of red brick and wire mesh from the
loading dock in the northeast end of the old Tulsa Paper
Company building, in the Brady District of the city, where
the planned Guthrie Center is taking shape. The center is
part of an ambitious plan to revitalize the downtown arts
community.

Now that the back walls are punched out, workers trucking
wheelbarrows of concrete can look across the tracks to the
tower built by BOK Financial, which George Kaiser, whose
foundation bears his name, presides over as chairman.
Forbes magazine ranks Mr. Kaiser as the richest man in
Oklahoma and No. 31 on its Forbes 400 list.

Ken Levit, the foundation’s executive director, said he
thought of doing something for Guthrie after the Hall of
Fame induction. Nowhere in Tulsa, he said, is there even a
plaque paying homage to this folk legend, who composed
“This Land Is Your Land”; performed with Peter Seeger and
Lead Belly; wrote the fictionalized autobiography “Bound
for Glory”; and sang at countless strikes and migrant
labor protests in the 1930s and ’40s. Mr. Levit began a
more than three-year campaign to win the consent of Ms.
Guthrie, who had taken custody of the boxes that her
mother, Marjorie Guthrie, had stowed away in the basement
of her home in Howard Beach, Queens.

Ms. Guthrie, who as one of Guthrie’s youngest children,
didn’t really know her father until Huntington’s disease
began to rob him of his sanity, movement and speech many
years before his death, in 1967, said she only
rediscovered the kind of man he once was when she started
to page through the boxes about 15 years ago.

“I fell in love through this material with my father,” Ms.
Guthrie, 61, a former dancer, said from her office in
Mount Kisco, N.Y.

Her older brothers Arlo and Joady were happy to have her
take custody of the papers. Of Arlo, she said, “He was
filled up with being Woody Guthrie’s son, so he was glad
the responsibility moved to me.”

She said the information contained in the archives can
clear up misconceptions about her father that she has
frequently heard at scholarly conferences and read in
articles, including that he didn’t write love songs or
sexually provocative lyrics. She has also opened up his
notebooks to contemporary musicians like Billy Bragg and
Wilco, Jackson Browne, Rob Wasserman, Lou Reed and Tom
Morello so that they could compose music to her father’s
words.

One of those artists, Jonatha Brooke, is starting off the
Guthrie Foundation and Grammy Museum’s yearlong centennial
celebrations on Jan. 18 at Lincoln Center with a concert
of new songs she wrote for the lyrics.

Woody Guthrie’s music has also had added play time this
year as Arlo Guthrie, Mr. Seeger, and other musicians have
sung his protest songs at Occupy Wall Street
demonstrations in New York and elsewhere.

While this poor folks’ hero and the richest man in
Oklahoma might not seem to have much in common, Mr.
Kaiser’s foundation, with its $4 billion endowment, is
dedicated to helping Tulsa’s most disadvantaged. “I cried
for an hour after meeting George Kaiser,” Ms. Guthrie
said. “This puts together what I’ve always dreamed of.”

Brian Hosmer, a history professor at the University of
Tulsa who is organizing the March conference — ironically
titled “Different Shades of Red” — said Guthrie’s legacy
is contested in some quarters.

Guthrie's hometown, Okemah, Okla., did not honor him until
lately: today the town has a statue, above, and an annual
festival.

The festival includes performances at the Crystal theater.

An old paper company building in Tulsa is being made into
a Woody Guthrie archives and study center.

“There is no doubt there will be some voices in opposition
to the way Guthrie is being emphasized — Oklahoma is about
the reddest state you can have,” Mr. Hosmer explained,
referring to its conservatism. “And when Woody Guthrie was
a boy, Oklahoma was also the reddest state because we had
more socialists elected to public office than any other.”

Guthrie always said he was influenced by the songs he had
heard his mother sing in his hometown, Okemah, about an
hour’s drive from Tulsa, with a population of 3,000. His
radicalism offended local officials, who scorned Guthrie
until an Okemah resident, Sharon Jones, decided to do
something about it in the late 1990s. One of her cousins,
an avid Guthrie fan, came to visit and was shocked there
wasn’t a single mention of her idol. So Ms. Jones, who
died in 2009, created the Woody Guthrie Coalition, which
organized an annual folk festival, called WoodyFest,
around his birthday on July 14, as well as a statue, a
mural and a memorial. Sensitive to the area’s Baptist
beliefs (including Ms. Jones’s), no alcohol was permitted
at the celebration until this year.

Dee Jones, Sharon’s husband, explained that Guthrie “was
kind of taboo because some influential people in this town
thought Woody Guthrie had communist leanings.” But once
the community realized that the 3,000 or so attendees
brought in business, everyone got behind it, Mr. Jones
said.

A couple of blocks from the memorial statue, visitors can
run a finger along the fading letters “W-O-O-D-Y” on a
fragment of Main Street’s original sidewalk, where the
16-year-old Guthrie signed his name in wet cement in 1928.

Mary Jo Guthrie Edgmon, Woody’s 90-year-old sister, always
hosts a pancake breakfast during the four-day music
festival. A white-haired, elfin woman with a persistent
smile and a sharp wit, Ms. Edgmon remembered how her
brother was always making music.

“You’d sit down at the dinner table, and there’d be
glasses of water, and he’d pick up a fork and play the
glasses all around the table,” she said. “If it made
music, he played it.”

Reciting snatches of Guthrie’s poetry and songs, Ms.
Edgmon said her brother never cared what people thought of
him and did not necessarily hold a particular affection
for his birthplace. “He didn’t get attached to anything,”
she said. “Everywhere was his home.”

Still, after so many years of Oklahomans’ snubbing her
brother’s memory, she said the whole family was thrilled
he was being honored: “What we were all shooting for,” she
said, “was acknowledgment

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