Steve Earle talking:
I found out about Woody Guthrie the same way a lot of people my age did: you know, through Bob Dylan. And, you know, I mean, like I’m only—I’m 57, so my first Bob Dylan records were actually relatively late ones, and I backtracked through—I had a drama teacher in high school who gave me a couple of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the second Dylan record. So that was the first time I ever heard what—I mean, I had heard Woody Guthrie by that time, and I had heard, you know, the Bob Dylan records I knew, the ones that I had bought as they came out, but that was the first time I made the connection between just how much, in the early going, you know, Bob Dylan was Woody Guthrie and how important Woody had been to Bob. I understood that connection when I started—when I heard those early records for the first time.
So, you know, it’s 1969. I’m 14 years old. The Vietnam War is going on. I’m not a candidate for a student deferment. As I got older, my friends started getting drafted. And I started out playing in coffeehouses because I wasn’t old enough to play in places that served liquor. And the one coffeehouse in San Antonio, Texas, was a pretty politicized environment. So I heard of—you know, these people quoted Woody Guthrie chapter and verse. They were the—the local underground newspaper was published upstairs. So I never separated music and politics, which kept bringing me back to Woody, over and over and over again, over, you know, writing songs. And I finally went to Nashville when I was 19. And I was trying to make a living playing music. I still don’t consider myself to be a political artist; I’m just an artist that—I think like Woody was—that lives in really politically charged times. And when I started playing, the war was going on. And now, I think these songs become, I think, you know, more relevant every second in the times that we’re living in right now.
On his guitar, he had “This Machine Kills Fascists.” it’s several. Sometimes it was written on the surface of the guitar. There’s several signs that he had made that were put on other guitars, yeah. There’s a whole thing of like—I’m kind of a guitar collector, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to track down the history of various guitars that Woody Guthrie was photographed with, because there’s about five or six of them that he was photographed with. And some of them consistently—one guitar is one Gibson that belonged to him. There’s—I know one of them, there’s a Martin that he’s photographed over and over again, and he even has artist’s model based on it, but it was not his guitar. It was Will Geer’s wife’s guitar that he borrowed and kept for a very long time.
So, it’s—you know, the whole thing about—a lot of it has to do with just who Woody was and how Woody was. I mean, I don’t think—you know, he was a professional entertainer. He had a radio show that was extremely successful. Now, he had bosses that allowed certain—you know, him to get away with a certain amount because of their own political convictions, and there was a lot going on. He got—his audiences, at that point, were—you know, were—it was the labor movement. So that sort of—he’s becoming Woody Guthrie at that point. So by the time he arrives in New York City, he’s Woody Guthrie, and he knows he is. And it’s one of those things. I think he made decisions that—you know, you could make a different decision and make more money, but I think there’s a point in which you realize, OK, I’ve got this audience, and I’m going to keep this audience, and I’m going to be able to look at myself in the mirror, if there are certain lines that I draw for myself as I go along and identify who I am as an artist that I don’t cross. And that can change. It’s not necessarily a static thing. Times change. What’s important to you changes. But I think—I think just, you know, money isn’t—he wasn’t doing this for money. He wasn’t—he was doing it because it happened. He became who he was as a performer as organically, I think, as anybody can, you know, come up with a career plan. It sort of happened, and, you know, a lot of it’s who he was, who he was born in. And most of it, I think, is—as artists, is who we become as whatever, you know, the world presents to us and that we travel through, the paths that we travel.
Nora Guthrie talking:
he grew up in Oklahoma, in a little, small town, in Okemah, 1912. And he actually came from a relatively middle-class family. They were in the real spirit of kind of what we’d call entrepreneurs now. His dad was kind of raring to go, make a success of himself. And his mother was of Scotch Irish descent. And it’s really from his mom that he learned how to write ballads. She sang all the long ballads from the old country to him. And spent a couple of years there. Their life quickly began to fall apart. The house burned down. They lost all their money. Illness and fires kind of followed him around. He lost his sister in a fire, etc.
By the time he was about 14, he was kind of on his own, living in a gang house with a bunch of other kids on their own. And that’s when really he began to kind of, I want to say, become conscious of the world around him and all the troubles he was seeing. And he moved up to Pampa, Texas, after a couple of years of living with the kids in the gang house, right at the time when the great Dust Bowls were at their worst. And he was living in Pampa when the great dust storm of 1935 took place.
And again, I bring these up only because they’re wake-up calls. And sometimes it seems that, as human beings, we need these kind of catastrophic wake-up calls to realize and to begin asking who we are, why we’re alive, and what we can do about it. That was the beginning of his journey. He migrated to California with a couple of hundred thousand other people, the largest migration in the history of the United States. And what he discovered when he left his small circle of life in Oklahoma and Texas was that the world was not what he thought it was. And when they tried to cross over to the California border for jobs, they were all stopped by state troopers and vigilante groups who didn’t want the influx of all of these people who had lost their farms where they had lived for generations. So, again, it was like, one step after the next, a series of wake-up calls.
He started early on, actually, in Pampa, Texas. He had his first little band, the Corn Cob Trio, and then later the Pampa Junior Chamber of Commerce Band. But in those days, he was mostly influenced by the music he had heard on the radio, actually. And I have to giggle, because he did what every 19-year-old kid does: he forms a band to get a girlfriend. And that was just the impetus behind the whole thing. The early songs that he was writing were kind of dance band music. He played for socials, church socials, you know, local happenings, for the fun of it, actually. And it didn’t occur to him that music could be expanded from then—from that perspective until he got to Los Angeles.
He was introduced to the labor movement, actually, to the political movement, which was pretty active in Los Angeles that time in the late ’30s. Now, I have to go back. All along the way, he had already played with the idea of songwriting, like I said, but more kind of silly songs about—that any 17- or 18-year-old would do. But as he was traveling along, particularly when he had those issues at the border trying to go into California and a couple of other things, the vigilante groups that he ran into that were trying to keep the Okies and Arkies out of the state of California, a couple of other incidents inspired him to start writing a couple of verses on his own. But again, he’s only 20-something years old—pretty young kid. So he’s writing in a notebook, and he keeps track of things, the stories of the vigilantes, the stories of crossing the border, and songs like “California is a Garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see / But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot / If you ain’t got that do re mi,” “Vigilante Man,” things like that, “Pretty Boy Floyd.” So he brings some of these verses and tunes to California, when he gets his first radio show.
He came to New York in 1940. He hitchhiked across and arrived here on February 16th, 1940. And he came at the invite of Will Geer, who was an actor, a friend that he had met in Los Angeles. A lot of people know him as Grandpa Walton. And he was starring in a show in New York, and he liked Woody’s music, and he said, “You ought to come to New York. They might like you here.” And so, that’s what he did. He hitchhiked across, and he came to New York. And as a matter of fact, he stayed at a little boarding house on 43rd Street and Sixth Avenue. That’s where he hooked up.
And the first three songs he wrote, the first week he was in New York—he had traveled across the country, and he was looking out this window at the little hotel room, and he was remembering his journey. And he sat down and wrote “This Land Is Your Land” that first week in New York. And a lot of people don’t know that he wrote “This Land” — they assume that he wrote it out in the Midwest someplace, but it’s really a New York song. It’s about the result, the culmination of that journey, and how he puts it together, and the lyric, in this boarding house—which, I have to say, right now, you know what stands on that corner? New York Trivial Pursuit question: 43rd and Sixth, southwest corner? Bank of America headquarters.
“The Ballad of Tom Joad.” Woody needed a typewriter to write this particular song, and Pete had a typewriter. And they—he was living on Fourth Street in the East Village at the time. And he spent all night at the typewriter. And Pete was hanging around with him. Pete finally said, “I got so tired.” Woody had a jug of wine. Pete went to bed, and he woke up the next morning, and there was the 16-verse “Ballad of Tom Joad” in the typewriter, and Woody was asleep under the table.
And it was a wonderful consolidation of Steinbeck’s book, The Grapes of Wrath. And Woody was very, very moved by the character of Tom Joad and closely identified with him personally as a young man. He felt that—he wished he could have said, “That’s where I’m going to be, Ma,” which is really out of the book, when Tom Joad ends and he says, “Wherever people are fighting for their rights, wherever people ain’t free, that’s where I’m going to be, Ma.” And that became kind of Woody’s mission in life, as well. Of course, when John Steinbeck heard about the song, he cussed him out and said, “God, that son of a B—-! He put down in 17 verses what it took me two years to write.”
he hooked up early on with Pete Seeger and a couple of other musicians. They were living and working together as the Almanac Singers. And historically, it’s very important because it was the first communal group to form a folk music band, so to speak, that evolved into everything we know, from the Kingston Trio to Weavers, etc., Peter, Paul and Mary—all grew out of that little seed core idea.
But they were kind of getting kind of popular in New York. Their folk music was kind of new. It was a little bit of a buzz happening around town. And they got a chance to audition, even at the Rainbow Room. And people loved them. Bess Hawes laughs and says, “Every time we sang a song that put them down, the rich people loved it, because there’s nothing more they love than having a sense of humor about themselves, unless then you get to the next step—you get serious—and then they stop laughing.”
Anyway, they did this audition at the Rainbow Room, and they were very popular. And the people said, “Oh, you guys are great.” And they wanted to dress them up as hillbillies, with little bonnets, and “You, wear a thing and sit on a pile of hay, and we’ll do hillbilly music, and New York City elite will just love it.” And Woody kind of freaked out and said, “I’m not going to do this.” And the rest of the Almanacs were going, “Why not? This is a great-paying gig.” And Woody says, “I’m not going to make fun of my people.” And they said, “But they’re going to pay a lot of money. We’re going to be a star in New York.” He said, “I’m not going to make fun of my people. And that’s what they want us to do. They want us to be up here so that they can laugh at us, instead of listen to us.”
And he started writing songs on the spot. He was a very good improviser. And he says, “At the Rainbow Room, the soup’s on the boil. They stir their salad with Standard Oil, in New York City.” And he totally blew the situation. And they escaped down the elevator 60-something floors.
people don’t understand how hard it is to do things like that, especially when you need money, you’re hungry. They were a very poor little group. And I think Woody kind of taught a lot of people, Steve, how to say no.
Woody wrote a ton of stuff. He wrote over 600 songs. He was in New York City from 1940 until he passed away, 1967. And a lot of people don’t think of him as a New Yorker, but that was really his home town for most of his life, actually. He was 27 when he came to New York. That’s when he wrote “This Land Is Your Land.” Can you imagine? Twenty-seven.
originally, it was titled “God Blessed America” because originally it was a kind of quasi-parody of Irving Berlin’s song “God Bless America,” that was popular that year. Kate Smith had a hit song with it. And I never considered it anti-Berlin, and I refuse to consider it anti-Berlin. I know a lot of people have made a big thing of that. But I think it’s an extension of “God Bless America,” because one is the voice of an immigrant who’s coming from a really hard time in Russia, and he’s really glad to be here, and the other is when you’re born here, and it’s the next extension. It’s chapter two of a song about America. So that’s—anyway, nobody asked, but that’s my thoughts about it. But—so he wrote a ton of stuff here in New York City. That was one of the—he used to busk along the bars on 10th Avenue, Ninth Avenue and 10th Avenue on the West Side there.
When the docks were still there. Those were sailor bars down there in those days. they were all sailors and guys who worked on ships, etc. The Cunard Lines were coming in from Liverpool in those days also, which is—that’s another story, the connection of rock ‘n’ roll and the Beatles and Lonnie Donegan, because that’s how the Beatles heard about Woody. They used to go to Lonnie Donegan shows in Liverpool, and he was singing Woody and Leadbelly tunes.
“Rock Island Line” was his biggest hit, which was a Leadbelly tune. “Big Grand Coulee Dam,” he did. And the little Beatles—they were all like 14, 15, 16—they were in the audience listening to Lonnie Donegan. So there’s this incredible musical history lineage between Woody, the Upper West Side and the docks, where he’s singing songs like “Hey, Hey, Hey” for a nickel in a bar to get—to get a drink, basically. So, that’s another story.
his mother was institutionalized when he was about 12 years old. She had an unknown disease, and she was falling apart, basically. And they figured it was all the troubles that the family was having with losing their money and the Depression, dust. She was put in an insane asylum, actually. They didn’t know what to do with her. And she passed away there. Woody never saw her again.
And in the late 1940s, Woody suspected that something was wrong with him, as well. And his behavior started changing. He was having trouble walking, things like that. And at the time, nobody really knew what it was. His friends thought he was drinking a lot, and they kind of started staying clear of him, because they thought he was a bad influence. And a lot of the anecdotal history that you still hear around town is what a drunk he was, he was a womanizer, da-da-la-da-da-la-da. But all this is really related to Huntington’s disease, including hypersexual behavior, things like that. Now they know. Anyway, long story short, he was finally diagnosed around 1952. All they could do was diagnose you. They said, “Well, you have Huntington’s, but we don’t have any clue what to do about it.”
It’s a neurological disease, and it affects body, mind, everything. Like I just said, emotionally, psychologically, he started changing. He really started falling apart, actually, and caused a lot of problems in the family, obviously. Nobody knew. He was just crazy. Anyway, so he was diagnosed.
He self—he put himself in a hospital, after he—he wandered around the country. He tried to hold on to whatever life he had. He was kind of running away from it, probably, hitchhiking around the country, dropping in on old friends in Oklahoma and California. And finally, he got a grip on himself and realized he would be hospitalized. And he did live for 15 years in different New York City hospitals.
Like Greystone out in New Jersey. it was also a psychiatric ward. Greystone was the largest psychiatric ward on the East Coast. It had like hundreds of thousands of people or something in it. And he was in a—just like his mom. They didn’t know what to do with him, and he was put in a psychiatric ward with 50 other patients. One of the symptoms of Huntington’s, like you can’t—you lose control of your arms, etc. And, you know, in these institutions, they would walk around and drop a plate of food in front of your bed. It was like kind of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest here. And he couldn’t get the fork to his mouth. My mother had to pay other patients to feed him.
Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, who—a lot of people in your audience might know her from the Martha Graham Company. She was quite well known in the dance world in New York City in those years. She was Merce Cunningham’s teacher. She was Erick Hawkins’ teacher. Anyway, our house was Leadbelly to the left and Martha Graham to the right, and other people in front and back.
my grandmother was a Yiddish poetess. This is another story, Amy, but she was like a well-known Yiddish poetess. And she had written her story of her life in Hebrew, and my mother wanted us to be able to read her story. So she thought—and, by the way, we’re not religious. On my birth certificate, under religion, it says, “All or none.” Anyway, but one of the cultural aspects was that we should learn Hebrew to read my grandmother’s stuff. And so, my mom hired a local rabbi, who was from the synagogue a couple blocks away. He was a young guy in his twenties or something, seemed kind of sweet and quiet, actually. And she hired him for a couple of months to teach us Hebrew. I actually have home footage of him in the house. We’re sitting around the table like this. Anyway, it was a disaster, and we were not very good. And he got really upset and said to my mother, “The Guthrie kids are not taking Hebrew seriously.” And he was right. He quit. Evidently, he quit America, as well, and ended up in Israel. And his name was Meir Kahane.
I moved up to Westchester like really 20-something years ago, after living in around all the boroughs, went to Elisabeth Irwin High School. My father played at Elisabeth Irwin in 1949. But it’s an historically very important school, actually, because it was—a lot of blacklisted teachers worked there, people who couldn’t get work anyplace else in the ’50s. And so, like my music teacher was Victor Fink, who’s Janis Ian’s father. People that went to the school—Angela Davis went there. The Rosenbergs’ kids were there. Arthur Miller’s kids were there. Norman Mailer’s kids were there. Woody Guthrie’s kids were there. So it was a very interesting school to go to. But, anyway, I did move up to Westchester.
When my dad died, they held a concert at Carnegie Hall. And actually, that was the concert that Dylan came out of retirement. He had been in the motorcycle accident and came out of retirement and says, “I got to do this.” And that was a wonderful—the band was there and Dylan and a whole bunch of other people. My brother was just starting out. He must have been like 20 or something at the time.
But at that point, my mother was an—she was an incredible woman. She really deserves a network television show just to talk about her or something. I don’t know. But she kind of put her foot down and gathered us all around the table. I was 21. And the day after I turned 21, she said to us, “Are you all OK? You’re 21 now. Can you take care of yourselves? You’re OK?” And we all went, “Yeah, Mom. What’s up?” And she said, “I have to go find a cure for Huntington’s disease.” And we went, “Oh, OK. It’s OK with us.” And that’s when she put an ad in the New York Times the next day and said, “If anyone knows anything about Huntington’s disease, call Virginia-80249.” And one person called. And they met for tea. They put the ad in again. Three people called. They met for tea.
Long story short, she founded all the organizations that began Huntington’s disease research, which is now at the forefront. All the doctors and researchers that are at the forefront of genetic research right now were my mother’s babies. She—not literally. But she would go around to all the medical schools and talk to the students and say, “Why go into plastic surgery, when you can go into genetic research?” Again, why do you have to make money when you can do something for humanity? So, she is really the godmother of so much of the research that’s happening now.
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Nora Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s daughter. She’s president of both the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, and Woody Guthrie Publications. She’s also the author of the new book, My Name Is New York: Ramblin’ Around Woody Guthrie’s Town.
Anna Canoni, Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter. She works for Woody Guthrie Publications.
Steve Earle, musician, actor, author and activist. He is a three-time Grammy Award winner. He’s performing in New York at WoodyFest, a three-day concert in celebration of Woody Guthrie’s birthday. His recent novel and album share the same name: I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.
— source democracynow.org