Woody Guthrie at 100: Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, Will Kaufman Honor the “Dust Bowl Troubadour”

GUESTS:
Will Kaufman, professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire, England. He is author of Woody Guthrie, American Radical.

Pete Seeger, legendary folk singer and activist.

Billy Bragg, British musician and activist. With Wilco, he has released two albums of Woody Guthrie music.

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Transcript

NARRATOR: Two fragments of film survive of Guthrie performing. One of them, lost in the archives for 40 years has only just come to light.

She ’rose from her blanket, a battle to fight.
She ’rose from her blanket with a gun in each hand,
Said: Come all of you cowboys, fight for your land.

AMY GOODMAN: A rare 1945 video recording of Woody Guthrie. Known as the Dust Bowl Troubadour, Guthrie became a major influence on countless musicians, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs. While Woody Guthrie is best remembered as a musician, he also had a deeply political side. At the height of McCarthyism, Guthrie spoke out for labor and civil rights and against fascism. He died in 1967 after a long battle with Huntington’s disease. But his music lives on.

Over the next hour, we’ll hear from folk singer Pete Seeger, the British musician Billy Bragg and the historian Will Kaufman. But first, Woody Guthrie, in his own words, being interviewed by the musicologist Alan Lomax

ALAN LOMAX: What did your family do? What kind of people were they, and where did they come from?

ALAN LOMAX: Where did you live? On a farm?

WOODY GUTHRIE: Well, no, I was born there in that little town. My dad built a six-room house. Cost him about $7,000 or $8,000. And the day after he got the house built, it burned down.

ALAN LOMAX: What kind of a place was Okemah? How big was it, when you remember it, when you were a kid?

WOODY GUTHRIE: Well, in them days, it was a little town, about 1,500, and then 2,000. A few years later, it got up to about 5,000. They struck some pretty rich oil pools all around there—Grayson City and Slick City and Cromwell and Seminole and Bowlegs and Sand Springs and Springhill. And all up and down the whole country there, they got oil. Got some pretty nice old fields ’round Okemah there.

ALAN LOMAX: Did any of the oil come in your family?

WOODY GUTHRIE: No, no, we got the grease.

AMY GOODMAN: Woody Guthrie being interviewed by Alan Lomax.

We turn now to Will Kaufman, author of the new book, Woody Guthrie, American Radical. Kaufman is a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire, England. He’s also a musician who’s performed hundreds of musical presentations on Woody Guthrie. I interviewed Will Kaufman recently and asked him to talk about Woody Guthrie’s childhood.

WILL KAUFMAN: Well, he was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, as you said, in 1912. He was born to a middle-class, fairly right-wing family. His father, Charlie Guthrie, was a small-town politician, a real estate agent and Klan supporter, supporter of the Ku Klux Klan.

AMY GOODMAN: Some said he was a Klansman.

WOODY GUTHRIE: [singing] Back in Nineteen Twenty-Seven,
I had a little farm and I called that heaven.
Well, the prices up and the rain come down,
And I hauled my crops all into town —
I got the money, bought clothes and groceries,
Fed the kids, and raised a family.

Rain quit and the wind got high,
And the black ol’ dust storm filled the sky.
And I swapped my farm for a Ford machine,
And I poured it full of this gas-i-line —
And I started, rockin’ an’ a-rollin’,
Over the mountains, out towards the old Peach Bowl.

WILL KAUFMAN: Some of those Dust Bowl ballads come out of, really, his late teens and early twenties, you know. Then he joined about half-a-million other migrants heading westwards towards California, where they had heard there was lots of work out there—and, of course, they were wrong. And it’s there in California when Woody gets—he sort of hooks up with the right people, I suppose, and gets involved in the Popular Front out there in California, and this is the beginning of—really, of his politicization. As you said, began writing columns for the People’s World out there and—in Los Angeles, and got a show on a progressive radio station, KFVD, out in Los Angeles, and begins to circulate around the migrant camps, where the Okies, as they were pejoratively called, were living in old dwellings of tar, paper and tin and old packing crates and the bodies of abandoned cars, under railroad bridges, by the side of rivers and what have you, and getting their heads broken when they dared to organize into unions. And Woody began to witness that and began to write about it. And so, he began to see music as a political weapon then.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Kaufman, talk about 1937, the turning point for Woody Guthrie as he takes on racial issues in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned the lynching that occurred a year before he was born that his father—

WILL KAUFMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —may well have been involved with.

WILL KAUFMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how it came back.

WILL KAUFMAN: Well, there was—about a year before Woody’s birth, there was a policeman in Okemah named George Loney, who went to the house of a fellow named Nelson, going to arrest him. I think the charge was sheep stealing or something minor like that. And I don’t think Nelson was there. But certainly his wife Laura and his 12-year-old son Lawrence and a little baby, they were there. And this policeman was apparently very violent, very threatening. And young Lawrence thought that his mother was in danger, and he grabbed a rifle, shot this policeman in the leg. Policeman bled to death on their front lawn.

[singing] As I walked down that old dark town
In the town where I was born,
I heard the saddest lonesome moan
That I ever heard before.

My hair it trembled at the roots
Cold chills run down my spine,
As I drew near that jail house
I heard this deathly cry:

Don’t kill my baby and my son,
Don’t kill my baby and my son.
You can stretch my neck from that old river bridge,
But don’t kill my baby and my son.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Kaufman, author of Woody Guthrie, American Radical. How do you know that melody and that song if Woody Guthrie never recorded it?

AMY GOODMAN: In 1940, Woody Guthrie moves to New York.

WILL KAUFMAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what being in New York meant for him. Who did he meet? What was he singing?

KATE SMITH: [singing] God bless America
Land that I love.
Stand beside her, and guide her
Through the night with a light from above.

WOODY GUTHRIE: [singing] I roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing
This land was made for you and me.

WILL KAUFMAN: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: —and what it became, in fact, for President Obama’s inauguration.

AMY GOODMAN: Did Springsteen and Seeger sing the whole song?

PETE SEEGER AND BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: This land is your land, this land is my land
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

I roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

By the relief office, I saw my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there wistless,
This land was made for you and me.

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing
That sign was made for you and me.

WILL KAUFMAN: He gets to New York. Will Geer is putting on a—organizing a concert, a benefit concert for the John Steinbeck Agricultural Committee.

AMY GOODMAN: Which is what?

WILL KAUFMAN: The Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural [Organization] migrants, it was a benefit—fundraising organization that was just raising money for the migrants, for the Dust Bowl migrants, out in California. Steinbeck didn’t have anything to do with it except lending his name, his name to it.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, he wrote The Grapes of Wrath.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Kaufman is author of American Radical. During an interview on Democracy Now!, the legendary folk singer Pete Seeger talked about Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you remember when you first met Woody Guthrie?

PETE SEEGER: Oh, yeah, I’ll never forget it. It was a benefit concert for California agricultural workers on Broadway at midnight. Burl Ives was there, the Golden Gate Quartet, Josh White, Leadbelly, Margo Mayo Square Dance Group, with my wife dancing in it. I sang one song very amateurishly and retired in confusion to a smattering of polite applause.

AMY GOODMAN: In 1940, Woody Guthrie appeared on a New York radio program featuring the folk singer Leadbelly.

[singing] Tom Joad got out of that old McAlester Pen
There he got his parole
After four long years on a man killing charge
Tom Joad come a walking down the road, poor boy
Tom Joad come a walking down the road

It was there he found him a truck driving man
There he got him a ride
Charge called Homicide, poor boy, it was a charge called Homicide.

AMY GOODMAN: Woody Guthrie performing on the radio in 1940. That same year, he formed the Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger and others. I asked Will Kaufman, author of Woody Guthrie, American Radical, to talk about the significance of the group.

WILL KAUFMAN: The Almanac Singers were really spearheaded by Pete Seeger and Millard Lampell and Lee Hays, and it had various personnel in this band. They were a—really wanted to form, I guess, what would have been the first self-consciously proletarian, progressive music group in America, group of singers. The idea was using song as a means of championing the union movement and the anti-intervention movement, until of course the war starts, and then they do their flip-flop and go from being anti-interventionists into war champions. They didn’t last very long. They’re dissolved, they’re broken up by about 1942. But they wrote quite a few songs which were sort of the prototype for many of the political folk groups that followed, including the Weavers, which in a sense grows out of the Almanac Singers, as some of the same people who were in that group become the Weavers, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Robeson—when did Woody Guthrie meet Paul Robeson, the famous singer, actor, dogged by the U.S. government, by the FBI? They took back his passport.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about the Peekskill Riots. Exactly what happened?

WILL KAUFMAN: OK, 1949, August, late August, early September of 1949, the Civil Rights Congress, through People’s Songs, got Paul Robeson to agree to sing a benefit concert at the golfing grounds up in—or the Lakeland picnic area up in Peekskill, Westchester County. And before Robeson even got to the grounds, he never—in fact, he never even made it to the grounds, because for the whole previous week, the Peekskill Evening Star and other local newspapers and the Ku Klux Klan and other right-wing organizations were firing up the populists to prevent Robeson and to prevent his followers from coming to Peekskill. Robeson—you know, it was all this Robeson, you know, Jew-loving commie kind of stuff like that, because Robeson had declared—his crime was declaring, in the midst of the Cold War, that no African American would voluntarily go to war with the Soviet Union. He’d been to the Soviet Union. He said he was treated with more respect there than he was ever treated in the United States. And for that heresy, he was met with a burning cross on the hills above Peekskill, which, you know, kind of proved his point. And so, he never made it to the grounds there, but the concertgoers did. They were on the grounds there, and they were met by masked gangs of men and women and teenagers hurling rocks and abuse and beating them up with, you know, fence posts and baseball bats, and destroying the grounds and what have you.

[singing] Paul Robeson he’s the man
Who faced down the Ku Klux Klan
Over Peekskill’s golfing ground
His words came sounding
And all around him there
To jump and clap and cheer
I sent the best I had
My thirty thousand.

The Klansman leader said
Old Paul would lose his head
When thirty-five thousand vets
Broke up his concert.
But less than four thousand came
To side in with the Klan
And around Paul’s lonesome oak
My thirty thousand.

A beersoaked brassy band
Went snortling around the grounds
Four hundred noble souls
Westchester’s manhood
And you know they looked exactly like
Fleas on a tiger’s back
Or lost fish in the waters of
My thirty thousand.

When Paul had sung and gone
Mothers and babies going home
Cops came with guns and clubs
And they clubbed and beat ’em
Well I would hate to be a cop
Caught with a bloody stick,
Of thirty thousand.

Each eye you tried to gouge,
Each skull you tried to crack
Has got a thousand thousand friends
All along this green grass
If you furnish the skull someday
I’ll pass out the clubs and guns
To the billion hands that love
My thirty thousand.

Each wrinkle on your face
I will know it at a glance
You cannot run and hide
Nor duck nor dodge them
And your carcass and your deeds
Will fertilize the seeds
Of the ones who stood to guard
My thirty thousand.

And then, of course, with the Cold War and the Truman doctrine about containing communism in Greece, Woody writes songs against Truman, writes songs expressing his astonishment that Britain and the United States could support the Greek monarchy against the workers rising there, and just sees not only the labor movement and the union movement becoming increasingly—the fangs brought out of it, drawn out of it, but then elsewhere in the wider culture, where basically McCarthyism takes hold. He sees Hanns Eisler being deported and writes a song about that, expressing his fears about what life in a McCarthy-dominated America might be like.

But then something happens. His Huntington’s disease kicks in seriously about 1952, and so he is increasingly immobilized, increasingly—his behavior is increasingly more erratic, and he finds that he has difficulty writing. He can’t speak as well. He can’t—he gets increasing bodily—a lack of coordination. And he sort of drops out—after 1952, 1953, he’s pretty—he’s sort of becoming less and less of a public figure at that point. But he is watching from the sidelines what is going on.

AMY GOODMAN: Not so far away from where he was, at Sing Sing.

WILL KAUFMAN: Not so far, that’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: In Ossining, New York.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned that Pete Seeger went before HUAC—

WILL KAUFMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —the House Un-American Activities Committee. Guthrie was never called before it, but he did write an impassioned defense of Pete Seeger.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you like to read the letter?

AMY GOODMAN: That was the letter that Woody Guthrie wrote—

WILL KAUFMAN: That Woody wrote to Pete Seeger.

AMY GOODMAN: —in defense of Pete Seeger.

WILL KAUFMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Before HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. What did Woody Guthrie himself feel were his most important achievements?

AMY GOODMAN: Will Kaufman, author of Woody Guthrie, American Radical.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. As we continue our Woody Guthrie special, we turn to the British rocker and activist, Billy Bragg. In 1998 and 2000, Bragg participated in two well-known albums paying tribute to Woody Guthrie. On Mermaid Avenue Volumes 1 and 2, Billy Bragg composed music for lyrics written by Woody Guthrie and performed many of the songs alongside the album’s other main contributor, the band Wilco. I asked Billy Bragg to talk about how the project came about.

BILLY BRAGG: About 20 years ago, it was now, I did a show here in New York City in Central Park with Pete Seeger to celebrate Woody’s—what would have been Woody’s 80th birthday in 1992. And I met his daughter Nora, and she told me that in the Woody Guthrie archive they had lyrics of songs that Woody had written during his lifetime, which although Woody had written lyrics and music, he had actually kept the tunes in his head. He couldn’t write music notation. Now, I can’t do that. I don’t write music notation, so I understood where he was coming from. And she invited me to come and look at some of these lyrics, with a view to write some new tunes, to give them life, really.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk a little about him, for people, young people especially.

BILLY BRAGG: Well—yeah, well, Woody Guthrie was born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma, and during the last Great American Depression, he was writing incredible songs about the internal migrations in the United States of America, people who had to leave the Dust Bowl, the areas of the Texas Panhandle, of Oklahoma, of Arizona, and move to the fruit orchards in California. It was a huge mass migration, similar to the kind of migration—it’s kind of a east-to-west migration. Now the migration is kind of like south to north that’s going on. But that great migration is still going on. And Woody wrote these incredible songs and eventually ended up coming to New York City in 1940, lived out in Coney Island.

AMY GOODMAN: So talk about some of the lyrics that you found.

[singing] I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-roamin’ ’round,
Just a wanderin’ worker, I go from town to town.
And the police make it hard for me no matter where I go
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
No, I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

My brothers and my sisters are stranded on this road,
Now the rich man took my home and drove me from my door
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
No, I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

My crops I laid into the banker’s store.
And my wife took down and died all on the cabin floor,
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
No, I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

I mined in your mines and I gathered in your corn
I been working, mister, since the day that I was born
Now I worry all the time like I never did before
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
No, I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

Now as I look around, it’s mighty plain to see
Where the gamblin’ man is rich while the workin’ man is poor,
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
No, I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.