Woody Guthrie’s legacy lives on
Daughter among speakers at special AGA event Friday
As fans around the world mark the recent 100th anniversary of Woody Guthrie’s birth (July 14, 1912), the legacy of the proverbial “dust bowl troubadour” is getting a fresh examination.
For most, he’s the guy who wrote that unofficial national anthem This Land Is Your Land. But there’s so much more to the story of this modern-day folk hero. Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie only had about 30 active years to make music before he died of Huntington’s disease at the age of 55 in 1967, but he left behind an artistic archetype that still reverberates through thousands of clubs, concert halls and festivals years later.
For those closest to him, the centenary is less about paying respect to an influential music idol, and more about furthering the ideas that he sang about. It’s about the role of music itself.
“No one thought about Woody as a well-known songwriter or recording artist or anything like that,” explains his daughter Nora Guthrie, recalling the family dynamic during her upbringing on Coney Island’s Mermaid Avenue back in the 1950s and 1960s. “The environment that he created in the house was one of music, everybody’s music, the heart and soul of folk music. The whole idea was that music and participation in music should be part of an everyday natural life.”
Nora Guthrie is one of more than 20 speakers — musicians, musicologists, writers, filmmakers and family — gathering in Edmonton for Woody At 100, a special conference-exhibit organized by Folkways Alive! at the Art Gallery of Alberta. She will also join her brother Arlo (of Alice’s Restaurant fame) when he leads a Guthrie family tribute to Woody on the Edmonton Folk Music Festival mainstage Friday night.
Most of Woody Guthrie’s recordings were produced by Moses Asch at Folkways Records. To mark the centenary, Smithsonian Folkways has produced a new three-CD deluxe set, also titled Woody At 100, full of remastered tracks, unreleased radio broadcasts, artwork and essays.
When she isn’t attending tributes to her father, Nora Guthrie spends much of her time getting to know the man better through his songs. Her mother Marjorie (Guthrie’s second wife, a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company) created the Guthrie Foundation. Nora followed in her mother’s footsteps, hanging up her own career in modern dance to found the Guthrie Archive in Westchester, N.Y., in 1994.
Among other jobs at the archive, she spends her time sifting through the huge collection of unpublished songs that Woody left behind, perusing 20 or 30 lyrics at a time, pacing herself so she isn’t overwhelmed.
“I’m still learning. There are about 3,000 lyrics, minus about 300 that are not very good and the ones that are already out there, so we still have another 2,500 songs.”
At Nora’s invitation, Britain’s Billy Bragg and the American band Wilco recorded two albums of new Guthrie songs together in 1998 (just reissued with an extra disc in The Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions on Nonesuch). Nora likes Bragg’s summary of her father’s place in music history best.
“He suggested Woody was the last of the medieval troubadours and the first of the American punk rockers. What he means is that Woody came out of the medieval troubadour tradition; he learned music from his mother who sang Scot and Irish ballads to him from her memory, so there’s a distinct troubadour lineage there.”
Part of Guthrie’s innovation was to recreate that role in modern times, to pick up on the social and political currents of American life and shape them into something new.
“You could say his style was almost the foundation of the punk rock movement in a way, the idea that ‘three chords and the truth’ was all a good troubadour needed. You didn’t have to be a great musician, but you had to be a truth teller or truth singer.”
Sorting through the archives often leaves her with surprises.
“Recently we found out that Woody and Einstein actually met and talked and took a train ride together and we were able to gather the many lyrics he wrote about atomic energy that he discussed with Einstein. Einstein also played the fiddle and my dad wrote a couple of songs for him to play.”
There have been seven more projects since Mermaid Avenue, albums featuring the likes of Lou Reed, Ani DiFranco, Michael Franti and more. Many of those artists told Nora what she already knew, that Guthrie’s songs seem to have more relevance than ever.
“My feeling is that he makes himself heard and known when he is needed, and boy, is he needed now. Everything he wrote about — political corruption, corrupt bankers, foreclosures, mentioning the environment in the dust-bowl ballads — is all in our face.”
Toronto musicologist and anthology producer Rob Bowman echoes her thoughts.
“When you look at the streams of influence, Woody Guthrie was right there at the beginning. When I go back and examine his songs, I’m blown away all over again by how meaningful they still are today.”
Bowman is visiting the Guthrie conference to outline Guthrie’s connection to Canada, particularly through The Travellers. Those unsung heroes of Canadian folk were responsible for adapting Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land to fit the Canadian map back in 1955, reimagining it all “from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island.”
Bowman says Canadian artists like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen wouldn’t have become what they are were it not for the example they found in Guthrie’s best-known disciple, Bob Dylan.
There’s no doubt Guthrie’s left-leaning sentiments, social conscience and fearless voice played a role in fomenting the counter-culture of mid-20th century America.
“I assumed that music was a way to create change,” Nora says. “Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s I was surrounded by musicians who had been blacklisted — all my parents’ friends — but they kept on singing and they all survived McCarthyism. Joseph McCarthy wound up being discredited and Pete Seeger is still on the road singing.”
Michael Kleff, a broadcaster with German Public Radio, curator of the Woody At 100 exhibit and Nora Guthrie’s husband, suggests there may be a greater awareness of Woody Guthrie’s politics overseas.
“Sometimes I think he’s watered down in American society. Everyone knows This Land Is Your Land, but they don’t know the extra verses about social welfare. In Europe he’s known for the sign on his guitar, ‘this machine kills fascists,’ and for writing political songs to change society. Especially in Germany, he is perceived as a very political figure and in recent years a poet, not at all a museum piece. His message is very much alive.”