WOODY GUTHRIE:
75 Years into “This Land is Your Land” and
the Fight’s Still On
by John Pietaro
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born on Bastille Day, 1912 and
some say that revolution was his birthright. Few before him, or since, can lay
claim to the mastery of protest music as honestly as Woody. Though he battled the
ravages of Huntington’s disease in his later years and lived only into middle
age, his time remains eternal. And his life story is the stuff legends are
built on.
75 years ago today, February 23, 1940, Woody completed work
on an acerbic song of fight-back he then sang as “God Blessed America For Me”.
Later, upon further reflection, Woody shifted its emphasis to include an
embrace of the nation’s beauty and promise as much as it damned its inequity. “This
Land is Your Land” has, through the decades, come to be seen as the ultimate
folk revival song, indeed, our second national anthem. A closer examination of
it, though, reveals the revolutionary core.
-Woody Guthrie
The hot and dry plains of Okemah, Oklahoma bared witness to
the birth of Woody Guthrie. The area’s spacious straights and windy hills
shaped his formative years, that which was spent in the company of the
high-lonesome sounds of rural white America, the church and blues music of
African-American culture, and the customs, dialects and plight of Native
Americans. With the introduction of basic guitar, harmonica and mandolin
skills, Guthrie dealt with the pains and poverty of his young, tragic life
through music.
His mother, Nora Guthrie, shared her gift of voice with
young Woody and exposed him to an important repertoire. Tragically, she developed
Huntington’s symptoms during his childhood, culminating in what Woody perceived
as a surrealistic madness, but not before he’d learned the ballads, old-time
and popular songs that had sustained her.
As a young man, moved by the early influences and the times
about him, Woody began composing new lyrics to traditional music. He referred
to this borrowing of familiar tunes as “the folk process” and most of his
repertoire can be traced to the lonely melodies that remained with him. But the
new songs that grew reflected the hardship and insistent survival of working
people. This body of work was social commentary, inspirational and prideful. In
this regard, Woody stands as our prototypical protest singer.
In the 1930s, Guthrie was among the many who climbed out of
the western states’ disastrous Dustbowl; he brought with him original songs
that catalogued the sights and emotions of the day: “So Long, Its Been Good to
Know You”, “I’m Blowin’ Down This Old Dusty Road”, “Talking Dust Bowl Blues”,
among many more. Once in California, Woody soon learned that it was no land of
milk and honey. However, instead of toiling in fruit orchards, he became a
radio performer, offering his old-timey and topical music to the southerners
who’d migrated to the West Coast. While the station manager tried desperately
to hold Woody to the country standards, somewhere in the mix was an original
called “Mr. Tom Mooney is Free”. This 1939 composition told of the recently pardoned
labor activist, a cause celebre in Left circles, who’d been wrongly imprisoned
for 22 years.
Through radical journalist Ed Robbin, whose own radio
program aired just after Woody’s, Guthrie was invited to a Communist Party
dinner to welcome Mooney home. Back-woods, lanky and unkempt, Woody stood out
in sharp contrast to most Party cultural workers--at that time, largely
academic poets or Modern classical composers. Yet almost immediately Woody
walked into the role of “a Communist Joe Hill”, that which had been called for
by Daily Worker columnist Mike Gold months prior.
Actor/activist Will Geer, also based in Los Angeles at the
time, saw Woody’s potential and the two began working in tandem at events for
the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and other left-wing labor organizations.
Several months later, Geer was on Broadway starring in “Tobacco Road” and
alerted Woody to the opportunities in New York for progressive artists.
During the winter that bridged ’39 to ’40, Woody made his
way across country. This strange odyssey coincided with a terrible winter storm
in which Woody initially attempted to drive. After his car broke down Woody,
determined, made his way to a bus station, but with resources so low he only
got as far as Pennsylvania. Stepping off the bus in the midst of a raging white-out,
his attempt to walk the highway became an impossible task. Near frozen, Woody
was rescued by a forest ranger who put him up for the night and bought him a
bus ticket to New York. Surely the irony was not lost on Woody the
revolutionist that a member of the establishment authority had saved him,
preserving the man as well as his future repertory of protest anthems.
Throughout the sojourn, Woody had continually heard the hit
Kate Smith record of “God Bless America” on juke-boxes and radios, a droning
soundtrack. The song’s passive sentiment of calling on the blessings of a higher
power during the brutal Great Depression agitated him. Woody believed that the
nation’s ills required some very human activism to evoke change and repair. It occurred
to him that this is a song that needed a response.
Not long after arriving in New York City, Woody moved into a
shabby room in Hanover House, 43rd Street and 6th Avenue,
near the then aptly-named Hell’s Kitchen. He engaged in prolific songwriting each
day in this period, performing in Bowery bars for change every evening. But the
surging echoes of Kate Smith’s flag-waver just wouldn’t let up.
It was all of the inspiration needed to write the first
sketch of “This Land is Your Land”, then called “God Blessed America”:
This land is your
land/This land is my land/From California/to Staten Island/
From the redwood
forest/to the Gulf Stream waters/
God Blessed America
for Me.
Reviewing Woody’s handwritten lyric, one notes where he eventually
scratched out modifications (no, “Staten Island” wouldn’t remain long—it was
altered to “New York Island” soon afterward). But the important change of
course is in the title, heard at the end of each verse. It’s believed this change
occurred during the throes of World War 2’s home front struggle. In addition to
the familiar verses most of us sang in grade school or camp, there were two
others that indicate Guthrie’s defiantly socialist viewpoint. When he
ultimately recorded the song (there were three versions he laid to vinyl), he
never resurrected the satirical edge. Neither did he record the revolutionary lyrics
in most versions. But for what it’s worth, Woody’s changes on that original
manuscript never included the deletion of these radical statements:
Was a big, high wall there/that tried to stop
me/a sign atop it said /
'Private Property'/But
on the other side/it didn't say nothing/
That side was made for
you and me.
One bright sunny
morning/In the shadow of the Steeple/
By the Relief office/I’ve
seen my people/
As they stood hungry/I
stood there wonderin’ if/
God Blessed America
for Me.
Several years later, Woody would comment, “Singing and
working and fighting are so close you can’t hardly tell where one quits and the
other begins”. One can assess that
his original penchant for populism had grown into revolutionary fervor. Woody’s
career as a musician was based on the larger needs of our society, even when
his own family had to pay the terrible price of his ‘rambling’. Living on
various coasts, performing for union meetings or in honor of progressive
political candidates, offering songs about the poor in Manhattan and then the
construction of Grand Coulee Dam, singing for those wandering out of the south
or rallying against Hitler, Woody laid down the foundation for the generation
to come. He said, “I learned all I could from the speeches of William Z.
Foster, Mother Bloor, Gurley Flynn, Blackie Myers. I heard them all and played
my songs on their platforms”.
By 1940, Woody joined forces with Pete Seeger in the Almanac
Singers. The Almanacs, as a group, joined the Communist Party, part of its New
York office’s cultural section. Woody’s guitar had, by then, been adorned with
the hand-painted epitaph, THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS, a slogan which
held great metaphoric power.
In this time he also founded an inter-racial quartet with
Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Cisco Houston, a veritable super-group he named the
Headline Singers. This group, sadly, never recorded. The material must have
stood as the height of protest song—he’d named it in opposition to a producer
who advised Woody to “stop trying to sing the headlines”. Woody told us that all
you can write is what you see.
Following service in the Merchant Marines, during which time
he struggled against Uncle Sam’s segregation of the troops, Woody returned to
cultural work. He made a series of records for Folkways including the brilliant
concept albums, ‘Songs for Sacco and Vanzetti’ and ‘Struggle’. He also became a
columnist for the Daily Worker and created an endless array of songs,
articles, sketches and visions in his ‘down-time’.
These post-war years found Guthrie relatively stable and
living in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn with his wife Marjorie Maza and
their children. Sadly, it would not be long before Huntington’s disease would drain
him of the songs and even some of the fight.
Woody died in 1967, after a slow, painful descent into the illness
he’d feared all of his life. But his legacy of empowering a nation through song
remains unshakeable.
---John Pietaro is a writer, musician and cultural organizer
from Brooklyn, New York www.DissidentArts.com
--THIS PIECE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN COUNTERPUNCH MAGAZINE--
