Woody Guthrie's politics still volatile topic years after his death
BY JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Scene Writer
Sunday, March 04, 2012
3/04/12 at 8:35 AM
Davis Joyce can’t hide the chuckle in his
voice when he says the title of the University
of Tulsa’s upcoming conference on Woody
Guthrie leaves him “tickled pink."
“I love that it’s being called ‘Different
Shades of Red,’ ” said Joyce, whose books
include “An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before:
Alternative Views of Oklahoma History”
and “Alternative Oklahoma: Contrarian Views
of the Sooner State."
“It’s a title that sums up the history of
Oklahoma as much as it addresses the life of
Woody Guthrie,” he said. “Not only have there
been different shades of red in Oklahoma’s
past, there have been different meanings to
the word. You could say that, in some sense
of the word, Oklahoma has always been a red
state — sometimes spelled with a capital ‘r,’
sometimes not."
“Different Shades of Red: Woody Guthrie
and the Oklahoma Experience at 100” is
the first major educational conference to be
held in conjunction with “Woody at 100,”
the national celebration of Guthrie’s centennial,
sponsored by the Grammy Museum, the
Woody Guthrie Foundation and the Woody
Guthrie Archives.
It will take place Saturday at TU’s Lorton
Performance Center, with presentations from
national and international scholars that place
Woody Guthrie’s life, music and ideas in the
context of Oklahoma history.
The conference will conclude with a roundtable
discussion, led by Grammy Museum director
Bob Santelli and featuring some of the
artists taking part in the all-star “This Land
is Your Land” Guthrie Centennial Concert on
Saturday night at Brady Theater.
Leftist leanings
Guthrie’s native state has taken quite some
time to acknowledge not just the fact that
Woody Guthrie was pivotal figure in American
popular culture, but that he was an Oklahoman
in the first place.
The reason is Guthrie’s politics — or, more
precisely, what people assumed Guthrie’s
politics to be.
Former University of Tulsa
Professor Guy Logsdon recalled a
performance he gave to a California
audience in 1957, when he included
a Woody Guthrie song.
“I had been performing a number
of songs, and after each one, the
audience would applaud,” Logsdon
said. “Then I announced I was going
to do a song by my fellow Oklahoman
Woody Guthrie. And at the end
of the song, there was dead silence.
Not a single person made a sound.
“At that time, Woody Guthrie was
considered a die-hard Communist
in many people’s minds,” he said.
For those people, the evidence
is hard to dispute. One of Guthrie’s
earliest gigs was a radio show
for KFVD in California, a station
noted for its leftist politics. His
on-air partner was a woman named
Maxine Crissman, who performed
under the name “Lefty Lou."
Guthrie wrote a column titled
“Woody Sez” for a paper called
“The People’s World,” a publication
of the American Communist Party.
But as Guthrie himself once said,
when asked about his performing
at a Communist Party event: “Left
wing, right wing, chicken wing —
it’s all the same to me. I sing my
songs wherever I can sing ’em."
Growing into political activism
William Kaufman, a professor
of American literature and culture
at England’s University of Central
Lancashire, is the author of
“Woody Guthrie: American Radical,”
the first biography to focus on
the political aspect of Guthrie’s life
and work.
“In the book I try to chronicle
the development of his political
education,” Kaufman said. “There
were certain milestones that he
passed all along the way that inevitably
changed his way of thinking."
Guthrie may have claimed in his
book “Bound for Glory” that his
activism started early in life, but
Kaufman said, “Although politics
was certainly in the air as he was
growing up in Oklahoma, in reality,
it took some time for him to grow
into his political activism."
“He wasn’t all that political when
he fled the Dust Bowl and headed
for California around 1937,” he said.
“At that time, all he wanted was
to be a country music star. But his
eyes were opened by what he witnessed
during the Depression, and
especially in the light of the Dust
Bowl migration and all the deprivation
that ensued."
Kaufman said Guthrie’s political
thinking was formed by certain
events that would change how he
viewed the work he was doing.
“He naively sings a racist song on
the air and then gets an angry letter
from a black listener. That changes
him,” he said. Guthrie “accepts
a commission to visit a migrant
camp to write about it, and that
changes him. Hitler and Stalin sign
a non-aggression pact, or Germany
invades Russia, and that changes
him — and on and on.
“The redefinition of ideas comes
through encountering whatever it
is that history throws at you today
or tomorrow or the next day — and
Guthrie wrote about that, too,”
Kaufman said.
Unyielding anti-capitalist
Guthrie himself wrote that “gradually,
out of all our isms, new isms
and new songs grow like weeds and
flowers."
For Kaufman, “This raises the
thorny issue of constancy versus
fickleness in one’s politics — and
Guthrie certainly had problems
with that, too."
To Logsdon, charges of Guthrie’s
political inconsistencies are the result
of a misunderstanding of what
was truly important to the Okemah
native.
“It was never a matter of political
belief — for Woody, it was an
economic belief,” Logsdon said.
“Woody believed that greed was
the world’s greatest enemy, and
that was what he devoted his life to
fighting — greed and the evil it can
produce."
“No doubt about it,” Kaufman
said, “his chief enemy, as he himself
described it, was ‘the capitalist cistern.’
He positioned himself firmly
in the American left, as a strident
and self-proclaimed anti-capitalist."
Joyce said: “One meaning of
the word ‘radical’ is ‘affecting the
fundamental nature of a thing.’ And
if you look at the political aspect
of Woody Guthrie’s life, you see
that was the foundation — to effect
some kind of political, social or
economic change to improve the
quality of life for regular folk."
Kaufman added that Guthrie had
a little fun with the term.
“He told the composer Earl Robinson,
‘I was born to be a reddical,
and the life and death of a reddical
is the only kind of a life and a death
I’d sign up with,’ ” Kaufman said.
“And he absolutely despised people
who posed as radical simply for the
sake of a trendy image."
Paling legacy
Ironically, the “trendy image”
some people have of Woody
Guthrie is one of a hobo balladeer,
writing and singing songs typified
by the first couple of verses
of “This Land Is Your Land,” with
its humbly poetic descriptions of a
land “made for you and me."
“People don’t realize what a truly
radical, even subversive song that
is,” Joyce said. “It may seem to start
out talking about the beauty of the
American landscape, but there’s so
much more to that song."
Joyce quoted one of the lesserperformed
verses of the song:
In the squares of the city, In the
shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my
people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood
there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?
“That’s a very pointed statement
about the way Woody saw the
world around him — all this beauty
to share, and so many people unable
to enjoy the simple benefits of
life,” Joyce said.
But just as the more pointed
verses of “This Land Is Your Land”
aren’t often performed, Kaufman
said, “the sharpness of Guthrie’s
radical edge has been massaged
away somewhat” over time.
“It’s like Arlo Guthrie said when
his dad ended up on a U.S. postage
stamp: ‘For a man who fought all
his life against being respectable,
this comes as a stunning defeat,’ ”
Kaufman said. “And when the
politically watered-down version of
‘This Land Is Your Land’ began to
take the form of a second national
anthem, one of Guthrie’s friends
complained, ‘They’re taking a
revolutionary and turning him into
a conservationist.’
“To a large degree, that’s what
happened to Guthrie’s legacy over
the years,” he said. “People could
still identify his compassion for
the downtrodden and his love for
America; that was always there. But
I’m willing to bet that the majority
of folks who sing ‘This Land Is
Your Land’ are still not aware of
that radical edge of his."
Then again, Guthrie made it fairly
clear that his songs had something
more to them than simple
tunes and memorable words. As
Joyce said, “Anyone who writes
‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ on his
guitar knows all too well about the
power of music to change people."
Different Shades of Red
SATURDAY AT TU
8:00 a.m. Registration and light breakfast
8:30 a.m. Welcome
Brian Hosmer, Symposium
Committee chair; Roger Blais, TU
provost; Steadman Upham, TU
president; Bob Santelli, Grammy
Museum
Session I
9-10:30 a.m. “A Culture of Protest”
Mark Dolph, session chair
Panelists
Worth Robert Miller, Missouri
State University — “Struggle for
the Promised Land: Oklahoma’s
Territorial Years”
Jim Bissett, Elon University
— “Demanding Democracy:
The Socialist Movement and
Oklahoma Politics”
James Green, University of
Massachusetts, Boston —
“Something in the Air: Persistent
Dissent in Oklahoma during
Woody Guthrie’s Boyhood and
Early Manhood.”
Session II
10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m. “Red Dirt Roots”Guy Logsdon, session chair
Panelists
Guy Logsdon, TU, retired
Thomas Conner, Chicago Sun-
Times — “Oklahoma’s Red Dirt
Music and its Debt to Woody”
Hugh Foley, Rogers State
University — “Red Dirt’s African-
American and Native-American
Roots”
12:30-1:30 p.m. Lunchtime
Keynote
Jim Hightower — “Some Will
Rob You with a Six-Gun, and
Some with a Fountain Pen.”
Session III
2:-3:30 p.m. “Echoes of Woody”
Ralph Jackson, session chair
Panelists
Will Kaufman, University of
Central Lancashire — “Woody
Guthrie’s American Radicalism”
Mark Jackson, Middle Tennessee
State University — “Jolly
Banker: Woody Guthrie on the
Financial Crisis of Yesteryear and
Today”
Jim Ronda, TU emeritus professor
— “A Better Home: Building
an American Future”
4-5:30 p.m. Artists’ Roundtable
Bob Santelli, session chair,
Grammy Museum
Other ‘Woody at 100’ events
THROUGH APRIL 29: “WOODY
AT 100 Exhibition,” Gilcrease
Museum, 1400 Gilcrease Museum
Road.
MARCH 8: The Bela Rozsa
Memorial concert, featuring
composer David Amram conducting
the University of Tulsa
Orchestra in “Variations on a
Theme by Woody Guthrie,” with
a special appearance by Nora
Guthrie. Concert also includes
world premiere performance
of Nathan Wright’s winning
composition in the Bela Rozsa
Composition Competition, and
performance by Amram and TU
Jazz Musicians. Co-sponsored by the TU School of Music and
Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame.
7:30 p.m., Lorton Performance
Center at TU, 550 S. Gary Ave.
Free admission.
MARCH 9: “Red Dirt Hootenanny,”
featuring the Red Dirt
Rangers, Monica Taylor, Randy
Crouch, Terry “Buffalo” Ware
and more. Doors open 7:30
p.m., show at 8 p.m. Cain’s
Ballroom, 423 N. Main St. All
ages. Tickets are $15, plus fees.
For more information, visit tulsaworld.com/cains.
MARCH 11: “Jazz Tribute to
Woody Guthrie,” featuring
David Amram in arrangement of
Guthrie songs, as well as music
inspired by Guthrie and his
work, 5 p.m. Jazz Hall of Fame,
111 E. First St. Tickets $15-$20.
918-281-8600, tulsaworld.com/mytix.
DIFFERENT SHADES OF RED: WOODY GUTHRIE AND THE OKLAHOMA EXPERIENCE AT 100
When: 8 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Lorton Performance Center,
550 S. Gary Ave.
Tickets: $40.
tulsaworld.com/tuguthrie
THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND: THE WOODY GUTHRIE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION CONCERT
When: Doors open at 6:30 p.m.,
concert at 7:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Brady Theater, 105 W.
Brady St.
Tickets: $45-$250, plus fees, at
Reasor’s locations, Starship and
Buy for Less; 866-977-6849.
tulsaworld.com/brady
Original Print Headline: Guthrie's politics remain volatile topic
James D. Watts Jr. 918-581-8478
james.watts@tulsaworld.com
Associated Images:
Woody Guthrie, singer, songwriter, dean of American folk artists, is seen in a 1947 publicity photo. RCA Victor/Associated Press file
An undated photograph shows folk singer Woody Guthrie playing his guitar. Associated Press file
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