RAMBLIN’ MAN: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie
By ED CRAY
W. W. Norton, 2004, 488 pp, $60 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
“Only thing that is higher than that dust is your debts”, wrote Woody Guthrie from Texas in 1934, as black clouds of dust up to fifteen hundred metres high blew in on windstorms that flattened 2,000 kilometre fronts. “Dust settles but debts don’t” he added, as over a million poor farmers, “dust bowl” refugees, streamed out from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, many driven out by drought, many by farm mechanisation, but most evicted, debt-ridden, by landlords and bankers who wanted to turn their small farms into vast, super-profitable cattle ranges.
Woody Guthrie, whose Dust Bowl Ballads recorded in bitter-sweet song the plight of these refugees, was, as Ed Cray’s superb biography of Woody shows, a songwriter and socialist of enduring relevance. Born in 1912 in Oklahoma, Woody was named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie after the Democrat Presidential nominee by his business-speculating father. Luckily, Woody didn’t inherit his father’s, or the President’s, love of capitalism and terror of socialism. More fortunately, Woody imbibed his parents’ love of music, and learned his trade from the white country singers, and the black gospel and blues artists.
One attempt after another to “find himself”, through, as Woody put it, the “superstition business” of faith-healing and fortune-telling, then Rosicrucian tracts, Eastern mysticism and the Baptist Church, finally ended with socialism. Whilst vast ranks of the poor starved, Woody observed, acres of peaches were left to rot because bringing too many to market would lower peach prices and profits for the big growers. As well as the existence of private plenty amidst mass poverty during the Great Depression, the activities of vigilantes busting cotton-pickers’ strikes also fuelled Woody’s politicisation.
To his new-found cause, dedication to the poor, Woody offered his special gift of song. He transfixed and inspired audiences at political benefits and rallies organised by the US Communist Party, a party which Woody saw as having the best fighters for the poor and the most unflinching opponents of the injustices of wealth, race and power. Cray is unable to resolve whether Woody ever joined the party, but he favours the majority opinion that Woody was too eclectic (he melded primitive Christianity with communism, Jesus with Lenin), and too independent, to have been useful, or happy, as a member (“he was not an organisation guy”, said an editor of the Daily Worker, for which Woody wrote almost 300 columns). Nevertheless, Woody was a committed socialist, and was proudly loyal to the Communist Party for better and, occasionally, worse.
Woody’s popularity outweighed his subversive politics for even the capitalist state and entertainment industry on rare occasions. RCA recorded Woody’s first album in 1940 (Dust Bowl Ballads) and the Bonneville Power Administration (in the Department of the Interior) commissioned a suite of songs on the building of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River (although his minder was wary enough to edit out “the bad stuff” from his lyrics because “he was in the class struggle pretty deep”). These tastes of commercial success were the exceptions to an otherwise frigid reception by the cultural arm of capitalism. Woody was, for example, a member of the Almanac Singers (formed by Pete Seeger) in the early forties, who were loved by unions but blacklisted by record companies and radio stations.
The war years had mixed outcomes for Woody. Pro-war once the Soviet Union was invaded by Hitler, the Communist Party found sudden semi-respectability and this encouraged a rush of patriotic, pro-war songs from Woody’s pen, most of them “quickly forgotten doggerel”. Woody, from a simplistic sense of anti-fascist ‘class unity’, also refused to sing for unions which broke the CP-endorsed ‘no strike’ pledge during the war.
On the other hand, whilst in the Merchant Marine and ferrying 3,000 troops across the Atlantic, and caught up in a particularly frightening submarine attack, the civilian Woody courageously led a sing-a-long for the terrified soldiers down in the hold where they all faced certain death should a torpedo strike. Woody then overcame the Army’s policy of racial segregation by making the continuation of his performance dependent on the black soldiers joining in an inter-racial sing-a-long.
Woody survived submarines and mines but did not survive the FBI which blacklisted the anti-racist balladeer from the Merchant Marine. Drafted by the Army but reprieved by the Third Reich’s surrender on the same day, a relieved Woody took to writing, completing his wonderful autobiography, Bound For Glory, the words dancing a vivid portrait of his life and showcasing his “intense interest in the world and the people in it” (although, says Cray, Woody tamed his revolutionary politics to a “tepid, back-the-underdog populism”).
Music also continued to consume Woody, who played with the black blues artists, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Huddie Leadbetter (‘Leadbelly’). Woody’s 1947 songs on Sacco and Vanzetti (the two Italian-American anarchists framed and executed for a payroll murder in 1927) often reached the poetic heights of his earlier years, despite lapses into “political speeches in verse”.
Signs of Woody’s eventual fate, however, began to appear with the onset of the rare, genetic, incurable nervous system disease, Huntington’s chorea. His gradual physical and mental deterioration was marked by memory loss, depression, concentration lapses, jerky movements, incoherent speech, shabby appearance, unpredictable mood swings, and sexual behaviour disorders. He became abusive and violent to his family (two more divorces brought his total of failed marriages to three). His performances became embarrassing. As energy and creativity drained from him, he produced “no new songs of real note” from this time. Alcohol was Woody’s solution to these symptoms but this only made his psychotic reactions worse.
Despite the curse of Huntington’s, the attentions of the FBI (who didn’t drop him from their ‘watchlist’ until 1955) and the weight of the blacklist (RCA and Decca dumped him, and Hollywood ditched a movie deal for his autobiography), his politics survived. Woody kept his political wits, and wit, about him – when visited in a psychiatric hospital by two of his left-wing friends, he deflected their concern over his welfare with his concern for theirs: “I’m worried about how you boys are doing. Out there, if you guys say you’re communists, they’ll put you in jail. But in here, I can get up and say I’m a communist and all they say is ‘Ah, he’s crazy’. You know, this is the last free place in America”.
The last thirteen of Woody’s 55 years were spent in state psychiatric hospitals, dying slowly until the end came in 1967. From roughly 1937 to 1947, Woody was at the height of his creative power – “before then he was not yet Woody Guthrie, after that he was no longer Woody Guthrie”.
Woody was no saint. Cray doesn’t soft-pedal on Woody’s personal failings, not all of which were entirely reducible to the effects of Huntington’s. Woody could be ill-mannered, self-engrossed, irresponsible, undisciplined and immature. He was, more often, supportive and generous. An eternal child in many respects, Woody was, despite his faults, impossible to hate and easy to love.
Woody left generations of musicians in his debt. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, The Indigo Girls, Bob Geldof, Billy Bragg, and Ani DeFranco, amongst many others, all readily acknowledge the inspiration of Woody’s songs informed by his vision of social responsibility. Woody’s achievement was to create compelling music, whose lyrical grace and melodic simplicity, sung with a voice which “bit at the heart”, was given lasting moral verve from, as Pete Seeger put it, Woody’s “strong sense of right and wrong”.
Woody’s songs succeeded in articulating the humanity of the poor and the abused. Woody put his philosophy as well as anyone - “I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it’s hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard its run you down or rolled over you, no matter what colour, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself”.