Subject: [SocialistWorker.org] Songs made for you and me
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http://socialistworker.org/2012/07/12/songs-made-for-you-and-me
Comment: Nicole Colson
======== SONGS MADE FOR YOU AND ME ===========================================
Nicole Colson tells the story of Woody Guthrie on the 100th anniversary of
his birth.
July 12, 2012
THIS JULY 4, the "doodle" for the day on the Google home page was a graphic
with the words "This land was made for you and me"--a reference to "This Land
Is Your Land," the famous song by folksinger Woody Guthrie. Conservatives
went--to put it mildly--nuts.
"Google chooses Communist-oriented 'This Land Is Your Land' July 4th theme,"
blared the conservative website Breitbart.com [1]. Other conservatives [2]
expressed similar outrage [3] about a "commie" songwriter being linked to the
most "American" of holidays.
How can a song written more than 70 years ago still be so polarizing--and how
can someone who was born 100 years ago this week still be so controversial?
The answer is in the radical roots of Woody Guthrie's music.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WOODROW WILSON Guthrie was born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Okla. Woody's
father Charley was a successful real estate man and a staunchly
anti-socialist and pro-Jim Crow Democrat.
Woody learned to sing from his mother Nora--mainly traditional Scottish-Irish
folk ballads and church hymns that would serve as inspiration and source
material for him throughout his life.
The Guthrie family endured a series of tragedies during Woody's childhood.
When Woody was a toddler, the family's home burned down. That, along with a
post-oil-boom recession, devastated the family's finances. Woody's older
sister Clara died in 1919 in a fire, and Woody's mother Nora began to
deteriorate mentally due to Huntington's disease--a degenerative, hereditary
and fatal neurological disorder that later killed Woody, too. Nora was sent
to the state mental institution in Norman, Okla., and died in 1929.
Charley relocated the family to Pampa, Texas--a booming oil town in the Texas
panhandle. It was here that Woody began putting his artistic talents to use,
painting signs and cartoons for local drugstore windows. His uncle taught him
how to play guitar and fiddle.
Despite the popular myth of Woody as an uneducated-but-folksy "hick," he read
constantly, working his way through nearly every book in the Pampa public
library--from psychology to Eastern religion to poetry. With little to keep
him in Pampa, Woody began traveling. Leaving his first wife Mary behind, he
headed out along Highway 66, through New Mexico, hustling painting jobs and
spending the occasional night in jail when he was busted for vagrancy.
In 1937, he decided to look for work in California. Thumbing rides, Woody
sang for his supper when he could and sometimes would swap his guitar for
food. In Arizona, he found himself so hungry that he was reduced to begging
for the first time--and was promptly turned away from every church he asked
for work at. After being told there was "nothing for him" at one Catholic
church, he later recalled, "I looked up at the cathedral, every single rock
in it cost ten dollars to lay and ten to chop out, and I thought, 'Boy,
you're right--there's nothing here for me.'"
Riding freight trains north through California, he was confronted with the
viciousness of police and railroad security--and grotesque scenes of poverty
contrasting with the natural beauty of the landscape. "I can't tell you how
pretty this country did look to me," he wrote. "I can't tell you how ugly the
cops looked, nor how ugly the jails looked, the hobo jungles, the shacktowns
up and down the rivers, how dirty the Hoovervilles looked on the rim of the
city garbage dump."
Eventually, Woody landed in Los Angeles where he began performing on
progressive radio station KFVD. The experience began to shape his political
consciousness. After casually introducing a harmonica solo over the air by
its traditional name, "Run, Nigger, Run," Woody received a letter from a
listener: "I am a young Negro in college, and I certainly resented your
remark. No person, or person of any intelligence, uses that word over the
radio today."
Woody apologized over the air and refused to play the piece again. He changed
his language and became a committed anti-racist.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WOODY ALSO began to develop his voice as a songwriter, spending more time at
the typewriter. His songs mixed his sense of humor with a growing sense of
radical politics.
In one of his songbooks, he'd famously write: "This song is Copyrighted in
U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085 for a period of 28 years, and anybody
caught singin' it without our permission will be mighty good friends of ourn
cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel
it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
Most often, Woody set new words to traditional music, hymns or country tunes
made famous by groups like the Carter Family. One such song was "I Ain't Got
No Home," a tune modeled on the Carters' "I Can't Feel at Home in This World
Anymore." This became one of Woody's /Dust Bowl Ballads/--a group of songs
that told of the experience of Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma and the
Midwest who made their way to California during the Great Depression.
Woody's version begins, "I'm just a wandering worker" and then describes how
"the police make it hard wherever I go." He explains that a "rich man took my
home and drove me from my door." "Oh, the gamblin' man is rich and the
workin' man is poor / and I ain't got no home in this world anymore," he
finishes.
Instead of the promise of a reward in heaven, as the Carter Family song spoke
of, Woody flipped the lyrics on their head by emphasizing the way in which
the profit system victimized the poor.
In other songs, Woody's wicked sense of humor took center stage. In "Dusty
Old Dust (So Long, It's Been Good to Know You)," Woody presents different
scenes set in a dust storm--something he experienced first-hand in Texas:
people taking cover in their homes and passing the time; two sweethearts
"sparking" in the dark; and a preacher who believes Armageddon is coming.
Woody pokes particular fun at the preacher who "could not read a word of his
text / and he folded his specs / and he took up collection."
The /Dust Bowl Ballads/, written in 1937-38 and recorded in 1940, spoke to a
wave of refugees from the Midwest who had been promised that good jobs were
waiting for them in California. As many as 1.25 million Americans were forced
to leave their homes in Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas to look for
some way to make a living during the last years of the 1930s. But in the
migrant camps of California, poverty, hunger and disease were the norm--with
frequent outbreaks of smallpox, typhus and tuberculosis--along with the
violence of police.
In 1938, Woody drifted around Northern California, working on a series of
stories covering the plight of the "Okies" in California. He performed for
migrant families camped by the Sacramento River and observed peaches rotting
on trees because growers weren't hiring pickers--too much fruit on the market
would drive prices down. During his travels, he met members of the Industrial
Workers of the World, and learned about IWW songwriter Joe Hill, who was
executed in 1915 for his labor activism.
In Kern County, where a cotton strike was in progress, he saw American Legion
vigilantes attack picket lines, beating strikers with ax handles. Enraged, he
immediately joined the pickets and began singing for the strikers at mass
meetings. He eventually channeled his anger into the song "Vigilante Man," in
which he describes being chased out into a rainy night by a vigilante. "Oh
why," he asks, "does a vigilante man / carry that sawed-off shotgun in his
hand? / Would he shoot his brother and sister down?"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
BACK IN Los Angeles, Woody met Ed Robbin, a commentator for KFVD and reporter
for the Communist Party (CP) newspaper on the West Coast, the /People's Daily
World/.
Through Robbin, Woody met a number of CP members, including actor Will Geer
(today mostly remembered for his role as "Grandpa Walton" on /The Waltons/).
Geer and Guthrie became lifelong friends--Geer also introduced Woody to
important figures on the left, including author John Steinbeck, who later
summed up Woody by saying, "He is just a voice and a guitar...there is
nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs that he
sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There
is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression."
When Woody suggested he write a column for the /People's Daily World/, Robbin
sent the columns in to the paper--and to his surprise, they were accepted by
the editors. For around seven months in 1939-40, the "Woody Sez" column
appeared in the paper.
Woody deliberately used poor grammar and spelling in his columns. One typical
one read:
>Everywhere a poor feller looks, they is a Finance Co starin you right in th
>face. An the big banks is a keepin em in business so's they can give you
>four bits, an git back a dollar--an boost youre hours up an cut youre wages
>down, an give you a skinning ever time you turn a round, an salute the flag
>an call it freedom. [/sic/]
>
Despite his column for the CP paper, it remains unclear whether Guthrie ever
officially joined the Communist Party. Will Geer would later insist that
Woody "talked Marx, but he talked socialism, even more than communism...He
was more of a Eugene Debs type. He certainly wasn't a Stalinist."
More recently, Woody's daughter Nora Guthrie answered today's right-wing
critics by telling the /Guardian's/ Ed Vulliamy [4] that her father was "a
commonist, not a Communist." The phrase is taken from one from Woody's
journals, in which he quoted Biblical scripture to express his support for
socialism: "To own everything in common. That's what the Bible says. Common
means all of us. This is old 'Commonism.'"
While understandable, such protestations aren't entirely accurate. Despite a
lack of consensus on whether Woody ever officially joined the CP, he remained
largely supportive and uncritical of the U.S. CP during the many twists and
turns of the "party line" before and after the Second World War--including
supporting the Hitler-Stalin Pact that briefly made the Soviet Union allies
with Nazi Germany. Woody also repeatedly expressed a fondness for
Stalin--something he never renounced.
Despite this, it's important to understand that Woody saw the CP in
particular, and socialism more generally, as an alternative to the
viciousness and barbarism of capitalism that destroyed the lives of working
people. Because of his interactions with rank-and-file CP members during
strikes and organizing drives, Woody developed a deep and abiding respect for
the party.
In a letter to his aunt in 1956, during the height of the McCarthyist Red
Scare, he expressed solidarity with embattled CP members by explaining:
>The big rich landlords, gambling lords, rulers and owners are cussing the
>Communists loud and long these days. The Communists have always been the
>hardest fighters for the trade unions, good wages, short hours, nursery
>schools, cleaner work shops, and the equal rights of every person of every
>color...So you can call me a Communist from here on.
>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WOODY BRISTLED against the patriotism and jingoism exploding in the U.S. as
America's entrance into the Second World War approached. This anger set the
stage for his most famous composition in February 1940: "This Land Is Your
Land."
While today the song is largely considered a patriotic, if populist, vision
of an ideal America, Guthrie actually composed the song as a direct response
to Irving Berlin's hyper-sentimental "God Bless America." Set to the tune of
the Carter Family's "When the World's on Fire," the heart of Guthrie's
version is in the verses that today are usually omitted:
>As I went walking I saw a sign there
>And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
>But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
>That side was made for you and me.
>
>In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
>By the relief office I seen my people;
>As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
>Is this land made for you and me?
>
>Nobody living can ever stop me,
>As I go walking that freedom highway;
>Nobody living can ever make me turn back
>This land was made for you and me.
>
With these verses restored to the song, it becomes a much more bitter vision
of America--expressing the idea of opportunity frustrated for ordinary people
and the need to keep pushing forward, "walking that freedom highway."
Later in life, as Woody began to succumb to Huntington's disease and his
speech began to fail, the idea that the stripped-down, "neutered" version of
the song would be his public legacy so horrified him that he made his son
Arlo memorize the song, complete with omitted verses, to keep the real legacy
alive.
He was right to worry. "This Land" would eventually be used as an advertising
jingle by United Airlines and Ford Motor Company--and, perhaps most
grotesquely, as a campaign theme song for the presidential run of George Bush
Sr.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
AS THE Second World War broke out, Woody set out for New York City, where he
met Alan Lomax--then an assistant in charge of the folk song collection at
the Library of Congress. Lomax recorded Woody over several sessions for the
Library, and pushed him to begin writing his (heavily embellished)
"awgowbyografie," /Bound for Glory/.
Lomax also introduced Guthrie to a young Harvard dropout named Pete Seeger. A
couple of years later, Guthrie invited the 21-year-old Seeger to tour the
West with him--much as Seeger later shepherded a young Bob Dylan through the
American South during the early 1960s.
Woody signed on as one of the "Almanac" singers, a left-wing group formed by
Seeger that at any given point included between two and six members and spent
much of its time performing for union organizing drives and strikes. The
Almanacs adhered stringently to the CP line as well--performing antiwar songs
while the Hitler-Stalin pact was still intact, and then suddenly taking up
the pro-war, anti-fascist cause in 1941 when the pact came undone after
Hitler moved troops toward the borders of the Soviet Union.
Woody chafed against the circle of wealthy intellectuals he was now running
in: "Now I'm picked up...and find myself camped along the trail of the
intellectuals...I hear their words that run like rainclouds and splatter a
few drops across some hot pavement--and the sun and the wind turn the words
to steam and they go up in the air like a fog."
Still, he remained convinced that music could play a key role in political
organizing. As he cheekily wrote in one notebook: "Lenin: 'Where three
balalaika players meet, the fourth one ought to be a communist.' Me: 'Where
three communists meet, the fourth one ought to be a guitar player.'"
The famous slogan emblazoned on his guitar--"This machine kills
fascists"--came about after Woody had seen the musical /Finian's Rainbow/,
which featured a character based on him. The character gives up a life on the
road in favor of settling down for married life. (Woody was, by this point,
both an absent husband and father.) Writing that such a fate would not befall
him, he said, "The union is my religion, the strike is my way of
praying...I'm Woody the union man. Woody the union worker, and my guitar is
my factory machine. My machine that kills fascists."
In 1942, after divorcing his first wife Mary, Woody fell in love with
Marjorie Mazia--a modern dancer who worked as an assistant to the famed
Martha Graham. Marjorie was married at the time, and her husband worked in
the civil service. He discovered the affair when two FBI agents approached
him and asked, "Did you know that your wife is sleeping with a Communist?"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WOODY'S EVENTUAL marriage to, and life with, Marjorie--living at 3520 Mermaid
Avenue in Coney Island--gave rise to a period of intense creativity and some
of his most famous songs. Moving away from the "agitprop" that had largely
distinguished his time with the Almanacs, he began experimenting with ballads
and found that one of his greatest strengths as a songwriter lay in capturing
detailed scenes.
In 1945, he wrote the story of the "Ludlow Massacre"--a song that, among
other things, propelled a young Brooklyn shipyard worker named Howard Zinn to
begin thinking about the history largely hidden from workers. The song "led
me to look in the library about this event which nobody had ever mentioned in
any of my history courses (and) no textbook had ever mentioned," Zinn later
said [5].
Another song, "1913 Massacre," is a haunting ballad about 73 people--mostly
children--who died on Christmas Eve 1913 in Calumet, Mich., during a copper
mine strike. At a party for strikers and their families, someone locked the
hall doors and yelled "fire" into the crowd. The victims were crushed and
asphyxiated in the melee that followed.
The pain of the song is palpable, as Woody describes the deaths of the
children and the despair of their parents. The song is especially striking
for the way in which Woody puts himself and the listener into the story:
"Take a trip with me," he beckons. "I'll take you in a door...I'll let you
shake hands with the people you see."
Woody's time at Mermaid Avenue was also marked by a massive output--of poems,
children songs (as his family with Marjorie grew), even lyrics about Jewish
holidays. "I feel now...that these words are such a force, such a pressure
bomb inside me, that if I fail to get them out written down here...they will
expand and actually explode and destroy me like wax paper," he wrote.
Domestic happiness with Marjorie didn't last. The couple's young daughter
Cathy died from burns suffered during an electrical fire, and Woody's mental
and physical health began to deteriorate as a result of the Huntington's
disease that was only finally diagnosed in 1956. The couple divorced, and
Woody briefly married a young woman named Anneka Van Kirk. In 1953, while
lighting a campfire, he suffered severe burns to his right arm, which ended
his ability to play the guitar.
In and out of hospitals, with his health deteriorating, Woody wrote that
"every step leads me to another barred window and another locked
door...Remind myself again this morning that I'm the world's best ballad
maker, and nobody can ever take that away from me."
A series of institutionalizations followed. At New Jersey's bleak Greystone
Hospital, Woody still managed, however, to keep his sense of humor. "This is
the best damn place to be these days," he told one friend. "It's the only
place in the country where I can get up on a stool and start screaming, 'I'm
a Communist. I'm a Communist.' And no one can do a goddamn thing about it. If
/you/ do that, they'll arrest you." At one point, his Viennese doctor thought
him delusional when he claimed to have written more than a thousand songs and
to have made records for the Library of Congress--before being informed it
was true.
By the end of 1956, Woody had stopped writing entirely, and by 1965, he was
unable to speak. For someone who built his life around reaching people with
song, to be cut off from this form of communication must have been especially
cruel.
The terrible irony, of course, is that even as his health deteriorated and
his body slipped from his own control, he became a hero to a new generation
of folk singers--including a young Bob Dylan, who worshipfully visited Woody
several times at the home of Bob and Sid Gleason, who brought Guthrie for
weekend breaks from Greystone.
In another cruel twist, there has been a concerted effort to turn Woody into
a bland figure--a "national treasure." As Woody's friend Irwin Silber
exclaimed in 1966 when Woody was given an award by the Interior Department,
"They're taking a revolutionary and turning him into a conservationist!"
That's not to say that those who have been inspired by Guthrie--including
Dylan, Phil Ochs, Steve Earle, Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg
and Wilco, to name a few--haven't done justice to his musical legacy. But on
the 100th anniversary of Woody Guthrie's birth, it's important to remember
the radical roots of songs that today are all-too-often presented devoid of
their meaning.
As folksinger Phil Ochs put it when he wrote of Woody in his song "Bound for
Glory":
>Now they sing out his praises on every distant shore
>But so few remember what he was fightin' for
>Oh why sing the songs and forget about the aim?
>He wrote them for a reason, why not sing them for the same?
>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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[1] http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/07/04/Google-chooses-this-land-is-your-land
[2] http://www.countercontempt.com/archives/3809
[3] http://www.independentsentinel.com/2012/07/google-takes-us-down-the-commie-memory-lane-on-july-4th/
[4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jul/07/woody-guthrie-centenary-protest-songs
[5] http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14303400
