Trials of a Radical Folksinger
GEWEN, BARRY
Trials of a Radical Folksinger Woody Guthrie, A Life By Joe Klein Knopf. 476 pp. $15.95. Reviewed by Barry Gewen Contributor, "Commentary," "Viva" The radical folksinger Woody Guthrie was a...
...He was seven years old when his 15-year-old sister Clara burned to death in a freak accident...
...Folk music was what remained for those growing up in the '40s and '50s (together, of course, with rock and roll), and if at first Gid Tanner's Skillet Lickers were a bit too gamey for urban tastes...
...The Communists went wild over his Dust Bowl ballads and down-home manner: Guthrie represented millions of people out there on the farms who would make the Revolution...
...Woody Guthrie, with his politically topical lyrics coupled to traditional pentatonic melodies, provided the bridge across which thousands could travel into a vast new and vital musical world...
...But theGuthrie family could not have been further from the Socialists...
...Joe Klein's book successfully and authoritatively presents the real Woody Guthrie...
...The father, Charles, a land speculator and small-time politician, was a brawling, Red-baiting, Negro-hating son of the Old South, a Klan member who helped lynch a 13-year-old black boy and then set out to take care of the Socialists by branding them nigger-lovers and degenerates...
...That job would take only a moment, though it assured Guthrie of a place in history...
...By 1923, he was broke...
...He became, in short, the freight-hopping, ballad-singing Woody Guthrie everyone knows today...
...He got little help from neighbors...
...After that, everything went downhill...
...Unfortunately, Klein fails to make clear that the shift had less to do with his political convictions than with a personal need, the need for an audience...
...If on some key points Klein is not as probing, not as hard on his subject as he should be, it is perhaps out of a kind of delicacy that comes from writing about a person on whom life itself was more than hard enough...
...A trip back home to Pampa revealed that the townsfolk there wanted nothing to do with him because he was a Red...
...Soon, he was drinking heavily...
...The last gasp for the persona he had created was the publication in 1943 of his autobiography, Bound for Glory...
...Anyone who has tried to listen to an entire Guthrie recording now that the aura is gone knows what a chore that can be: His tempos are too fast, his delivery too flat...
...Klein tells the story of the early years cooly and well, offering a rich, evocative picture of life on the Oklahoma frontier, with its menagerie of cowboys and boomers, fundamentalists, populists and psychics...
...and he was writing—songs, love stories, an autobiography...
...No longer...
...His four-year-old daughter died in an accident eerily reminiscent of his sister's death...
...One evening Nora poured kerosene on her husband and set him ablaze...
...Later that year he joined his father in Pampa, Texas, where he started to demonstrate remarkableenergies: He became a skilled cartoonist and began learning oil painting...
...Klein is less satisfying, though, when he has the opportunity to be most analytic and thoughtful...
...In 1940 he arrived in New York City, where he repeated his Los Angeles experience with the East Coast Communists...
...Anyone interested in American music or radical politics or U.S...
...On this round of travels, Guthrie drifted Leftward...
...Eventually he convinced himself...
...He behaved outrageously with his friends, until even the gentle and loyal Pete Seeger was embarrassed to be with him...
...He was 17...
...history around World War II owes Joe Klein a debt of gratitude for producing a fine account of a harrowing life...
...The final 200 pages of Klein's book make grim reading...
...The neighbors blamed the mother, Nora, who was already acting peculiarly from the early effects of the hereditary disease that would afflict her son, and after her daughter's death Nora suffered from deep depressions, dizzy spells, forgetfulness...
...With a drunken father and a mother going mad, Guthrie had to fend for himself as best he could...
...Guthrie grew up a loner, surviving among his schoolmates only by acting the class clown, dancing jigs and playing the harmonica...
...Life in the Guthrie home also grew worse as a result of a sudden downward turn in the family fortunes...
...Always the performer, Guthrie responded to the Communists' adulation by doing what he could to reinforce their image of him as a "progressive hillbilly...
...He was no better with the two wives who followed...
...This was undeniably the best period of Guthrie's life, until, inevitably, the tide went out again...
...The East Coast Communists lost interest just as those on the West Coast had, and when the crowds stopped coming in 1942, Guthrie was stranded—and helpless...
...Small matters set her off screaming...
...His albums do not hold up nearly as well as the records of country music's twin pillars, the Carter Family and Jim-mie Rodgers, or thoseof theearly string bands like Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers and Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers...
...He was jailed for writing obscene letters...
...Guthrie was left with neither roots nor a community, and a year after becoming involved with the Communists he was totally adrift...
...Nor did he find it in rebellion against his father's political primitivism: It was not politics that filled Woody Guthrie's early years, it was tragedy...
...A prospering sign-painting business assured him of a steady income, and in 1933, five years after his arrival in Pampa, he married the sister of his closest friend...
...The tragedy, set down so well in this book, is that it broke his back...
...His songs became widely known at a time when the other musics available to urban and cosmopolitan ears had gone bankrupt...
...His politics, such as they were, are a period piece...
...Klein can be faulted for not looking as deeply as he should have into Guthrie's mind and motives, but that shortcoming hardly diminishes the job he has done: He has gotten behind the legend...
...He lived, miraculously, but Nora Guthrie was institutionalized permanently and Charles, as quickly as he was able, fled to relatives in the Texas Panhandle, leaving 15-year-old Woody behind...
...What isGuthrie'ssignificance for today...
...It was one thing to mislead the Communists, quite another to mislead himself...
...The first of these came in the mid-'30s, shortly after the birth of his first child...
...Guthrie was born in Okemeh, Oklahoma, in 1912, when the state was a hotbed of native radicalism, with more Socialist Party members than anywhere else in the country...
...But he was not quite ready to become a drifter...
...For a while, an Okemeh family took him in...
...He went to live in California in 1937 during his wife's pregnancy with their second child...
...In the last months of his radio show, he was losing his spark and had to find some way of renewing himself...
...It is a fluid, informative, valuable work, and very moving, for Guthrie's story toward the end of his life was a tale of almost unrelieved horror...
...Guthrie was an inspiration to them...
...Those with a curiosity about the musical origins of the '60s should not miss these pages of Klein's book...
...So, alas, is most of his music...
...Guthrie refused to see that while he was being applauded by his new friends as the voice of the people, the people whose voice he was supposed to be were not singing his songs...
...he read voraciously, exhausting the local library...
...Most important, there was a small group of radicals, notably Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress and Pete Seeger, whose politics were intertwined with a genuine interest in folk music...
...In the postwar period, modern composers in the classic tradition, like Cage, Stockhausen and Boulez, were busy destroying the distinction between music and noise in order to persuade audiences that their noise was music...
...Yet Guthrie's initial flight from his family would be repeated over and over again...
...He may not have known what Communism was?his heroes, he declared, were Jesus Christ and Will Rogers—but before long Guthrie was one of thecPUSA's most ardent defenders...
...Yet Guthrie did play an important and historic role in American culture...
...He rode boxcars, lived in hobo jungles, spent nights in jails, played his guitar and sang his songs for the down-and-outs who were his traveling companions...
...By 1939 he had embraced the Communists (though not necessarily Communism...
...He was looking for a public...
...jazz performers, beginning with Ornette Coleman, were assiduously "deconstructing" their own tradition for the sakeof what they called free jazz but most others called anarchy...
...Never one to stay in a single place for long, however, he was back on the road again less than a year later...
...The disease set in some time during these years and he slowly began wasting away mentally and physically...
...Lomax has remarked that the '60s folk song revival began when Woody Guthrie met Pete Seeger in 1940, and there seems little reason to dispute this...
...There were more concerts, more rallies, more parties...
...Guthrie began drifting away from his life and his family in Pampa...
...The picture that comes through is not that of an outsized artist but of an irresponsible husband...
...He saw first-hand the conditions of the Okies in California, and the anger he felt boiled over into songs...
...Even the beards and bluejeans they wore were in the Guthrie manner...
...Guthrie found that his concentration was gone...
...There was only one place left for a "progressive hillbilly...
...To Klein, Guthrie's travels were merely a matter of a big man outgrowing a small town...
...In the years following World War II especially, his life became a terrifying succession of failed starts, drunken sprees, tantrums, flights, rejections, tragedies...
...he played his harmonica and now guitar with sufficient skill to perform professionally...
...The declining Guthries were shunned as "white trash" by the upwardly-mobile townsfolk...
...they preferred Roy Acuff and Bing Crosby...
...Yet the only place the curious could turn for information about the man was his own unreliable versions of his past, in particular his romanticized autobiography, Bound for Glory...
...Then they left for the West and Guthrie hit the road for the first time, hitching rides and living in hobo camps...
...That was the second major turn for Guthrie, the most fateful of his life...
...He treated his wife unspeakably, abandoning her and the children whenever the urge struck him—and the urge seemed to strike hardest when there was some responsibility that should have kept him at home...
...Not even the Hitler-Stalin Pact could shake his allegiance...
...In 1927 came the final collapse of the Guthrie household...
...There were two major turning points in Guthrie's life that transformed him into the kind of person books are written about...
...Reviewed by Barry Gewen Contributor, "Commentary," "Viva" The radical folksinger Woody Guthrie was a living legend...
...The dangers of such self-deception quickly became apparent when the California radicals tired of his simple music and his audience dwindled...
...With the exception of a few songs like "Pastures of Plenty" and "1913 Massacre," Guthrie's work sounds banal, even empty...
...pop melodies in the line of Gershwin, Kern and Porter had lost their balance and drowned either in the syrupy confections of the later Rodgers and Ham-merstein or the acid broths of Stephen Sondheim...
...The guitar-strumming, war-protesting, civil rights-championing activists of the '60s were accurately dubbed " Woody's Children...
...His moment had passed...
...In California Guthrie managed to become a professional musician, and even succeeded in establishing a name for himself as a Los Angeles radio entertainer with his own show...
...We get brief, competent sketches of Oklahoma radicalism and early country music, and a clear-eyed, rounded portrait of a special person who had talent bursting out in every direction...
...What he found were the Communists...
...By the time he died of Huntington's chorea, a hereditary brain disease, in the mid-'60s, thousands of younger people were imitating him, and millions more were singing his songs...
...he could no longer work...
...Charles, who at one time owned as many as 30 farms, began to lose his money j ust as everyone else in the area was getting rich from Oklahoma's oil boom...
...Obviously, Guthrie did not inherit his later radicalism...
...They were looking for a radical "man of the people...
...Death came in 1967, but the basisof his legend had died 24 years before...
Vol. 63 • December 1980 • No. 23
