WOODY GUTHRIE
AHEAD OF HIS TIME
Puffs of white clouds mercifully blotted out the sun as I configured our tent.
My 7-yearold daughter tagged along with me to find out more about Woody Guthrie, Oklahoma’s native son, at the annual festival that bears his name. The prolific folk icon who penned “This Land is Our Land” died in 1967; he would have been 105 this July. I’d recently learned Guthrie was from Okemah, Oklahoma, and that people from all over the world converge yearly, around his birthday on July 14, to pay homage.
“And why on earth would they do that?” I thought as I battled with a tangle of tent poles, sweating and out of my element. Way out.
Near me, teardrop trailers along a rusty white fence encircled the Okemah High School rodeo ring. Buddhist flags flapped in a stifling breeze on shade tents outside the necklace of trailers. Those occupying the shade sported gray hair slicked into ponytails and sat in camping chairs, some jamming on guitars.
A man in a boxy black convertible pulled up next to my camping spot.
He offered us a drink of water.
He made me nervous. I asked in the nicest way possible if he wouldn’t mind giving us a little space. I eyed him with suspicion, having noticed his dusty clothes, his possessions
strewed about in his convertible, along with a box of records.
“Why did you tell that man to go away, Mommy?” Laila demanded.
“We don’t know him,” I said.
I’d jumped at the chance to journey to the fest with Laila and now regretted it.
Lord, where am I?
I unevenly affixed the tent’s canopy, declared it good enough and headed to downtown Okemah to see what we could see.
Downtown Okemah
“You know, it’s only been 20 years since this town embraced Woody Guthrie,” I overheard heard a woman say near a Woody Guthrie statue and mural downtown. She wore a bright red Connie Johnston T-shirt. I walked over. Jo Davis, 74, told me she’s from Shawnee — Lawton originally.
“My Daddy was a bootlegger and the meanest man alive. But I’m nice!”
Her effervescence belied the fact she’d partied the night before until 5 a.m.
What is it about Woody Guthrie that drew you here, I wanted to know.
It was “his caring about other human beings and caring about the fact we should all care about each other and not try to be selfish or greedy.”
Davis had to go — she was missing the music.
Campsite
Back at the campsite, I spread out a blanket. Having nothing else to do, we contemplated the clouds on our backs, had a picnic dinner and started to play Spot It.
“Is that Spot It? I love Spot It. Hi, I’m Nora!” said a blond girl with a bob.
“Do you want to play with us?” I asked.
Nora, 8, schooled us, then ran to fetch a hula hoop. She and Laila burst into an instantaneous bestfriendship and ran off to play. I invited Nora’s parents, Lauren, 37, and Brad, 40, over to the blanket.
The Humphreys told me this is one of the places where John Fullbright used to play. He would be performing later tonight at the big show right before the headliner, Woody Guthrie’s son, Arlo Guthrie.
Fullbright, an Okfuskee County native, used to jam at the fence with the teardrop trailer guys. The Humphreys watched him grow up here as they camped year after year, adding camping equipment, a marriage, and a daughter, Nora.
Brad Humphrey said the fest gives him a chance to hear good music you can’t find anywhere else. And it’s a pilgrimage for progressive-leaning people from all over, right in the middle of the deep red Southern plains. Political difference aside, the townies and the festival goers love this land.
“The townies are very much of this place and conservative, and everyone’s got a flag in their front yard,” Lauren said. “They’re very patriotic. But so is everyone at the festival, too.”
Modern and permanent
Laila and I trucked with our lawn chairs and blanket to the main stage next; I was surprised to see it there, huge, modern and permanent.
Laila started dancing a freewheeling hippie child dance barefoot on the grass.
A woman walked by to give her glow sticks to swing around.
“She looked like she could use these,” the woman told us. Laila was ecstatic.
Fullbright’s musical chops gave me chills. Piano, harmonica, guitar. That soulful, gravely voice, those lyrics. I’m not even from here, but I felt pride, too. This was an Okfuskee County boy from Bearden, an Okemah High School graduate. He was ours and look at him now! And a Grammy nomination to boot.
“And my cup it runneth over
And it runs down in my eyes
Maybe when I’m a little older
I won’t tell myself so many lies,” he sang.
Arlo Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s son, took the stage. He talked about a 1948 news story that listed the names of the crew, but none of the 28 Mexican nationals who died in a California plane crash.
“That pissed him off,” he said of his dad, who often pinned articles that enraged him up on the wall for inspiration. Woody Guthrie gave the crash victims names in his song, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos,” also called “Deportee,” which Arlo Guthrie sang.
My daughter had taken a seat on her tiny lawn chair, fighting sleep. We had to go back to our tent.
I ended the day feeling a still calm I hadn’t had when I arrived. No, not even the late-night, blaring tuba jam session back at the campground could annoy me now. Lord, where were we? We were at Woody Fest!
Two schools
There was just one more thing.
Morning broke. I had to talk to teardrop camper guys, the ones who jammed with Fullbright.
Mark Ambler, 64, walked over. He offered my daughter a glass of water.
“Of course. Thank you so much,” I said.
He was the man who had made me nervous. The one I’d told to go away.
I’d shunned the guru of Woody Fest!
“You got two schools,” Ambler, of Oklahoma City, said. “One that thought he was communist and couldn’t tolerate him. The other one, that he is a populist, a man of the people. He was trying to do everything he could to make the common man’s life a little better. This festival is the second school.”
It took a long time for Okemah, a farming and ranching town of 3,239 in east-central Oklahoma, tocelebrate Guthrie.
Guthrie fans fought to get “Home of Woody Guthrie” painted on a water tower in 1972. In the late 1990s when Woody Fest got off the ground, some business owners resisted with signs declaring Guthrie a communist. But the signs have come down. There is music year-round now in the cafes and restaurants and bars. Artists like Fullbright and Shawna Russell, an Okemah native and country singer and songwriter, hail from Okfuskee County. Things are changing.
“Once you get those beliefs in you, no matter what they are, it’s hard to get them out,” said Randy Norman, chairman of the board of the Woody Guthrie Coalition. “Okemah is more accepting and willing to accept Woody. He wasn’t perfect, by far. But he was out there talking for the little people.”
Guthrie opened his heart to the world, letting the red dirt convergence of country, folk and rock flow through him, seeing human beings as human beings in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, decades before the Civil Rights era, the superfan told me.
While you can’t be naive in this day and age, I still felt ashamed for viewing this man as somehow other, and therefore fearing him, and teaching my daughter that terrible lesson.
“Mommy was wrong, Laila,” I later told her. “We shouldn’t judge people because they are different from us.”
On our way out of town from Woody Fest, Laila and I found the Guthrie homestead, now just a sandstone foundation enmeshed with undergrowth. Efforts from an out-of-town owner to revive the Guthrie home have stalled.
In a brown sundress and flip-flops there, Laila sang “This Land Is Our Land” next to a totem pole inscribed with the title of Guthrie’s most famous song.
“This land,” she sang, “Is made for you and me.”