The Truth About Woody Guthrie at 100
But the New York Times ran the most left-wing, guilt-tripping contribution to his legacy in its Weekend section last Sunday. The piece, written by Lawrence Downes, begins by noting that to attend the gala final concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., one has to buy tickets that range from $80 to $175. Guthrie was a singer who in a good year may have earned $70 in one month — when he was employed by CBS to do a radio program — and such a price for people to listen to his songs would have infuriated him.
The publicity for the concert reads: “Through his unique music, words and style, Guthrie was able to bring attention and understanding to the critical issues of his day.” To which I would say, sometimes. He came to attention by what is most likely his most outstanding work, Dust Bowl Ballads, in which Guthrie chronicled the impact of the dust storms throughout the Southwest that drove thousands of poor farmers from Oklahoma and elsewhere to flee however they could to California and the Salinas Valley, where they could eke out a living picking crops.
No one who listens to these songs can doubt his talent, his humor, and his concern for those he knew well. “Talking’ Dust Bowl Blues” is filled with humor and irreverence, and although imitated by scores who wrote their own talking blues for years thereafter, nothing comes close to Woody’s originals.
But Mr. Downes’ concern is that there has been a “sentimental softening and warping of Woody’s reputation,” because the truth was that the “saintly folk hero” was really an “angry vigilante — a fascist-hating, Communist-sympathizing rabble-rouser.” He complains that his most well-known song, “This Land is Your Land,” has been “truncated and misinterpreted” because the “pan is off the flame.”
Mr. Downes is obviously referring to the last two verses, which Guthrie himself never sang — and which now both Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen regularly include — about how he saw a sign that said “Private property, no trespassing, but on the other side it said nothing, that side was made for you and me.”
Just don’t try to trespass on any of Bruce’s million-dollar properties — unless you want the police arriving and throwing you in the hoosegow, which Woody himself knew quite a lot about.
Guthrie detested the National SOCIALIST WORKERS Party?
Wow, “Socialist Workers” sounds really “right-wing fascist” to me /sarc
See the unhinged venom directed at any Dem who doesn’t tow the Dem party line and you’ll understand the communist hatred of the Nazis
Astute. Of course, the leftists use Commie/Nazi antipathy to convince the unschooled that Naziism was a right wing movement.
Arlo “Alice’s Restaurant” Guthrie is now a Republican… fitting, nuts to Mr. Downes.
Supports Ron Paul, so perhaps Arlo is more Libertarian. (Alices Restaurant is both a pro drug and anti forgien war song which fits in some Libertarian thinking). I suspsect that Arlo isn’t a Reagan or Romney Republican…
But you don’t know that, do you? Arlo is a Republican but you assume that he is a Libertarian because he supported Ron Paul in 2008. He is either a Republican or a Libertarian and is not both. Since he says he is a Republican, I take him at his word and he very well could be a Romney supporter. Smart people are very hard to categorize because they do their own thinking. ABO2012
Arlo Guthrie was a serious musician who associated with other serious musicians. I had a friend who met him while taking a lesson with Santoli in Philly. Santoli had a reputation a musician’s musician…
training guys who intended to play for what passes as a living in the music trade. That AG would even know him, let alone go to him for lessons, pegs him as simething other than a freeloading minstrel.
He is also a convert to Catholocism.
I have no clue whether or not Arlo Guthrie is a Republican, though the claim that he is a Libertarian certainly seems like a good possibility. Nevertheless, what I remember most fondly from the Arlo Guthrie concert I attended in the mid-1980s was his song mocking Jimmy Carter about the “killer rabbit” incident. I found it here on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlO6OwSXbrE
I think maybe Bob Dylan saw what happened to Woody and took care to not let the Left do the same to him. He took quite a bit of flak (including from his then-girlfriend) for refusing to write protest songs and publicly support the anti-war movement.
Bob Dylan made himself somewhat of a expert on Woody, and visited him in the asylum. On the folk music movement he said “I snuck in when no-one was watching the door”. He told Joan Baez “Ain’t gonna change people with songs”.
It is telling that the old protest songs seem outdated and that the ‘old’ rock stars seem stuck in the past.
He was naïve enough to think, it seems, that songs really could make people into good Reds.
Well, he certainly convinced the good ‘community members’ over at Oak Publications (formerly ‘Peoples Songs’, a creation of the CPUSA) that such songs would make people into good Reds. And among the folkies of the 60s (now the respected leaders of the academy and the media and Hollywood), the combination of free love and veiled antiAmericanism packaged inside the sweetened capsules of American traditional music, that convincing worked like a charm.
Woody was erratic, a creative free-thinker looking for The Answer without exerting much skull sweat beyond parroting the latest leftist slogans. And because he was one of the sacred Folk (as Obama also was), and not part of the WASP establishment, the organized lefties put that useful idiot of Okemah, OK to very effective use as a front man.
Another false chorus: This land is my land, this land ain’t your land, I got a shotgun, and you ain’t got one.
Woody didn’t live long enough to discover that socialism (much less communism) just doesn’t work. Anyway, anyone who believe that these hacks — Bruce Springsteen, Tom Morello and Ry Cooder — are geniuses knows nothing about music.
“Woody didn’t live long enough to discover that socialism (much less communism) just doesn’t work.”
Woody Guthrie died in 1967 so that means he lived long enough to know what happened under the entire regimes of Lenin and Stalin and also the worst years of Chairman Mao. He missed Pol Pot but he saw Fidel Castro’s rise and the bloodletting of the Fidelistas. He never got to read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago but there were plenty of people who wrote about what the Communists were doing – or had done – before Guthrie died. Of course this assumes he was interested and I don’t know if he was; some people have selective blindness about things they don’t want to see.
Pete Seeger, on the other hand, has seen all of Mao’s regime, Pol Pot’s rise and fall, all of Castro’s regime and has had ample opportunity to read Solzhenitsyn and STILL thinks Communism is a great idea. I cannot begin to understand that. He must be a very VERY stupid man.
I meant — and should have written — that Guthrie did not live to see the economic collapse of socialism around the world. Mea culpa. Anyway, I wasn’t defending Guthrie. The only reason I listen to him is because Bob Dylan admires him.
Folk music and communism go together like soup and sammiches. As a guitar player who cut his finger calluses on folkie stuff, I loved Guthrie, Ochs, Seeger, all those guys. Cooder’s “Diddy Wah Diddy” knew no equal. Funny how I outgrew the music when I outgrew the liberal politics.
But there were quite a few folkie “free thinkers” out there. They were the ones who ended up being blackballed from those little musical gulags they call “Folk Festivals.” In the 80′s, I once arrived about two hours early at a U of P Cherry Tree Folk Club to make sure I got a good seat to see guitarist John Fahey. I got invited in to help set up, and was rewarded with meeting Fahey and hearing his stories of sharing the bill with the “limousine” folkies who pretended to still be fighting for “the cause.” He seemed to have a real hard spot for Joni Mitchell, who would demand her stage time “on arrival” so as not to mix with the hoi polloi. Fahey, a genius of open tuning composition, had no time for the political posers and granola crunchers. But he faded away into obscurity when the folk concert venues snubbed him. He died a down and out alcoholic, probably a little too much of an independent thinker. You want to treat yourself, pick up one of his Christmas albums.
“Diddy Wah Diddy?” I haven’t had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Cooder’s interpretation, but I’ll swear by Blind Blake’s original. That’s the real stuff.
I’d agree with you, but I was never a country blues purist. Never had the ear or the patience for the scratchy old 78s. Cooder was a very good interpreter of the old stuff. There was a cadre of 50s and 60s folkies who learned at the feet of guys like Robert Johnson and John Hurt. It must have seemed like guitar heaven to have been there for that.
understood!
Fahey was brilliant, but got Irish Disease. Cooder puts on a great show. Jorma Kaukonen is great as well.
Second the respect for John Fahey. Try “Old Fashioned Love” if anyone wants to check him out.
Back in the 1930s during the Depression, a whole lot of people were beginning to think that democratic capitalism had broken down. Some became enamored with fascism; others with communism.
The U.S.S.R. had acquired a certain moral cachet owing to its orators ranting about the working class being liberated from oppression and so on. (The truth about the U.S.S.R. would not emerge till years later.)
And of course in the 1940s, those who thought there was some good in the U.S.S.R. couldn’t exactly be attacked, since the U.S.S.R. was our ally at the time.
So I don’t have any antipathy toward those who were communists back then. My own grandfather on my mother’s side was one of those.
But after the Soviet invasion and crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, anyone in the West who continued to rationalize the Soviet Union’s actions was clearly an apologist for imperialism and totalitarianism.
Howard Fast was one of those who saw the light.
Our grandchildren will be speaking similarly of those who voted for Democrats.
I can hope.
No, you are wrong, and engaging in the the worst sort of “I’ll draw the moral line at my own family”. One either has a moral perspective or one doesn’t, regardless of whether one’s cousin Ted Bundy was a lovely child or one’s favorite uncle collected money money for Al Capone. In case anyone slept through the death of five million during the Ukrainian Famine, the Moscow show trials, held from 1936-1938 made it clear once and for all that the USSR was a psychotic dictatorship. Your grandfather is not excused. I don’t excuse my mother. In the face of overwhelming evidence, she chose to support genocidal lunatics, and so did your grandfather. Face the truth.
Charles Wesley is reputed to have said: “(Unfortunately) the Devil has all the good songs.”
The Devil has some of the better song-writers too.
As Tom Lehrer sang in “Folk Song Army”:
The late Larry Norman asked, and sang,”why SHOULD the devil have all the good music?”
I find it amusing that ‘This land is your land’ is a patriotic sound, and that ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ intended to be an anti-american song, but instead nobody pays attention to anything but the chorus and instead it becomes a pro-American anthem.
I never much cared for American folk music. My dad said folk singers were rich people who looked like bums, and sang (bitched) about being poor. English folk music from the 60′s such as John Renbourn, Davey Graham, and others were more pleasing to my ear. In 1974, I bought Cooder’s “Paradise & Lunch” LP, and swooned for a couple of years, until I was able to play the song list proficiently. John Fahey caught my ear years earlier, as did Leo Kottke. At this point I spent the next few years learning the “American Primitive Guitar” style, as Fahey coined. I still enjoyed Cooder, and bought all of his subsequent albums, but when I figured out he was just another common as they come commie (Cooder is a west coast version red diaper baby) I lost interest until years later when I learned to separate music from political views. You know, the “shut up, and sing” axiom.
As far as the Guthrie’s go, I couldn’t stand the ol’ man, even when I was a kid, and I never cared for Arlo, other than his libertarian, Republican politics.
WOODY MAY HAVE BEEN A LEFTY PINKO.
BUT HE BELIEVED IN THE SECOND AMENDMENT.
Surprised you don’t mention the fact that Woody being a registered commie was kept hidden by the press so that his songs would sell.
Ranger’s Command by Woody Guthrie
“Come all of you cowboys, and don’t ever you run
as long as there’s bullets in both of your guns”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FznriVNbWCI
It was fashionable to be a lefty.
After the devastation perpetrated by the Nation States in WWI, everybody thought the power of the state was unstopable and could be put to good use — Socialism.
They did not realize yet that government is good at certain things and bad at others — allocating capital and stimulating the economy.
Well said Mr. Radosh.
Not quite as nutso as it seems, I view Guthrie and his contemporary John Maynard Keynes in much the same way: both geniuses, and both way too smart not to change their minds when circumstances change. Arlo G may be a living example.
The NYT, predictably, whines into the wind. Ballad for Mr. Downes:
This land is my land, it isn’t your land;
I’ve got a shotgun; and you ain’t got one…
Picking up from @4. Steve, the next step, for Lexus-driving comrades everywhere and NYT fans of Walter Duranty above all, is to continue this nostalgic voyage with the open minds for which they are legendary. Time, perhaps, to revisit one or two patriotic anthems that ‘like all good music’ transcend their roots and can now be co-opted by the left: the Horst Wessel Lied and Cara a Sol .
The Red Flag is now so yesteryear.
Woody ended up in Brooklyn State Hospital the consequence of advanced Huntington’s Chorea; chainsmoking Pall Malls, wracked by involuntary movements, and muttering to himself. And essentially abandoned b y his leftist companions.
Phil Ochs praised Mao, quoted his poetry and asked how could he be a threat. This wonderful compassionate man, this role model Mao had syphilis and took any peasant woman he wanted saying “I clean myself off in the women I’m with.”
I still think Phil Ochs was very talented and enjoy some of his songs. Changes is lovely. He was a very sad man and didn’t always think clearly–obviously.
Would have been nice to include a link to Arlo’s comment on PJM mentioned in the article.
Today, as in the30s, those pushing the Socialist/ Communist ideology expect to be commisars, not workers.
Woody had health problems that may have effected his mind. Arlo, it seems, has embraced the virtues of the ‘republican’ form, the only political construct that maintains the freedom of the individual.
“…he was level on a level, shaved even every door. Grandpa voted for Eisenhower ’cause Lincoln won the war.” John Prine
What the critics forget is that today’s equivalent of Mr Guthrie would earn not $70 a month but $7000 a month (if not $70.000 a month) working that radio job (or TV job now).
The equivalent of $150 for that ticket in his time would have been $1.50 therefore, something that while expensive he would likely not have objected to as long as he got his cut.
If you claim to value the liberty on which this country was founded, yet you give “senseless piles of money” to the people who want to destroy that liberty, you are a hypocrite.
It doesn’t matter how good the music is, or whatever other excuse you may offer, the fact is you are giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies.
If you cannot make even this small sacrifice for America, don’t call yourself a patriot.
“that cut a CD some years back with Noam Chomsky speeches” I was a Sociology major in college (I know, I know!) and had to read some of that blithering idiots writings. Truly ignorant, maybe just old idk, but he will literally just say anything to fit his mold of how he BELIEVES the world is.