Whose land?

...On the contrary, just because he is a conscious writer, most academics tended to dismiss him...

...Charley was a bigoted populist, a physical fitness enthusiast, a brilliant stump speaker, and a vicious foe of Eugene V. Debs, Mother Jones, and the other socialist "kumrids" whose appeal to poor farmers seemed a clear threat to Charley's land speculation plans...

...He would have been the first to jump on the Debs bandwagon had he been a contemporary of Charley's...

...Klein does a superb job of dealing with the political issues in Guthrie's life and those around him...

...Whitman failed partly because his form was too radical to be accepted by most readers...

...Klein points out, "It was a strange time: Fiddle and guitar music, the old folk culture, was both dying and about to be reborn with a vengeance...

...There was an all-black town near Okemah and, as in other parts of the South and Southwest, the cultural mixing was extensive...

...Their marriage was stormy but also filled with Woody's early literary success and unforgettable moments like Ado's Hootenanny-Bar Mitzvah...

...Long before, Woody had absorbed the great traditional sources that have defined our folk styles from the beginning of our history—the unique mix of Anglo-Celtic and black lore and music, which never combined anywhere else as they did here...

...But Woody's old nemesis was never out of the picture, and it is clear that the death of his own daughter in a fire (the result probably of faulty electrical wiring) was only a predictable prelude to the onset of his Huntington's chorea...

...But like Pete Seeger, whose genius runs in just the same direction, Woody wrote songs that often bridged the gap between folk and popular culture...

...Guthrie wanted to have the same impact on mass audiences as the folk materials he grew up on had among the people of his region...

...his daughter was burned to death in another fire...

...One of Woody Guthrie's close friends told me some years ago that when he spotted some erotic materials in a Guthrie archive he pushed them as far back as he could...

...I am not a folklorist," he wrote, "I'm a poor folkist," and he tried to use the rich resources of folk speech to create a literature and song that would have the power of folk tradition itself...

...Their failure (like the Wobblies' before them) had a great deal to do with the unions' decision to move in exactly the opposite direction...

...His description of the Almanac song collective is a mouth-watering introduction to an amazing group of writers and singers who influenced all the folk artists of the time...

...He finds it necessary to rank the sexual appetites of the Almanac singers (Millard Lampell's was high, Pete Seeger's was low...

...He sees the dogma of Communist Party policy as an authoritarianism bound to lose when it meets the vivacious and unpredictable artists it tried to control...

...Another Oklahoman named Ralph Ellison has described eloquently the lack of separation he felt as a young boy...

...But if the life is deeply and effectively researched, the drawback is Klein's inability to deal with the art of Woody Guthrie—and that is a serious liability...

...It was only Alan Lomax who immediately understood Guthrie's deep connections with traditional culture...

...But here as elsewhere, Klein weakens his study by lapsing into gossip and caricature...

...He has appropriately decided to let it all hang out, and the result is the fullest description of Guthrie's life we will ever have...

...Guthrie once wrote to Pete Seeger, "I must steer clear of Whitman's swimmy waters...

...He knows that Woody was bright and creative...

...Someone still needs to do a full-length study of the Almanacs, who attempted to translate folk sources into materials that would inspire working people to create a socialist America through their unions...

...It was a big mistake...

...There is no doubt that he thought himself a communist, though he often liked to call himself a "com-monist...

...Klein is aware of the influence of the Carter Family (Woody knew their repertoire and copied their guitar licks) and recording stars like "The Sing-'ing Brakeman," Jimmie Rodgers (Woody's phrasing and excellent diction owed a great deal to Rodgers...

...Charley's first house burned to the ground...

...While Charley Guthrie tried to rise to an upper-middle-class station, Woody attempted to keep himself close to the poor people who created and supported folk tradition...

...Klein's biography begins with a brilliant evocation of the activities of Woody's father, Charley Guthrie, a small-town hustler and politician who settled with his young wife, Nora Belle, near Okemah, Oklahoma (though it was still Indian Territory) at the turn of the century...

...He is referring to the impact of recordings (strong since the 1920s) and radio, a new development which would give Guthrie his first access to an audience...

...And in later years Woody seemed to read his family's history and his own as a series of predetermined events that could end only in catastrophe...

...But in a way reminiscent of Picasso, he was never under party discipline—after a while the commissars apparently gave up...

...Klein never considers the possibility that there could be such rich sources in an area so seemingly barren...

...Woody's writing lacked the technical skills which Whitman had perfected...

...The most poignant section of the book is Klein's description of Woody's relationship with his second wife, Mar-jorie Greenblatt, a modern dancer with whom Woody lived for many years in Coney Island...

...In the long run, Klein's book will surely change that...

...His great anthem, "This Land Is Your Land," which Klein shows was written to counteract "God Bless America," was bought for commercials by Ford and United Airlines...

...Later on, Woody served a short sentence for sending similarly erotic letters to an unresponsive young woman...

...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein teaches literature at California State University in Fresno and has specialized in folklore and folk music...

...And so Klein misses the most important aspect of Guthrie's significance—his partially successful attempt to function as an artist within a. body of materials that by definition are anonymous and the result of a folk tradition that takes hundreds of years to achieve its inimitable results, what folklorists call "the folk process...

...But Klein has a hard time understanding the sources of Woody's genius...

...Marjorie hung in as long as she could, even through a third marriage and the last agonizing stages of the disease...

...But coming as Klein does from a rock background (the book was inspired by an interview Klein did with Arlo Guthrie for Rolling Stone), Klein seems unaware of the complex materials and the significant mix that Woody inherited...

...His most recent recording is "The Bluestein Family Album: Sowin' on the Mountain...

...Woody was almost a mirror image of his father...

...Klein is wrong in suggesting that academic folklorists have created a myth about Guthrie...

...it was rumored that Nora had set the fire that almost killed Charley during one of her increasingly serious fits of hysteria, which were ultimately diagnosed as Huntington's chorea, an incurable and hereditary disease...

...millions of our school children sing it by heart but have no idea that Woody wrote it...

...The makings of a classic Horatio Alger success story were all there, but Charley seemed fated not to succeed...

...The motifs—fire and disease—were present from the beginning...

...Klein fills in Woody's early wandering years, the first stirrings of interest in music, his learning to play fiddle, mandolin, and guitar from friends and relatives, his marriage to Mary, the sister of a member of his first musical group called the Corncob Trio, and his inability to stand still in any place for long...

...And that explains his espousal of radical ideologies and causes...

...It seemed to him (as to a great many others in the 1930s) that the communists were the ones who wanted most to create a society open to the salubrious influences of the common people...

...Bess Lomax is "virginal," the "sanest person ever associated with the group...

...Like James Joyce, Guthrie was not only intrigued by oral sex but had a strong penchant for writing about it to Marjorie in great detail...

...Not Joe Klein...

...Like Whitman he intended to bring his genius to a mass audience...