Woody Guthrie, American Radical

Although this site is called Ralston Creek Review, we have not yet published any formal reviews.  That is about to change, with a review of a book by Will Kaufman, a professor of American literature and American culture at the University of Central Lancashire in England.  The book. published by the University of Illinois Press in 2011, is entitled Woody Guthrie, American Radical.

Woody Guthrie is often seen as the quintessential American folksinger:  a simple man hitchhiking and riding the rails, singing the songs of the common man to the workers who make this country great.  We remember his songs like “Roll On Columbia,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Ballad of Tom Joad” and of course “This Land is Your Land.”  We see is influence in the music of Bob Dylan; Phil Ochs; Peter, Paul and Mary; Bruce Springsteen, U-2 and countless other artists.  However, most of us know very little about the person he really was.  Much of the legend that Guthrie’s life has become is derived from his book, Bound for Glory – which he himself called an “autobiographical novel.”  It was based on his life, but was selective to the extent that it became part fiction.

John Greenway, one of my former teachers at the University of Colorado, published a book called American Folksongs of Protest back in 1970.  In the final chapter of that book, Mr. Greenway devotes some 30 pages to Woody Guthrie’s life and songs and manages to convey what may be a more accurate, though acerbic, view of Guthrie’s life than what Woody himself wanted us to believe.

Will Kaufman’s book, Woody Guthrie, American Radical, is based almost entirely on Guthrie’s own writings, including many that have never been published.  He was given the opportunity to review the extensive collection of the Woody Guthrie Foundation as well as those of several families with personal collections of correspondence with and about Guthrie.

The result is not a biography, but a scholarly and eye-opening look at Woody Guthrie as an entertainer whose art was influenced by his leftist political views.  Woody does not seem to have ever been a member of he Communist Party, but he did write a regular column for the Party’s Daily Worker publication.  He seems to have been a pacifist at heart but his strongly anti-Fascist beliefs made him a strong advocate for the entry of the United States into World War II to fight against the evil he saw represented in Adolph Hitler.

These and other little known facts are covered in great detail in this book.  There are three that I would like to mention briefly in this review.  The first is Guthrie’s tenure as part of the Almanac Singers, which was a group consisting originally of Woody, Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell and Lee Hays.  The Almanacs began singing informally in 1940 or 1941 and continued to make music with various members (including, from time to time Burl Ives, Josh White, Sis Cunningham, Bess Lomax Hawes, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry and several others).  They sang topical songs with folk-based melodies.  Those songs were performed at union gatherings and hootenannies for the workers and the common people.  Their first album of politically charged songs was widely criticized for its socialist/Communist bias, even drawing the ire of Eleanor Roosevelt.  By the time their third album was released and the group was singing strongly anti-Fascist songs such as “Reuben James” and “Dear Mr. President,” Mrs. Roosevelt remarked to folklorist Alan Lomax that she had listened to the songs and “thought that they were swell.”  She was even playing the record for the staff of the Office of Civilian Defense.

 The next relates to the concerts that have come to be known as the “Peekskill Riots.”  In the summer of 1949, actor/singer Paul Robeson had become increasingly outspoken about civil rights and critical of the Ku Klux Klan, leading to his compelled appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  On August 27, 1949, Robeson was scheduled to perform a concert to benefit the Civil Rights Congress at Peekskill, New York.  Shortly before the concert was to begin a local mob, influenced by the Klan, attacked those in attendance with rocks and baseball bats and hanged Paul Robeson in effigy.  The concert was cancelled and re-scheduled for September 4, 1949.  Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and other socially-conscious entertainers were added to the bill for this second concert.  Although there were no incidents during the performances, afterwards the local police directed the exiting traffic into an ambush.  For several miles, mobs threw rocks and bottles at the departing vehicles, breaking windshields, overturning cars and beating concertgoers.  The car in which Guthrie, Seeger, Seeger’s infant child and several others were riding was attacked and the window broken.  Woody placed a shirt over the widow to keep the glass from shattering.  Lee Hays later remembered, “Wouldn’t you know it, Woody pinned up a red shirt.”

Finally, the anecdote that seems to have generated the most interest concerns Woody’s inspiration for “This Land Is Your Land.”  In 1940, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” was ubiquitous, playing on every radio and jukebox across the country.  Woody hated the song, asking, “What ‘America’ had Kate Smith been singing of?  Not the ‘big high wall’ and the painted sign saying ‘Private Property’; not the bread line ‘in the shadow of the steeple,’ by ‘the Relief Office’ where Guthrie’s ‘people…stood hungry.’  These are the first critical images in the song Guthrie initially titled ‘God Blessed America.'”  Still, Woody Guthrie loved America and its people – his people – and the completed song shows that love.  Like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” written over four decades later, what was originally meant as a strong critique of the country has been adopted as a patriotic anthem.

Woody Guthrie embraced the politics of the left and of unionism and he was radical in the ways he used his music – which he adapted from America’s folk music – to present his political views.  These facts are superbly presented in Will Kaufman’s book.  Woody was not a politician, however, so this book should not be seen as a definitve biography of this complex man.  As John Greenway states, “Not all of Guthrie’s compositions are songs of overt protest.  Of an estimated one thousand songs in his manuscript collection [now about 3000 have been collected] I found only about 140 whose basic theme is one of protest; the remainder fell into conventional folksong categories – love, humor, crime … and even nursery songs.”  Woody Guthrie, American Radical presents a very detailed look at what is only one facet of the man’s work.  It is well researched, well written, and certainly worth reading for anyone interested in American culture from the Dust Bowl years to the 1950s or early 1960s, or in the life and times of the radical who may truly be called “America’s Folksinger” (which was the name of his 2002 biography for elementary school students written by Karen Mueller Coombs).