Remembering Woody Guthrie, born on this day in 1912. —Ed.
Born in 1912 and laid to rest in 1967 after a long bout with Huntington’s Disease, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie is as iconic a figure as American music has produced. Long-considered the granddaddy of folk protest, his 1940s recordings have influenced countless musicians across numerous genres, but ill-health brought his days as a performer to a close prior to the onset of the ’50s folk boom. But against all odds, in every era since, Guthrie’s music has remained relevant; the posthumous 1976 LP Struggle is testament to his staying power, and it’s been reissued on vinyl by Smithsonian Folkways in the label’s classic tip-on jacket, with artwork by David Stone Martin and original liner notes by Moses Asch.
It was as a music hungry youth in the mid-’80s that I first became cognizant of Woody Guthrie. Sure, I’d sung “This Land Is Your Land” in school a good while before that, but the teachers did a bang-up job of not mentioning whose song it was. It was a fascination with Dylan that led me to Guthrie, and even at that point Woody was moving beyond the iconic and into the realms of myth.
Mythic stature almost always brings a backlash, but with Guthrie, it was surprisingly little. He was beloved by the folkies natch, but also valued by the heartland rockers, rated as worthy by blues hounds (due to his association with Leadbelly and Sonny Terry), and even respected by the punks; well, some of them, anyway.
But I’ll confess that after soaking up and appreciating Dust Bowl Ballads (recorded for Victor in 1940) and the Library of Congress Recordings (from another 1940 session, issued by Elektra in ’63 and again by Rounder in ’88, which his how I heard it), for a long while afterward, I listened to Guthrie only intermittently.
However, Billy Bragg and Wilco’s two Mermaid Avenue volumes, which featured unused Guthrie lyric adaptations, lit a spark of personal interest and led me to an immersion in The Asch Recordings, then fresh in the bins, a copious bundle of material cut in 1944-’45 for Moses Asch’s eponymous pre-Folkways label.
I’d say the experience was revelatory, but that would overstate it a bit; time spent with The Asch Recordings really just drove home the depth of the man’s talent. Solid if unexceptional as a singer and guitarist, the vastness of the four volumes (also issued together) did a fine job in establishing him as much more than just the admirable template for straightforward folk protest.
He was also a writer and cartoonist, and if his biography underlines that he couldn’t stay in one place for long enough to really benefit from his abilities while active, his social and political activism, if strident and unapologetic (and also a limitation to success), has easily stood the test of time. As the recently uncovered Guthrie lyrics “Old Man Trump” make clear, he’s still screamingly of the moment.
The root of this album stems from the Asch Recordings and Guthrie’s desire for there to be a musical depiction of working class struggle in the USA during the period of their making. This took the shape of Struggle: Documentary #1, which was released by the Asch label in 1946 and held six songs, “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Buffalo Skinners,” “Union Burying Ground,” “Lost John,” “Ludlow Massacre,” and “The 1913 Massacre” on three 10-inch 78 RPM discs (a copy is selling for 250 greenbacks on eBay as I type; it’s safe to say Woody wouldn’t approve).
That makes it something of an early concept album, and Folkways’ reissue offers six more Asch recorded tunes in thematic unity as it arrived in time for the country’s Bicentennial. In keeping with its truncated title, the contents differ from much subsequent protest music, in that it’s largely not righteous or immediately uplifting, instead remaining true to the original intent of documentary. And the griping of Guthrie naysayers situating him as a didactic vessel of leftist ideology aside, Struggle isn’t a bum auditory trip as it begins with the guitar and harmonica instrumental “Struggle Blues.”
The track, somewhat homey in approach but more than merely likeable in its proto-folk blues ambiance, helps to illuminate Guthrie as stylistically broader than the occasional (but undercutting) Jimmie Rodgers-meets-Will Rogers synopsis can suggest. However, “A Dollar Down and a Dollar a Week” and “Whoopie Ti-Yi-Yo, Get Along Little Doggies” (which like “Struggle Blues” feature the additional vocals of frequent cohort Cisco Houston) do make plain the man’s old-time country and cowboy music influences.
By extension, some have put down Guthrie as a popularizer/ adapter/ sanitizer of the USA’s trad-song potency (and if you’re sensing a political axe grinding in these detractions, you’re not wrong), but the above tunes unwind with casual sturdiness and a lack of heavy-handedness, which only increases the unpacked wallop that is the lyrics to “Hang Knot.”
This is in large part Asch’s doing, as the original release’s six songs wisely retain Guthrie’s original intent on the album’s second side. If “Hang Knot” openly concerns a social evil (often used to political ends), “Waiting at the Gate” and “The Dying Miner” do take an explicitly political turn in the depiction of labor strife, but both are more than worthy as pure songs, in part through obvious conviction and an understanding of his own limitations, and they wrap up side one quite well.
Representing Guthrie’s original intent, side two explores its maker’s desire for pure reportage (again, documentary-like and kinda proto-cinema vérité) over Asch’s (admittedly modest) maneuvers as a record producer to achieve emotional effects. The big exception is “Lost John,” which offers Sonny Terry’s considerable talents on harmonica as Guthrie and Houston strum and whoop up a storm. The rest of the side is solo, with the highlights including the tense “death song” storytelling of “Buffalo Skinners” and the outlaw romanticizing (a standby in the USA) of “Pretty Boy Floyd.”
It can be tempting to crow that we need someone like Guthrie right now to help remedy the sociopolitical foulness in the USA and beyond, but that’s ultimately bullshit. The reality is that people are busy documenting the landscape of current events, in some cases musical but most not, as part of a condition of existence that never ends: Struggle. Above, I stated that Guthrie’s relevancy persevered against all odds, but y’know, that’s just wrong. This album’s title and its concept underscore that the man and his music will never fall out of favor.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
