My wife, Maria, and her brother ________, saw the Del McCoury Band perform with the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band at Wichita’s Orpheum last night. I was unable to go, which sucks. Spectacular show, I was told. McCoury has performed with Pete Seeger. If that wasn’t a sign I should write about the folk troubadour, maybe this clenched it. My reporter friend, P.J., who chronicles agriculture in Kansas, told me about a down and out farmer whose barn, equipment and several animals were destroyed in a fire. Hot wind and drought has left his property “looking like the 1930s,” she said.
The Dust Bowl.
This weekend in Okemah, Okla., the townspeople have been celebrating the centennial of native son Woody Guthrie. I wasn’t going to write about Guthrie’s 100th birthday because I don’t want to become known as the guy who always writes about dead people. But hell…last year, I acknowledged Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday on this blog. (Still with us, thank God.) How do I pay tribute to Dylan without recognizing Guthrie?
Woody Guthrie matters in the 21st century.
When following the news reports about union busting in Wisconsin and other Midwestern states, I thought about Guthrie’s songs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kknr-advKkgHe spoke up for working man whose rights were being trampled on by the privileged class. Along his travels, Guthrie talked to thousands of migrant workers in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and who migrated west to a false Promised Land in California.
Today, Guthrie would feel solidarity with the people of the Occupy movement in their protests against social and economic inequality. He would feel compassion for the immigrants from south of the border, being exploited by business owners and vilified by nativist demagogues.
In his song, Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos), Guthrie wrote about a 1948 plane crash in California that killed four Americans and 28 migrant workers being deported back to Mexico. The local newspaper identified the Mexican workers, not by individual names, but by the blanket word, “deportees.” Today, we use the dehumanizing term, “illegals.” Back then it was “deportees.”
Guthrie sounds strangely current. Economic disparity in America is worse than it has been in the past 70 years and the eliminationist party is trying to dismantle every safeguard FDR and his team put in place to prevent another Depression. They want to bring the country back to the eat-the-poor conditions that existed in Dickensian England.
A couple of years ago, before he was fired into obscurity for being too conservative for Fox “News”, Glen Beck was ranting about Guthrie, calling him a communist. (This wasn’t considered a bad thing in the 1930s. However, while Guthrie agreed with many of the party's views and wrote a column for the Daily Worker, he never joined the Communist party.)
Naturally, Beck with his pseudo-populist diatribes that really only serve the rich and powerful, would not get a guy like Guthrie. That folk song we all learned in grade school, This Land is Your Land, is, according to Beck “Maoist.”
I hear freedom in its lyrics. Guthrie wrote the song in protest against God Bless America, a radio hit popularized by the biggest female pop star of the day, Kate Smith. I can see where Jewish immigrant Irving Berlin was coming from when he composed the song. He wanted to pay tribute to the nation that had afforded him freedom and opportunity. But I also see Guthrie’s view. Berlin’s song is jingoistic and perpetuates the myth of a divine American exceptionalism. God Bless America magnifies patriotism. This Land is Your Land is about freedom.
This Land is Your Land (its melody adapted from a Carter Family song, When When the World's on Fire, which itself was adapted from a Baptist hymn) is most likely the first Guthrie song you ever learned, something you probably sang in music class, while playing with tambourines and triangles. Of course, you’re not going to be singing about lynchings, anti-union massacres and protests against the death penalty when you’re in first grade. It’s like learning the Beatles’ All You Need is Love before turning on to Happiness is a Warm Gun. You have to drink milk before moving on to meat.
But This Land is Your Land is a bridge that can lead you there. In his protest songs, Guthrie was speaking for America’s disaffected, for the rights of all our country’s people to enjoy the blessings of freedom. The song celebrated inclusivity – something Guthrie knew. He was born and raised around Creek Indian land in Oklahoma. He worked with – and was influenced by -- African American musicians like Leadbelly. While living in New York’s Coney Island in the 1940s, he was inspired by his Jewish mother-in-law, Aliza Greenblatt to write Hanukah songs. Clearly, Guthrie valued pluralism and social justice, terms considered dirty words by right wingers. But 50 years from now, Glen Beck won’t even be a footnote to our history while Guthrie, like Dylan, the Beatles, Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams…will still be remembered as an important artist.
True artistry challenges the status quo, society’s convention. The social issues Guthrie addressed weren’t invented by Karl Marx. They have been a part of human condition ever since man’s inhumanity to man began. Injustice exists today as surely as it did in the Depression and in an America split into fragmentations and living in apathy where people living in poverty are concerned, we could use a voice like Guthrie’s.
He’s still relevant.
