Singer who exposed America’s underbelly
Born 100 years ago this month, he was the dust-bowl troubadour whose music inspired Bob Dylan and countless others, but he came across as a uneducated hick. Who was the real Woody Guthrie? Sarfraz Manzoor separates the man from the myth.
INA dingy New York hotel room in February 1940 sits Woody Guthrie, 27. He has just travelled from California, where he spent three years singing and writing about the migrant workers who had fled to the Golden State, escaping the dust storms that had ravaged the Great Plains.
As he crossed the country, Guthrie kept hearing Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. The sappy lyrics sit uneasily with his own bitter experiences of how shabbily migrant workers were treated in California. He begins tapping at his typewriter a song he initially calls God Blessed America. Guthrie then signs it, dates it and ignores it for five years. When he does eventually revisit the song, he gives it a different name.
This Land is Your Land is now considered by many to be America’s alternative national anthem. Woody Guthrie has been mythologised as a dust-bowl troubadour, a spiky-haired, boxcar-riding, hitchhiking king of the road, clutching a guitar emblazoned with Machine Kills Fascists’’.
But Guthrie the man was more contradictory, calculating and complex than Woody the myth.
Will Kaufman, a biographer of the singer, writes that Guthrie ‘‘could be selfish, bitchy and snide . . . he climbed on the backs of women, using them and deserting them, pregnant or otherwise . . . he neglected his first wife and their children [and] he could be violent’’. Far from being an uneducated hick, Guthrie was a bibliophile who admired the mystical poetry of Kahlil Gibran. A Stalinsupporting communist, he wrote more children’s ditties than protest songs. So how did Guthrie become, as another biographer, Joe Klein, put it, ‘‘the patron saint of American rebelliousness’’?
Woody Guthrie was born on July 14, 1912, the third of five children, in Oklahoma. The family lived in a dilapidated shack after his father, Charley, went bankrupt. His mother, Nora, prone to
‘‘This violent rages, once threw a kerosene lamp at Charley. A seriously burnt Charley was sent to Texas to recover, while Nora was admitted to a hospital for the insane and diagnosed with Huntington’s disease. Woody was dispatched to join his father and extended family in Pampa, Texas, where he began to play the guitar.
By 17, he was busking on the streets or reading in the library.
‘‘He was entirely self-educated,’’ says Robert Santelli, author of This Land is Your Land: Woody Guthrie and the Journey of an American Folksong. ‘‘The librarian in Pampa, Texas, would later claim that Guthrie had read every book in the town library.’’
In April 1935, a dust storm destroyed Pampa and thousands headed west looking for work.
Guthrie, with first wife Mary Jennings, joined the refugees riding freight trains and hitchhiking. He would play songs in exchange for a bed for the night as he made his way west. It was a journey he would mythologise in his heavily fictionalised memoir, Bound for Glory, which was later adapted into a Oscar-winning film. It was in California, where he landed a job as a radio DJ, that Guthrie first set about creating his persona of an uneducated hick.
Stung by the violence, bigotry and poverty he saw the migrants facing, Guthrie composed songs such as Do Re Mi, Vigilante Man and I Ain’t Got No Home, and began to write a regular column, Woody Sez, for a communist newspaper. ‘‘He was upfront about nailing his colours to the communist movement,’’ says Kaufman.
Guthrie’s image as an American icon has been vigorously whitewashed of his inconvenient political radicalism that is evident in the final verses of This Land is Your Land. In the original lyrics, Guthrie praises the pastoral beauty of America – ‘‘the redwood forest, the Gulf Stream waters’’ – but the tone darkens as he sings: ‘‘in the squares of the city, in the show of the steeple, near the relief office I see my people/ and some are grumbling and some are wondering if this land’s still made for you and me’’. These final, critical lyrics were dropped because, says Santelli, ‘‘they are radical and by the 40s the focus was on the war and the relief lines were gone’’.
By the late 40s, Guthrie himself had returned from the war and was living in Brooklyn with his third wife and their children when he began to display signs of Huntington’s chorea – the disease that killed his mother. He became moody, violent and unstable. In 1954, he was admitted to Brooklyn State Hospital, where he was visited by a young Bob Dylan. He died on October 3, 1967, at the age 55.
Guthrie wrote an estimated 3000 songs, but recorded only about 300 of them. ‘‘In the archive there are songs which go totally against the grain of the iconic Woody Guthrie,’’ says Billy Bragg, who has recorded two albums of his songs. ‘‘There are songs about making love to Ingrid Bergman, songs about hitching a ride on a flying saucer – we can’t nail him down until we hear those.’’
His political songs, written more than 70 years ago, could hardly be more relevant. ‘‘Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen,’’ he sings on Pretty Boy Floyd, and The Jolly Banker includes the lines, ‘‘I’ll come and foreclose, take your car and your clothes, I’ll come down and help you, I’ll rape you and scalp you, I’m a jolly banker’’.
‘‘If Woody were alive today, he would be at Occupy Wall Street,’’ says Bragg.