At 100, Woody Guthrie Still Resonates

by Bradley Klein

http://www.npr.org/2012/07/11/156571771/at-100-years-old-cultivating-woody-guthries-legacy

July 11, 2012

Woody Guthrie would have been 100 years old on
Saturday. The singer and songwriter wrote "This Land Is
Your Land," among thousands of other songs.

Even though Guthrie died almost 45 years ago, his
lyrics and message continue to appeal to new
generations of Americans.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie grew up rough and poor and wild
in a family scarred by tragedy. His older sister died
in a fire when he was 6. His mother was eventually
committed to a mental hospital, where she died when
Woody was 18. By then, the Guthries' native Oklahoma
was reeling from the one-two punch of the Great
Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s -- and the
westward migration it spawned. 


A song Guthrie wrote in 1938, "I Ain't Got No Home in
This World Anymore," describes his family's plight:

    My brothers and sisters are traveling on this road
    A hot and dusty road that a million feet have trod
    Rich man took my home and drove me from my door
    And I ain't got no home in this world anymore


Joe Klein, a journalist for Time magazine and the
author of the political novel Primary Colors, wrote a
biography of Woody Guthrie in 1980.

"The further we get away from Woody's birth and death,
and take a look at his influence, [the more] it helps
us learn about ourselves as Americans," Klein says.
"There's a wild-ass quality to this country that he
personified. I go around the country. The greatest fear
is that we're losing that -- we're losing our
creativity, our individualism. Woody was an individual,
and a militantly individual individual." 

Guthrie blew out of Oklahoma on the winds of the Dust
Bowl, along with hundreds of thousands of displaced
Americans. He was in his 20s when he landed in the
California farmlands. But another Guthrie biographer,
Elizabeth Partridge, says Woody just didn't have a
knack for farm work.

"Woody was not a physical worker -- he was not out in
those fields picking like everybody else in
California," Partridge says. "But he was the first one
to show up and have his guitar and lead a cotton
strike. If he could be there doing the music, he was
happy."

Guthrie found his place in the world as a troubadour
supporting farmworkers and union movements. He was too
independent to be a card-carrying communist, but his
sympathies were always with the poor and the powerless.
His politics veered far to the left.

"Society was also gaining such a strong leftist
position, because there were so many people in his same
shoes," Partridge says.

Guthrie's songs connected with those people, and he
headed east to make his first recordings at the advent
of WWII. By 1943, he'd written an autobiography that
led The New York Times to call Guthrie a national
treasure -- "part of the best stuff this country has to
show the world."

But Guthrie's politics stayed far to the left even as
the political climate shifted during the Cold War. For
the most part, he wound up playing to small audiences.

As the 1950s turned to the '60s, interest in folk music
picked up -- and Guthrie's politics resonated once
again. Bob Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Pete Seeger
championed his songs, introducing him to a new
generation. But by then, Guthrie's health was failing
as a result of Huntington's disease, a neurological
disorder he inherited from his mother.

Woody Guthrie died on Oct. 3, 1967. But that's not the
end of his story.

Guthrie's daughter, Nora, has largely written the
latest chapter. She runs the Woody Guthrie Foundation,
which curates her father's artistic legacy. It's hard
to exaggerate the sheer volume of his output. Many
thousands of pages of drawings, paintings, writings and
lyrics fill floor-to-ceiling shelves. Guthrie seems to
have written about every place he ever went to -- and
every person he ever met.

"He loved writing -- he loved it," Nora Guthrie says.
"My mother would say, 'He loved the feeling of a pen on
paper' -- just that visceral experience. He loved that.
It was his energy coming out of his fingertips."

Nora Guthrie has opened this archive not only to
researchers and biographers, but also to musicians like
Jeff Tweedy of the band Wilco. He went there and held
the battered journal that contains Woody's handwritten
lyrics to "This Land Is Your Land."

"I remember it feeling like I was getting to hold the
Declaration of Independence," Tweedy says.

But most of the archive is made up of unpublished
writings. They reflect the full range of Guthrie's
interests.

"He was everything I thought he was, and an enormous
amount more," Tweedy says. "I wasn't expecting there to
be ribald songs about prostitutes, or Jewish songs. And
I was thrilled to have that in there, because that felt
like the Woody Guthrie I'd like to imagine or invent if
it wasn't real."

Among the songs that Tweedy found in the archive, and
later recorded, was one called "California Stars."

"It's on a yellow piece of paper in blue ballpoint,"
Nora Guthrie says. "He hadn't been to California in 10
years at least. He probably already knew he had
Huntington's, and he wished he could go back in time --
stop the progress of an illness."

Tweedy says that as he sifted through the archive, he
started to a get a sense of the "genuineness" that was
part of Woody's appeal in the 1930s -- and that still
resonates today.

"He was very welcoming. There was this generosity of
spirit and openness to experience, experiencing the
world and the people of the world, an almost childlike
embrace of whatever happens," Tweedy says. "I think
that's always going to be inspiring, when you can find
someone that has such a gift for being themself."

About 300 of Woody Guthrie's unpublished song lyrics
have now been set to music and recorded by a new
generation -- that's more than he recorded himself in
his lifetime. Nora Guthrie says musicians are still
finding new material.

"It's been 20 years, and I still haven't read all the
lyrics," she says. "Just watching each of the artists
turn the pages, I realized what happens is they find
themselves in Woody's lyrics. Every artist finds
something different."

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