A Race of Singers by Bryan K. Garman

Author:Bryan K. Garman [Garman, Bryan K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1990-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

SINGING WOODY’S SONGS

Twenty years after the release of Ashby’s Bound for Glory, the music video network VH-1 aired a report on a tribute concert sponsored by the Woody Guthrie Foundation and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the conclusion of the broadcast, the young reporter remarked, “Not only did [Guthrie] do protest stuff, but he was a great songwriter.”18 Like Ashby, she suggested that art and politics were separate discourses, that Guthrie’s work could be neatly separated into didactic ballads and beautiful lyrics. Which type of Guthrie’s songs has become most prominent in the canon of American music? Which songs are most often performed and hence remembered, and what do these songs say about the politics of American cultural memory? An examination of the tributes staged in Guthrie’s honor reveals that his most famous songs are those that emphasize individual struggle and express their politics with ambivalence.

Since Pete Seeger led a cadre of musicians onto the stage of the Pythian in 1956, cultural workers have honored Guthrie in venues ranging from the Hollywood Bowl to Harvard University to Carnegie Hall, in cities ranging from Minneapolis to Austin to Okemah. They have recorded albums of Guthrie material on such labels as Vanguard, Folkways, Warner Brothers, and CBS.19 Thirteen of these events, to which artists such as Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, Ronnie Gilbert, and Bernice Reagon have contributed, have disseminated a more comprehensive representation of Guthrie’s politics to a sizable national audience, but they too often expurgate the historical and ideological content of the original lyrics and struggle to balance collective politics and individualism. Perhaps the cultural productions most influential in shaping Guthrie’s legacy, these tributes tend to honor the artist rather than the causes for which he fought, and consequently, they often devolve into eulogies that acknowledge the horrors of his disease. By the time the participants in these affairs join hands to close the show with a sing-along of “This Land,” any radicalism they articulate is often swept away in a surge of patriotism, nostalgia, and sorrow. Although most of these tributes identify their hero as a radical, they make certain that audiences understand that he was not too damned radical.20

Seeking to disconnect Guthrie from communist affiliation, artists typically perform songs from Dust Bowl Ballads, many of which articulate a disdain for wealth and privilege in republican terms, which, as we have seen, means they “protest social and economic inequalities without calling the entire system into question.”21 “Do-Re-Mi,” the most frequently covered of these ballads, expresses the core of Guthrie’s populism by describing the disappointment that farmers face when they leave their dust-blown homes to start their lives anew in California, a place the song sardonically describes in Edenic terms. Hoping to find work in the fruit orchards, these families travel westward along Route 66, but when they arrive at the mythic “sugar bowl,” they taste only the most bitter fruits. Whereas border patrols welcome families who have the wherewithal to vacation or purchase a house, they sometimes refuse to admit poorer farmers who will likely drain state or federal relief funds.

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