Woody Guthrie

[bobbieinok]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030721&s=earle

article by Steve Earle

suggested by DU thread

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

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Woody Guthrie was what folks who don't believe in anything would call an anomaly. Admittedly, the intersection of space and time at the corner of July 14, 1912, and Okemah, Oklahoma, was a long shot to produce anything like a national treasure.

Woody was born in one of the most desolate places in America, just in time to come of age in the worst period in our history. Then again, the Dust Bowl itself was no accident either.

After the Civil War, the United States government and the railroads, mistakenly believing that the Great Plains would make swell farmland, killed off all the buffalo, effectively neutralizing the indigenous population, and opened up vast expanses of prairie to homesteading. Problem was that the head-high buffalo grass that thrived in the thin topsoil had slowly adapted to its deceptively hostile environment over several thousand years. It took less than seventy years for nonnative water- and mineral-greedy crops to wring every last nutrient from the traumatized earth, creating a vast man-made desert and setting in motion a mass migration of folks from Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma out west to California, where they hoped against hope for a better life.

Most found only bigotry and exploitation at the hands of wealthy fruit and vegetable growers. Woody found an audience. He sang in the migrant camps and on the picket lines up and down the lush interior valleys. A few well-meaning outsiders were sympathetic to the plight of the migrants, but they were college boys who used a lot of big words like "proletariat" and "bourgeoisie" and unintentionally made the Okies feel small. But Woody was one of their own. He spoke their language and he sang their songs, and every once in a while he'd slip in one of those big words in between a tall tale and an outlaw ballad. As he became more outraged he became more radical, but his songs and his patter always maintained a sense of humor and hope. He said, "I ain't a Communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life."

Woody arrived at his social conscience organically, over a period of years. Socialism made a lot of sense in the Great Depression. Capitalism had, after all, essentially collapsed and wasn't showing any significant signs of reviving in Pampa, Texas, where Woody spent his late adolescence. The ultimate hillbilly autodidact, he divided his time between teaching himself to play several musical instruments only tolerably well and frequent marathon sessions in the public library, where he clandestinely educated himself. He followed his own haphazard curriculum, one book leading him to another in an endless scavenger hunt for answers that invariably posed even deeper questions. An acute interest in psychology segued into medieval mysticism and from there he stumbled into Eastern philosophy and spiritualism. He went through a poetry period, a Shakespeare period, even a law book period. When, a few years later, he began to travel around the Southwest by thumb and freight train, his mind was wide open when he encountered crusty old radicals who handed out copies of The Little Red Song Book and preached the Gospel of Union. It was only natural that when he began to make up his own songs, he drew on the despair and pain he had witnessed all his life and the lofty ideas that ricocheted around in his head for inspiration. He became the living embodiment of everything a people's revolution is supposed to be about: that working people have dignity, intelligence and value above and beyond the market's demand for their labor.

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