A Pilgrim’s Digression

Born July 14, 1912, today is the 94th birthday of Woody Guthrie. The best tribute ever paid the man has been by Bob Dylan, who wrote “Song To Woody” about 1962.

Song to Woody

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
Walking a road other men have gone down
I’m seeing a new world of people and things
Hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song
About a funny old world that’s coming along
Seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn
It looks like it’s dying and it’s hardly been born.

Hey Woody Guthrie but I know that you know
All the things that I’m saying and a many times more
I’m singing you the song but I can’t sing enough
‘Cause there’s not many men that’ve done the things that you’ve done.

Here’s to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too
And to all the good people that travelled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

I’m leaving tomorrow but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hitting some hard travelling too.

By the time Dylan met Woody in 1961, Guthrie was hospitalized in a sanitarium in New York with a condition called Huntington’s Disease, a degenerative disease of the nervous sytem that gradually stripped him of his ability to communicate. By 1965, Guthrie would point at cards marked “yes” or “no” in order to communicate his wishes. When he died in 1967, Guthrie had suffered with the disease for nearly two decades. Guthrie’s suffering, and his final two, unproductive decades, is one of the saddest chapters in the story of American song and literature.

In Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles Vol. 1, Dylan relates how on a weekly basis, he would travel out to East Orange, New Jersey, to spend time with Guthrie. He would play Guthrie’s songs for him and try to cheer him. Guthrie liked to hear “Song to Woody,” as well.

One gets a sense that Dylan really cared for the man, perhaps as a sort of substitute father. Dylan barely mentions his own childhood in his autobiography, and his father is notably absent in Dylan’s telling of his life. It’s easy to imagine that the man who became Dylan’s spirutal father, Woody Guthrie, also became a very real father to him, albeit a silent, non-judgemental, unconditionally approving father.

To this day, Dylan likes to end a concert with “Song to Woody.” It’s a powerful, raw piece of music, under whatever circumstances it is heard. Written when Dylan was himself a rambler and gambler, just another aspiring artist among other unknown s living in the cultural ferment of Greenwich Village in the early sixties, it is a song from a young man just starting down the road, written to an older man who has finished his journey.

What strikes me about the song is its melancholy, perhaps occasioned by the undercurrent of knowledge of what became of Guthrie and the men with whom he travelled. The line, “here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men / That come with the dust and are gone with the wind” is an acknowledgement not merely of the roots of Dylan’s inspiration, but an acknowledgement of mortality.

Guthrie, Leadbelly, Sonny, and Cisco, and many others as well, got their start in the Dust Bowl days of the thirties, often by singing songs about the hard times of the depression. They quite literally came in with the dust, and like dust they have gone on the wind.

For a young man at the beginning of his career, with so much life ahead of him, this is a fairly mature acknowledgement of the mortality of the flesh.

In the final verse, one can sense a sort of anticipation of greatness for himself, on Dylan’s part. “I’m leaving tomorrow, but I could leave today” suggests Dylan knows he is on the cusp of, if not greatness, the cusp of whatever God has planned for him to achieve. Could be today, could be tomorrow. The last thing Dylan wants to be able to say is that he’s had some hard travelling, too.

Experience is the central preoccupation of the song. Although celebrations of Guthrie’s music abound throughout the song, via allusion (’Hard Travellin’ and ‘1913 Massacre’ to name just two), it is Guthrie’s experience that Dylan celebrates. Here was a man who lived! Dylan wants the same for himself. The poet must live before he can write. The poet must reject home (”I’m out here a thousand miles from my home…”) and its comfort and stability, go on the road, see the things that other men have done.

Certainly, by all accounts Guthrie led a vigorous and varied life, while his health supported it. Even though Dylan’s song celebrates such a life of activity, in the end it is the music that is really the only thing is left of a man, after his dust has been scattered into the wind. If Dylan does not acknowledge this directly, he acknowledges it with every song he sings, including “Song to Woody,” in all of which he artfully draws on Woody Guthrie’s song-writing style, subjects, and vocal mannerisms.

From Bob Dylan to Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams, to Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen, the influence of Woody Guthrie on 20th and 21st century American music cannot be undervalued. When Bruce Springsteen releases an album of folk music called “The Seeger Sessions,” he might as well have titled it “The Guthrie Sessions,” because it is Woody’s voice that speaks through these old songs, in a relatively young man’s cracked, thoroughly American voice. Before Seeger, there was Woody. He is the front bookend to American music in the 20th century, as Dylan is the rear bookend.

What always surprises me, in listening to Guthrie, is his political radicalism. It is a quality that often is elided, in accounts of his life and collections of his music. How many people have heard the verse of “This Land Is Your Land” that mentions the “relief office?”

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me.

I suspect if more Red State parents knew of this verse, they might object strenuously to their children learning this great song in elementary school. Let them object. Teachers ought to teach kids the whole song, and let parents piss and moan.

Why not teach Guthrie’s song about Sacco and Vanzetti, “Two Good Men,” in our schools? Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants facing deportment for supposed Communist sympathies when they were charged, convicted, and executed for a robbery and murder they did not commit.

Writing in prose from the perspective of the two executed men, Guthrie wrote about how they must have felt in their last days, “There was no cure known, and the words whirled and spun around in your head. No cure for the people. No cure for the streets.” Guthrie’s alienation, as well as his hope, is the alienation and hope of the modern liberal as well.

One of my favorite anecdotes about Guthrie is that he painted on his guitar the words, “This machine kills fascists.”

In the context of World War II, this might be taken as a wholly innocent expression of patriotism. Except that in that time and place, it would have been seen as an expression of communist sympathies. When Woody writes the song “All You Fascists Are Bound to Lose,” he does not address only Adolf Hitler and his Nazis, though they are certainly a target of Guthrie’s fascist-killing machine. He writes of fascists generally: “I’m gonna tell all you fascists, / You may be surprised, people all over this world are getting organized, / You’re bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose.” Then he goes on to nail American fascists specifically in the next verse: “Your poll tax and Jim Crow / And greed has got to go.”

For a modern liberal, living in a stifling environment where people commonly speak the word “liberal” as if it were the vilest of smears and liberals themselves won’t call themselves liberal but insist on being called “Progressives,” Woody Guthrie is a breath of fresh air. He lived in a time when liberalism was vibrant and strong, even stronger because it was unpopular and harrassed by social and economic conservatives alike.

Guthrie’s liberalism is complicated and, perhaps, contradictory. Liberalism itself is contradictory, expressing both an optimistic faith that government can solve complex problems, and a fear of the oppressive evil of a tyrannical government. Can liberalism accomodate both the Woody Guthrie who decries the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti by the state, and the Woody Guthrie who approves of government welfare, rather than the charity of the “steeple,” as the source of relief for the poor?

Maybe I make too much of the paradox of a political philosophy that values freedom and a powerful, centralized State.  Woody offers no apology for his politics or the contradictions someone more strictly logical might find in his words. Like Walt Whitman before him, Guthrie strides across this nation, from the redwood forests to the New York island, declaring that this land is yours and mine, if we have the strength to claim it. Temerity is not one of Woody’s qualities because, as Dylan noted, “there’s not many men that’ve done the things that you’ve done.”