Woody Guthrie

Guthrie, Woodrow Wilson Born in 1912, Woody Guthrie traveled the same roads from Oklahoma to California and beyond many American workers and rural people traveled during the Depression and Dust Bowl era of the 1920’s and 30’s. A committed socialist (a sticker on his guitar read, “This Machine Kills Fascists”), he was associated with but never a member of what biographer Joe Klein calls the “largely irrelevant and often laughable” Communist party (119). In the late 1930’s, he was a radio folk singer well known in California to the thousands of displaced Okies in Los Angeles. In early 1940, he appeared at a benefit concert sponsored by his friend, actor Will Geer, in New York. At the concert was Alan Lomax who was Assistant Director of Folk Music at the Library of Congress and who, after hearing Woody, convinced him to record for the Library’s collection and became a kind of agent for Woody (Klein 148). Woody also later recorded a set of songs, including “This Land is Your Land,” for Moe Asch, who put together the American Anthology of Folk Music for American Folkways (Klein 275). Around the time Guthrie met Lomax, the archivist had an assistant, Pete Seeger (then in his early twenties) who later became Guthrie’s traveling companion and mentee (Klein 280). Guthrie’s career was affected by many influences, not a few of which were his own wanderlust personality and his gradual decline from Huntington’s Disease. After serving in World War II as a sailor, Guthrie returned home, where his writing, songwriting, and radio career was cut short by both his medical decline and the anticommunist oppression of the late forties and fifties. He was placed in a hospital facility in 1956 and died eleven years later in 1967.

Bruce was not consciously influenced by Guthrie’s folk music until Jon Landau gave him a copy of Joe Klein’s biography on the day after Ronald Reagan was elected on November 5, 1980 (Marsh 276). He became intrigued by Woody’s very interesting life and noticed the economic similarities (and the differences) between the Depression and the Reagan era, and started regularly playing “This Land is Your Land” at shows, with a little introduction abut the song and its relevance (Marsh 277 and Guterman 130). For the purposes of this presentation, however, I wish to point out two aspects that both Bruce and Woody have in common (besides our presumptive use of their first names) that show how the social milieu affects their artistic trajectory and our appreciation of that art.

Woody Guthrie was “discovered” by Alan Lomax at the benefit concert after a reasonably successful radio career in Los Angeles because Lomax was searching for a person to fill an ideological and aesthetic construct: ideological, in that socialist cultural critics were looking for an authentic voice of the working people to emerge from working people instead of from socialist institutions; aesthetic, in that academic musicologists were looking for an authentic folk tradition that was both popularly appreciated and adhered to the historical conventions of American folk music (Klein 143-50). Guthrie seemed to fill both bills as a socially conscious, “unwitting classicist” folk musician; plus, Lomax noted, he was funny onstage and had the most impressive repertoire of songs Lomax had ever seen (149). That the promise of folk music in general and Woody Guthrie in particular to achieve the socialist ideal in America didn’t completely come to pass was a function of history and society rather than any issue with Woody or his music, and due in no small part to Woody’s contributions, folk music did survive the challenges of the mid-twentieth century.

When Bruce Springsteen went to the fateful audition with John Hammond in 1972, Hammond was on a mission similar, if more market-oriented, to Alan Lomax’s: after bringing Bob Dylan to Columbia, Hammond was looking—as much as a member of a “pop music aristocracy” would look—for a softer, more commercial, more accessible version of folk-rock, a James Taylor—Jackson Browne type of solo act (Marsh 53). Bruce’s insistence that he and the E Street Band were a rock and roll band and would stay that way “stunned” the record executives (56). What emerged out of the New Jersey Shore was not a soft-rock folksinger but a working-class rock and roll band.

Bruce and Woody’s artistic output, also, became subject to the social and commercial forces that appropriated their most popular songs and reinterpreted them for a more politically conservative appeal. Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” written in an angry response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” had two verses cut for public distribution that emphasized a unquestioning patriotism that Woody didn’t feel, and Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” was claimed by the Reagan administration as an expression of working-class patriotism—contrary to the words of the song and Bruce’s “nonconfrontational rejection” of President Reagan’s appropriation of the song (Marsh 431). Bruce joined the line of singers who have tried to rehabilitate “This Land Is Your Land,” such as Pete Seeger, when he included the song in the rotation for shows immediately preceding the making of Nebraska, and introducing the performances with a monologue about his interpretation of it, which Marsh has characterized as “smack dab in the middle” between Woody’s Marxist disillusionment and the dream fulfillment paean of Irving Berlin’s “God bless America” (279). Bruce interpreted “This Land” as “a question everybody has to ask themselves about the land they live in, everyday” (280).