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Woody Guthrie, L.A., 1937–1941 ed. by Darryl Holter and William Deverell

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-3921368

1558-1454

Michael Honey,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Many of us in labor studies knew Darryl Holter for his work in the 1980s as a labor scholar, educator, and organizer in Wisconsin. In 1991, the UCLA Labor Center offered him a job, and he taught labor and industrial relations there until his life took a different turn when his father-in-law, who owned several struggling auto dealerships in downtown Los Angeles, came down with terminal cancer. At a time of recession in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King beating and riots, with four hundred jobs at stake, Darryl took over the business and helped to build a coalition to revitalize the downtown. Today, the dealerships employ nearly one thousand, and downtown is booming. After his many previous years of protest singing on picket lines, he also rejuvenated his lifelong passion as a singer-songwriter.Holter produced a CD of his own songs. For a Labor and Working-Class History Association / Organization of American Historians panel in Washington, DC, we linked his protest song, “Living on the Edge,” with searing photos of L.A. homelessness and poverty by labor’s indefatigable photojournalist David Bacon. A bit later, after a stint doing research in the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York City, Holter organized an academic conference and concert in L.A. to commemorate the 2012 centennial of Guthrie’s birth. Holter and University of Southern California historian Bill Deverell have now edited a book of essays from that conference on Guthrie’s formative years in L.A., 1937 to 1941.This is a sumptuous book filled with photos of Guthrie and reproductions of his cartoon art from this period, with well-written essays that offer a refreshing and important reading of Guthrie’s evolution as a political and folk musician. Fleeing the dust storms in his native Oklahoma and the Great Depression in Pampa, Texas, “the Dust Bowl vagabond” hoboed his way to “the Garden of Eden” of California. Guthrie came of age surviving by his wits, his humor, his music, and by linking up with the radical labor and antifascist and antiracist movements of that era.Holter’s first essay offers a bracing account of how Guthrie’s early experiences shaped a lifetime of music and writing that would inspire Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and generations of singer-songwriters. Playing in bars and living in the flophouses of a desolate and poverty-stricken downtown L.A., Guthrie eked out a threadbare existence while assembling songs, yarns, commentary, and writing that became his “radio songs” on radio station KFVD, which covered more than a thousand miles and reached tens of thousands of transplants to the West. Meeting people in the migrant labor camps jolted Guthrie’s outrage at injustice and helped to transform him into one of the great interpreters of the American worker’s experience. Holter documents Guthrie’s turn to the left as a musician and a folklorist as he came to identify with working-class people, including African Americans and Latino workers.Dan Cady and Douglas Flamming, “Ramblin’ in Black and White,” document how Woody flipped from unconscious white supremacy to conscious antiracism. His hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma, was the site of a horrific lynching of a black mother and her thirteen-year-old son from a bridge, an event that his father watched and in which he might have participated. White supremacy and racist language engulfed Woody’s childhood in the Jim Crow era. His radicalization came in part from rejecting that legacy, beginning in L.A. in his work with Latino farmworkers and with his crucial linkage to the Communist Party’s antiracist Popular Front.By 1940, Guthrie was in New York City, writing the chilling “Slipknot,” a song about the Okema lynching, and singing with African American performers, including the great collector of songs, Leadbelly. Woody flowered in a radicalized folk music era, and the roots of his transformation can be found in the period from 1937 to 1941, the years covered in this book, meeting diverse audiences and working with the Left in and around L.A. James Forester, in “Slow Train through California,” Peter LaChapelle, in “The Guthrie Prestos” (records), and Philip Goff, in “In the Shadow of the Steeple I Saw My People,” fill in important details of his experiences in L.A. Tiffany Colannino’s reproduction of “Woody’s Los Angeles Editorial Cartoons” is a gem. Ed Robbin, an activist of the 1930s who connected Woody to the Left, memorably recalls in “Woody and Will” how he and actor Will Geer helped to launch Guthrie as a people’s musician. Ronald Baily, in “Woody Sez,” draws from Guthrie’s columns in the People’s Daily World that helped Guthrie shape himself as a political musician.Holter, in “Woody and Skid Row in Los Angeles,” details the origins and alternative lyrics of some of Guthrie’s best songs. Bryant Simon and William Deverell, in “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” meditate on the influence of writer John Steinbeck’s depictions of the Depression on migrant workers and show how Guthrie in turn influenced the writings of Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen sums up the Guthrie method: writing about “characters that could be you and me” and asking “the listener to walk in those shoes” (163); the moral of the story is “people living and working together without stepping on each other” (162).John Kun, in “Woody at the Border,” shows how Guthrie’s influence lives on in Latino and borderlands music. It is one example of many of how Guthrie’s acute sensibilities about race and class make his songs usable today.Woody Guthrie took American “folk” music in a profoundly political direction, and this collection shows how his time in L.A. profoundly shaped that direction. In the last chapter of this gorgeously produced and illustrated book, Holter provides an extremely useful overview of all of Guthrie’s recordings from 1939 to 1949. His seminal songs can be found here, along with how and when they got recorded, with many other people’s songs that Guthrie picked up in his travels. In a mere ten years, this “wry-witted word-volcano, a prophet singer,” according to one critic (159), blazed a path through our history with hundreds of recorded and written songs. During his lifetime, Woody barely sold any records. He spent his last years not silenced by the Red Scare, which would have blacklisted him, but sidelined by degenerative Hutington’s disease. And yet his influence on American songs and political culture was profound.While reading this book, readers will benefit greatly by also hearing Darryl Holter’s new album, “Woody Guthrie L.A.” He recovers some of Woody’s lost songs as well as better-known songs, with great arrangements and scintillating orchestration from top L.A. rock and folk-country musicians. John McCutcheon has also come out recently with a great interpretation of Guthrie’s songs, titled “This Land: Woody Guthrie’s America.” This enlightening book, and our continuing explorations of Woody’s music, help his muse to live on.