the movement that would spawn Bob Dylan. So Tony got a banjo, and the elderly Jewish fellow showed him how to play some chords. It was in this manner that live music entered our household. There were, to be sure, instruments in the house prior to this. An old, hulking piano resided in the basement. An African drum was spotted here and there, a small, exotic animal looking for a place to get comfortable. And there was an ocarina, too; my father would periodically pop the mouthpiece between his lips and wheeze out the theme from The Third Man.
Soon I wanted to play an instrument. (All this predates, by a few months, anyway, the advent of the Beatles, after which everybody and their brother decided to take up an instrument.) I started strumming along quite spiritedly on a mandolin, chosen because it was a small instrument and I owned a small hand. The first song I learned to play was a classic, “This Land Is Your Land.” As first songs go, this was a pretty good one. There is wonderful power and poetry in the lyrics, and in adopting “This Land Is Your Land” as an ideal, a basic template, I had (unknowingly) set the bar rather high. I say “(unknowingly)” because I was preoccupied not only with fingering the chords but with trying to remember the words. It is a geographical song, and at least off the top is concerned with naming places. I have trouble retrieving mere lists from the memory banks. Moreover, there was a Canadian version (“from Bonavista to Vancouver Island”), and I was torn between this version and the “real” one, so often I bellowed out an odd combination of the two.2
WOODROW WILSON Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1912, the son of a businessman, landowner, and Democratic politician. (I mean, his father was all those things; it wasn’t my intention to suggest some Satanic trinity.) Woodrow was a bright lad, and he read constantly. That didn’t prevent him from leaving high school before graduation. It is said he picked up harmonica by hanging around a street corner beside a black man and his shoeshine box. He learned a little guitar in order to accompany his cousin, a fiddler. And that’s what Woody was, a widely read kid who could play a little music, when he joined the thousands of Okies travelling westward to California, where, it was said, there was work. This was the Dust Bowl era, and out on the coast was the mythical “pie in the sky.”3
I don’t know at what point Guthrie became “politicized,” a word I’ve put in quotes mostly because it makes me kind of uneasy. I sometimes conflate Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck’s fictional Tom Joad. In The Grapes of Wrath, Joad is made increasingly aware of injustice and suffering; he discovers the worth of every single human being, regardless of wealth or origin, and he goes out into the world to fight for the dignity of all. I believe something like that happened to Guthrie; indeed, one of his most enduring songs is “Tom Joad.” Guthrie was also inspired to write a song about Thomas Mooney, a labour leader imprisoned for bombing the Preparedness Day march of 1916 (killing ten and injuring forty), a crime virtually no one thought he actually committed. But as the fine songwriter Steve Earle once remarked, “I don’t think of Woody Guthrie as a political writer. He was a writer who lived in very political times.” I’m guessing that Guthrie was inspired by a good story as much as by his outrage. After all, he did write “Pretty Boy Floyd.” The song makes an eloquent point about the callousness of banks (“some rob with a fountain pen”), but Charles Arthur Floyd was pretty much a murdering thug.
Guthrie’s songs soon found an audience, and he began singing “hillbilly” music on radio station KF VD. There he met newscaster Ed Robbin, a left-leaning fellow who introduced Guthrie to socialists and Communists in Southern California, including a man who would become Woody’s lifelong friend, Will Geer.4 Many of you will remember Geer as Zebu-lon (Grandpa) Walton, but it is interesting to note that Geer was also a folksinger and a political radical. “Which means I get to the root of things,” Geer was fond of saying. “That’s the Latin derivation for ‘radical.’” Geer refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and was subsequently blacklisted. His solution was to start a theatre company called Theatricum Botanicum, in which he and other blacklisted players presented the works of the Bard.
Geer, busy on the Broadway stage, invited Guthrie to New York City. It was there Woody made his first real recordings, musicologist Alan Lomax feeling that Guthrie’s songs should be documented for the Library of Congress.5 Guthrie decided to respond to the over-popularity of Kate Smith’s “God Bless America.” He had seen too much to endorse that kind of cheery chauvinism. He borrowed a melody from an old gospel song, “Oh My Loving Brother.” Although he wrote about the physical grandeur of America in “This Land Is Your Land,” he got a few good digs in too. Not everyone knows the final two verses to the song, in which Guthrie sees hungry people lined up outside a relief office and wonders if this land is really made for you and me.
Song can be an effective vehicle for political statement, in particular for complaint and damnation, song being an extension of speech, and speech being what it is. Alan Lomax described a scene that occurred during the “ballad hunting” he undertook with his father across the American South.
A few ragged sharecroppers had been gathered together by the plantation manager to sing for us. They had sung some spirituals, and finally everybody said, “Let’s have Old Blue sing.” A big Black man stood up in front of the tiny Edison cylinder recorder. He said, “I want to sing my song right into it—I don’t want to sing it in advance.” We said, “Well, we would like to hear it first because we don’t have very many unused cylinders.” He said, “No sir, you are going to have to have this right straight from the beginning.” We agreed, and so he sang:
Work all week
Don’t make enough
To pay my board
And buy my snuff.
It’s hard, it’s hard It’s hard on we poor farmers,
It’s hard.
After a few more stanzas, he spoke into the recorder horn as though it was a telephone. He said, “Now, Mr. President, you just don’t know how bad they’re treating us folks down here. I’m singing to you and I’m talking to you so I hope you will come down here and do something for us poor folks here in Texas.”
On another afternoon in the early twentieth century, on a street corner in Spokane, Washington, a political agitator named Jack Walsh was busily recruiting for the Industrial Workers of the World, standing on a soapbox and preaching unionism. Down the road, the Salvation Army was recruiting on its own behalf. The Holy Soldiers disliked Walsh’s exhortations of revolution, so they elected to march the band down—tambourines pounding, trombones baying, trumpets keening—and attempt to drown him out. Walsh fought back, starting a musical aggregation of his own that included Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock pounding out cadence on a bass drum. Among the songs McClintock wrote was “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” a beautiful evocation of a hobo’s Utopia. McClintock had another song, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” which the street-corner crowds found very rousing. Walsh penned a couple of parodies of the Sally Ann’s high-test spirituals, “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” and “Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?” Those four songs became the foundation of the IW W’s Little Red Songbook, which sold for ten cents. The volume soon contained not only more songs but “The Preamble,” the manifesto of the Industrial Workers of the World:
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things in life.
It’s hard to say how this all connects to a chubby little eleven-year-old kid playing “This Land Is Your Land” with cross-eyed, tongue-biting concentration. I knew nothing then of pie in the sky or sharecroppers or the Industrial Workers of the World. All I knew was that Woody Guthrie’s song was fun to play and sing. Without realizing it, I suspect I was also absorbing the idea that songs should mean something, that they should make a point, and that the point should be beneficial.
