The contributors to this fantastic edited volume effectively answer the questions posed by Jorge Arévalo Mateus in the foreword: “What is the source of Guthrie’s enduring cultural value? Why are artists and academics alike drawn to the mythology and reality of his life and times?” (xv). Using recent and traditional analytical frameworks from a variety of disciplines, these scholars unpack Guthrie’s expressive practices, iconicity, and political aesthetics (xv). This volume ushers in a new generation of scholarship in “Guthrie Studies” and, according to Mateus, challenges the conventional ways of thinking and writing about the musician’s complex and often ambiguous career for the last fifty years. For the most part, the contributors focus on Guthrie’s relation to the New Deal era, the Great Depression, and the American working-class. Others explore widespread, romantic notions of Guthrie as an itinerant vagabond and the ways in which Guthrie and others fashioned particular identities and brands of authenticity. Many of these scholars engage in song-text analysis, while others acquired letters and diaries from the Woody Guthrie Archives, providing novel perspectives into the musician’s image, identity, and relentless battle for a better American future. The volume is divided into three parts.
The first part (chapters 1-5) examines Guthrie’s political ambiguity, communist rhetoric, and tireless support of the American working-class. Richard Nate’s contribution (chapter 1) highlights the New Deal-influenced rhetoric in Guthrie lyrics. Although this article is brief, Nate paints a clear and thought-provoking picture of Guthrie’s role in and response to New Deal-era politics. Guthrie’s self-appointed role as the voice of the working class and common man lead to Benjamin Botkin labeling him as the “original forgotten man”—a title that closely linked Guthrie to the early days of the New Deal era. Although Guthrie sympathized with the Communist Party of the United States, Nate’s article shows clearly the musician’s compatibility with the New Deal outlook (13). At the same time, Nate shows that Guthrie’s reluctance to “succumb to any political orthodoxy” caused him to navigate the fine lines separating political ideologies of his time—something Nate calls a “strange mixture of Marxism and democratic idealism” (13).
In chapter 2, John S. Partington discusses what he calls Guthrie’s two visions: a conservative one built on the integrity of the “traditional family,” and one based on radical political and social agendas including “politicized labour unions, large-scale government projects, anti-racism, women’s rights and internationalism” (18). The author writes that these two visions were influenced by three stages in Guthrie’s life: his migration to California from the Dust Bowl, his employment by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), and his labor union activism in the 1940s (19). Like Richard Nate, Partington acknowledges the mixed and multi-layered rhetoric in Guthrie’s writings. The author attributes part of Guthrie’s diversity to his experience with workers in both the rural and the urban workforce across the United States. While there are elements of communist rhetoric in many of his songs, Partington argues that Guthrie “clearly supported the liberal democratic state that America epitomized to the rest of the world” (29). Guthrie took advantage of his days at the BPA, advocating for state support for rural areas, smallholder farming, and the unemployed. Guthrie had a different agenda in the urban realm. He did not advocate for the termination of capitalism or class division. Rather, he desired a rebuilding of class relations between workers and their employers via “worker solidarity and government intervention” (30). Partington reminds us of Guthrie’s strong anti-racism, fighting for racial equality his entire adult life until he lost his ability to write due to Huntington’s Disease. With this article, Partington eloquently shows Guthrie’s “simple humanism” (32), built on “pragmatic cooperation which respected the different traditions of rural and urban America” (31).
Chapters 3 and 4 are contributed by Will Kauffman and Mark Allan Jackson. Kauffman discusses what seems, at first, to be less important events in Guthrie’s biography and musical development. Kauffman explores, however, the musician’s role in the cultural front and the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the resulting People’s Songs, Inc. Jackson reminds us of the flexibility of song lyrics, especially American folk songs, and that they may be adapted and altered to fit the needs of present-day society. He chronicles Guthrie’s use of “John Henry” and other folk songs to rally workers, soldiers, and the unemployed. He uses Guthrie’s versions of “Jackhammer Blues,” a derivative of the well-known “John Henry,” to show his sensitivity to the American worker. The characters he used in this song and several others epitomize the ways in which “legendary” figures become powerful symbols in American culture, past and present.
In chapter 5, Martin Butler discusses Guthrie’s vocal group, The Almanac Singers, in the early 1940s. Their type of pro-war attitude embodied a “newly emerging patriotism among singers and songwriters” at the time (69). Butler’s contribution seeks to explain Guthrie’s personal impact on the pro-war effort. In particular, Butler uses Guthrie’s lyric content as a way of explaining the musician’s understanding of German fascism. With the help of the Woody Guthrie Archives, Butler gained access to his personal diaries, letters, and notebooks. The author uses these materials to discuss the level to which Guthrie and his compatriots were affected by the fascist threat from abroad (69). Lastly, Butler calls the musician a “cultural seismographer,” who was both an influence upon and product of the “political and ideological discourses” of the early 1940s. Guthrie’s songwriting was a way of publicly rationalizing this fascist threat by “dramatizing and popularizing its unspeakable and atrocious consequences” (69). The contemporary discourse on fascism contained in the songs was widely disseminated, but Guthrie’s songs, according to Butler, are “socially and culturally productive in that they communicate and popularize discursive positions” and influence “cultural knowledge and taking part in contemporary discourses on German Nazism” (80).
In Part II (chapters 6-8), scholars explore Guthrie’s iconicity, American sense of place, and identity construction. In Butler’s second contribution to this volume (chapter 6), he eloquently discusses how Guthrie was affected by notions of the itinerant man, the American hobo, and the songs and folklore generated from these ways of life. In this article we learn about Guthrie’s self-branding as a “hobo” of sorts. Those traveling by boxcar and hitchhiking became role models who led a lifestyle not far from Guthrie’s own. His hobo-themed songs were often sung in first-person and, in that way, Guthrie “sings about tramping and fashions himself as one at the same time” (89). Butler considers the timeframe during which Guthrie likely became fascinated with the American hobo—the Great Depression era, when a man’s mobility was based less on a romantic idea of free movement, but rather became a mode of survival. While some considered mobility to be involuntary, making them feel like a victim of the political and economic climate, Guthrie continued to refashion the hobo with a “particularly constructive and thus very positive momentum” (93). For Guthrie, the hobo is a man on the outside with the advantage of looking in. From this vantage point, the hobo is a man who watches and criticizes others on the inside, in “normal” society. The hobo’s marginal position makes him the “ideal observer” and “an epitome of moral superiority” (95) who, as a result, experiences feelings of freedom and a “natural state of being in this world” that insiders can only dream about (94). Butler concludes that the hobos in Guthrie’s songs, however, challenge conventional ways of thinking about the itinerant man. Rather than being figures who avoid responsibility, Guthrie’s hobos are “cultural custodians” and patriotic (95-6). Interestingly, Guthrie’s reluctance to be politically pigeonholed, which is illustrated in the articles throughout Part I of this volume, speaks to his fascination with the American hobo and itinerant lifestyle. As a man on the margins, as a non-conformist, he maintains a position that may be understood “both as a detriment and as a benefit” (90). Frank Erik Pointer (chapter 8) addresses another side and less-favorable aspect of Guthrie’s public image—his unfortunate, over-simplified image as “the guy who wrote ‘This Land is Your Land,’” and the public’s uninformed and exaggerated association of Guthrie with folk revival artists like Bob Dylan. Pointer argues that Guthrie, as a rebel and revolutionary, has been ascribed a distorted legacy by the public.
Part III presents case studies that have been overlooked in the past and provides a new perspective on Guthrie’s connection to Bob Dylan. In chapter 9, Ronald D. Cohen chronicles Guthrie’s relationship with actor Will Geer. He describes this relationship and the various social activities in which they were involved as a “broad support network” (142). With this article, Cohen seeks to better understand the role of friends and some non-musical relationships in the trajectory of Guthrie’s career. This interesting account of a complicated relationship provides a fresh perspective from which to analyze Guthrie’s life and work. Ed Cray, too, tells the story of a beneficial relationship—one that drastically changed the course of Guthrie’s musical career. Through the efforts of Alan Lomax, Guthrie was able to record dozens of songs, publish his famous Bound for Glory book, and acquire the job at the Bonneville Power Administration. While Cray does not intend to explicitly discuss Guthrie’s influence on Lomax, this article shows clearly his fascination with Guthrie. Lomax’s practices and motives are often questioned by scholars, and there are curious elements in this story that may further fuel those discussions (see Jeff Morgan’s article, chapter 7, page 101). At any rate, the positive impact that Lomax and Guthrie had on each other is undeniable in light of this article.
In the final chapter, Carpenter compares Bob Dylan’s and Guthrie’s notions of the outlaw and how it manifests in their songwriting. A particularly compelling discussion involves Carpenter’s comparison of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” Here, Carpenter shows how each artist conceptualizes “living outside the law” and the kind of behavior that is required to successfully do so. Carpenter brilliantly sums it up, writing, “It is freedom that drives the outlaw whether it is the collective freedom for the ‘hard-hit’ to live an honest life, which Guthrie stands for, or the freedom of individuality and expression bereft of social or popular demands, which Dylan strives for” (162). Through their juxtaposition of the versions of the American dream, both artists argue that freedom is achieved through “the rugged individualism of the outlaw role” (162). The two-sided message of both songs, Carpenter suggests, is often misunderstood and contribute to the general public’s misconception of their performers.
This book would be helpful in both undergraduate classes and graduate seminars. Classes that focus on the formation of artist identities, twentieth-century American popular music, the Dust Bowl, music and migration, and Bob Dylan would find many articles in this volume enlightening.
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[Review length: 1794 words • Review posted on November 17, 2011]