"Only thing that is higher than that dust is your debts", wrote Woody Guthrie from Texas in 1934, about the giant windstorms that flattened farms and hopes, driving a million poor farmers, "dust bowl" refugees, from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, away from drought and rapacious landlords and bankers.
Born in 1912 in Oklahoma, Woody attempted to "find himself" through the "superstition business" of faith-healing, fortune-telling, Rosicrucian tracts, Eastern mysticism and the Baptist Church, finally ended with socialism as the response to the existence of private plenty amidst mass poverty during the Great Depression.
Cray is unable to resolve whether Woody ever joined the US Communist Party, but he favours the majority opinion that Woody was too eclectic (he melded primitive Christianity with communism, Jesus with Lenin), and too independent, to have been useful, or happy, as a member ("he was not an organisation guy", said an editor of the Daily Worker, for which Woody wrote almost 300 columns). Nevertheless, Woody was proudly loyal to the Party for better and, occasionally, worse.
Woody brought his special gift of song to his new-found cause, dedication to the poor. Tastes of commercial musical success were the exceptions to an otherwise frigid reception by the cultural arm of capitalism (his Department of the Interior minder edited out "the bad stuff" from his 1940 government-commissioned album on the building of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River because "he was in the class struggle pretty deep").
Woody survived submarines and mines during the war but he did not survive the FBI which blacklisted the pro-Soviet and anti-racist balladeer from the Merchant Marine. Music continued to consume Woody, and his 1947 songs on Sacco and Vanzetti (the two Italian-American anarchists framed and executed for a payroll murder in 1927) often reached the poetic heights of his creative peak (roughly 1937 to 1947), despite lapses into "political speeches in verse".
Signs of Woody's eventual fate, however, began to appear with the onset of the rare, genetic, incurable nervous system disease, Huntington's chorea. As energy and creativity drained from him, he produced "no new songs of real note" from this time. Alcohol was Woody's solution to his developing psychosis but this only made everything worse.
Despite the curse of Huntington's, the attentions of the FBI continued (they didn't drop Woody from their `watchlist' until 1955) and the blacklist stayed in place (RCA and Decca dumped him, and Hollywood ditched a movie deal for his autobiography). The last thirteen of Woody's 55 years were spent in state psychiatric hospitals, dying slowly until the end came in 1967.
Woody was no saint. Cray doesn't soft-pedal on Woody's personal failings, not all of which were entirely reducible to the effects of Huntington's. Woody could be ill-mannered, self-engrossed, irresponsible, undisciplined and immature. However, he was, more often, supportive and generous. An eternal child in many respects, Woody was, despite his faults, impossible to hate and easy to love.
Woody left generations of musicians in his debt which was marked by a lyrical grace and melodic simplicity, sung with a voice which "bit at the heart" and which drew its moral verve from, as Pete Seeger put it, Woody's "strong sense of right and wrong".
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Top reviews from other countries
- Amazon CustomerReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 1, 2023
Interesting autobiography
- Cormac BrackenReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 28, 2019
Better than I expected.
