The year, I remember, was 1967 when Woody Guthrie died of Huntington’s disease at the age of 55. As an undergraduate in the mid-1960s, we would sit around the fire in winter singing Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘I’d rather be a hammer than a nail’ or Woody Guthrie’s ‘This land is your land’. We argued deep into the night over the dissident spirit underpinning the 1960s that had attracted the young and the old who stood up against authority and protested against the Vietnam War. The politically charged times were integral to music, which became a symbol of democracy and civil rights through a non-violent anarchy, holding out promise of liberation and love. It was for no other reason that Guthrie had the words ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ scrawled on his many guitars.
Inspirational presence
Large-scale commemorations, which mark Woody Guthrie’s 100th birth anniversary, evoke a profoundly felt sense of history and deep-seated expectation of revolutionary fervour rooted in country music and the blues. The legend of Woody Guthrie stands as the main sociological phenomenon that inspired Bob Dylan and his contemporaries like Jack Kerouac, John Lennon, Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger and several generations of folksingers, song-writers and activists that were to follow. I am particularly reminded of the image of Guthrie playing the guitar simultaneously with the mouth organ in the rack, which Bob Dylan so religiously followed.
Woody Guthrie wrote nearly 4,000 songs and numerous poems, prose and plays, which are located in the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York. The songs that captured the plight of everyman were ‘Deportee’, resonating around the world wherever immigrants have suffered. The famous ‘This Land Is Your Land’ mourned the misery of the poor with a biting, defiant and subversive dig at the institutions of capitalism: “ By the relief office I saw my people./As they stood hungry, /I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me. ” Another angry stanza almost reverberates with the same sentiments behind the contemporary Occupy Wall Street Movement: “ There was a high wall there/That tried to stop me/A sign was painted that said ‘Private Property’/But on the other side it didn’t say nothin’/That side was made for you and me. ” In “Pretty Boy Floyd” he hits out at the moneylenders: “ Now as through this world I ramble, I’ve seen lots of funny men/Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen. ” The vision and poetic beauty of his lyrics, particularly in his famous ‘Ballad of Tom Joad’, which echoes the plight in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath , expresses the inherent quality of music as a vehicle for social change. Tom Joad’s last words became the principal occupation of his life: “Wherever people are fighting for their rights, wherever people ain’t free, that’s where I’m going to be, Ma.”
Not to forget his remarkable painting “In El Rancho Grande” as well as the long-lost House of Earth , his unpublished novel about endemic poverty and a scathing proletarian attack on capitalist greed, along with his semi-fictional memoirs Bound for Glory and Seeds of Man , all written in a genuine homespun prose full of humour and wit. The 1960s generation shared with him a deep commitment to ideals of liberty and the significance of love and meaning in a corrupt world that he brings out in House of Earth , issues that transcends space and time and becomes globally applicable not only in the dry bowl of Texas, but anywhere where abject poverty and death make life miserable. The Great Depression, World War II, the social and the political upheavals resulting from Communism and the Cold War along with the economic bankruptcy of his family and the early death of his mother compelled him to take to the road, a long journey that became the inspiration behind his radical involvement in social and political affairs. ‘I Ain’t Got No Home’, ‘Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad’, ‘Talking Dust Bowl Blues’ portray his desire to give voice to the dispossessed and the marginalised.
As heady as ever
A hundred years have gone by since the birth of this quintessential poet of the American heartland on July 14, 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma, yet his music and paintings remain as heady as ever. Starting his music career at the age of 19 in Pampa, Texas, writing and singing dance band music for the fun of ‘getting a girlfriend’, he went on to involve himself in the serious business of contemporary politics when he arrived in New York at the age of 27. His support for labour and Civil Rights movement through a non-violent anarchy was optimism for days of liberation and equality.
The palpable ideology of radicalism underpinning the 1960s was, to a large extent, inspired by Woody Guthrie whose legacy lies in the inherent spirit of cooperation, integration and solidarity standing in opposition to the days of violence and greed that marks the inherent character of capitalist strategies aimed at the co-option of the artist. The message of peace and harmony that he embodies is loud and clear emphasising our responsibility to improve the world in the field of the human spirit and of human conscience so that it is free of class inequity and discrimination. It is a vision that is underpinned by Guthrie’s ability to see the world through the long lens.
Those who belonged to the generation that Guthrie inspired lived and breathed the air in which debate, love of learning, existential philosophy and the arts made life an invigorating experience. He epitomised not only left-wing sentiments, but also the spirit of energy that held out enormous possibilities of a new tomorrow and a vision of change. It was a test of whether people of our generation really believed in one another and in the world they were struggling to create. For me, Guthrie stands for the act of imagination that transformed calamity into celebration. It was the pronouncement of the endurance of music and art as a mode of survival in appalling times.
The memory of Woody Guthrie becomes at this juncture an inspiration for the establishment of a new moral and philosophical dominion of social, political, and spiritual justice.
