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Woody Sez: What Woody Guthrie Can Still Tell Us About Protest Singing

Lucy Brouwer takes a look at Guthrie's life and influence.

Posted 3rd February 2012, 2:02pm in Blogs by Lucy Brouwer
Lucy Brouwer

Lucy Brouwer

Woody Sez: What Woody Guthrie Can Still Tell Us About Protest Singing Riots, recession, depression, occupation. We are living in highly politicised times. As young people become more engaged with the issues that effect them, arguments about politics in music rage on (see Jamie Milton’s recent DIY blog).

Reading Dorian Lynskey’s weighty but highly readable tome, 33 Revolutions Per Minute, a very thorough history of the protest song, has lead me to keep looking for instances of the successful marriage of politics and pop. Invariably this entails looking to the past.

This week, thanks to Glasgow’s annual festival of all things folk, Celtic Connections, I got the chance to see ‘Woody Sez’ an exuberant play telling the life story of iconic protest singer Woody Guthrie through his songs.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born 100 years ago this year but as the play illustrates, his highly politicised brand of folk music still holds relevance for anyone looking to engage with the tricky art of protest song writing.

Born in Oklahoma, Guthrie began his musical career by busking with his harmonica as a child. Moving to Texas in search of work in the 1930s, he witnessed “the Great Dust Storm” in April 1935. It was to be a turning point. The barren lands left by the effects of years of drought were dubbed ‘the Dust Bowl’ and hundreds of people fled the area, hoping to find work in California. Hitchhiking and riding box cars, Woody entertained these ‘Okies’ with folk ballads and country songs. Later, as he reached California himself and saw the poverty and antipathy experienced by the Dust Bowl migrants, slowly he incorporated the lessons he was learning about socialism and hard times into his songs.

During the rest of the 1930s he made his name performing on radio and writing his column “Woody Sez” for the ‘People’s World’ newspaper. Taking advantage of the public taste for down home philosophy and what his producer (in the fictional version at least) called “This Grapes of Wrath Okie Act”, he played up his hillbilly persona and maintained he was performing for people who “couldn’t afford a radio.”

Never able to settle in one place for long, by 1940 Woody was in New York City, where among other things he shared bills with Pete Seeger and Lead Belly; recorded folk songs for well-connected archivist Alan Lomax and narrated a documentary about the Grand Coulee Dam.

Prior to the US’s involvement in World War 2, Guthrie had performed anti-war songs with the left-wing Almanac Singers; Post-Pearl Harbour though, the group demonstrated their disgust for Hitler. Guthrie in particular embraced this anti-Nazi stance, painting his guitar with the now famous slogan ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’.

After a stint in the Merchant Marine, he returned to the USA in 1944 and became increasingly associated with the communist party (although he was never a member, he was “black listed, red listed and put on every colour list.”)

The ‘Woody Sez’ version of his story peters out here, as Guthrie began to succumb to the symptoms of the hereditary Huntington’s disease.

In the 1960s Bob Dylan visited Guthrie, then living in a hospital near New York, but by this time it was difficult for Guthrie to speak or move, let alone sing. (Dylan was to learn much about his direct playing style from another performer for whom Woody was mentor, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.)

Woody Guthrie’s influence has lasted long past his death in 1967. Dylan and the ‘60s folk revival owed him much; Bruce Springsteen has covered his songs and Billy Bragg, with Wilco, has recorded the Mermaid Avenue albums of Woody’s previously unheard lyrics set to new tunes. Joe Strummer adopted the name Woody as a teenager and there is a marked resemblance between his pre-Clash self and Guthrie. The hobo troubadour touting acoustic guitar and cigarette being an enduring style statement for the budding protest singer.

The latest project to embrace Woody’s spirit and mine the archives of unrecorded material are Yim Yames (My Morning Jacket’s Jim James), Jay Farrar, Anders Parker, and Will Johnson who have recorded an album entitled ‘New Multitudes’, under the direction of Woody’s daughter Nora.

Perhaps Guthrie’s greatest legacy is as a self-mythologiser. As the cast of ‘Woody Sez’ pointed out, “An artist is a person who’s been out of work so long they learn to do something else.” However the important fact about Guthrie remains that he was directly radicalised by his own experiences. By staying in touch with his own naïve roots he was able to communicate directly to the people he was singing about.

Easier perhaps, in the 1930s than it would be now, but still possible – Dorian Lynskey cites songs by musicians including Egypt’s Ramy Essam, the UK’s Grace Petrie  and demonstrates the resurgence of the genre.

Tom Robinson (for BBC Introducing) has noted that though many of the UK’s best polemicists over the last ten years have been MCs, there are many artists breaking through who seem unafraid to reflect the times in their music - and these are the ones walking in Woody Guthrie’s road weary shoes.
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