The book contains an eloquent introduction by Robert Santelli of the Grammy Museum, and a meaty essay and detailed track notes by Smithsonian archivist Jeff Place (himself a multiple Grammy winner). More importantly, it includes full-page illustrations of Guthrie's work: pen-and-ink cartoons, brush-and-ink paintings, illustrated letters and lyric sheets (both typed and handwritten), and even a remarkable oil painting of Abraham Lincoln. Other graphic elements include contracts and telegrams, LP labels, photographs of Woody and his friends, and reproductions of album covers, all tied together with first-rate design. The set would be worth it as a book of artwork, poetry, and correspondence by an American Master.
Just one quirky item in it that sheds new light on Woody is a 1949 letter to Folkways executive Moses Asch and his secretary, Marian Distler. At the time, Woody's song "Philadelphia Lawyer" had just been covered on records by his friend Cisco Houston and the West Coast band, The Maddox Brothers and Rose. Woody urges Asch to release his original recording of the song, since these cover versions are bound to make it popular. He then rhapsodizes at length about the Maddoxes: "This is the best all-around hillbilly band I've heard in my life," he writes. "They do everything from lowdown blues up through silly nonsense songs, and on to serious spirituals, and ballads with a pretty fair content, and do the best job I've so far heard done by any hillcountry band."
Woody then shifts gears. Worrying that he might soon be indicted for sexually explicit letters sent to a female friend, he offers this advice to Asch and Distler: "Take all your obscene feelings out in spoken words on each other. Don't never write them down and drop them into no public mail box." (Guthrie was indeed indicted and then convicted of sending obscene materials through the mail, ultimately spending ten days in jail.) The letter is adorned with one of Guthrie's deceptively simple brushstroke cartoons in red ink, showing a perfectly round moon, with a surprised-looking face in it, hovering above stylized brownstones. (The letter was posted from Brooklyn on May 13, 1949... the morning after a full moon.)
The broadcasts show that Guthrie was renowned for singing traditional songs. This is important: It's largely because of his performances of traditional folk songs that Woody was accepted as a "folksinger" by such authorities as John and Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress. In turn, the fact that this renowned "folksinger" was a singer-songwriter is largely responsible for the shift in meaning of "folk" in American music, from traditional music to acoustic singer-songwriters. Not many people can claim to have helped change the meaning of a common word, but I think Guthrie can.
Woody at 100 suggests fascinating questions about Guthrie's most iconic creation, "This Land Is Your Land." The first disc contains two versions: the standard version, recorded in 1946, and a 1944 recording containing the famous subversive verse about ignoring a "Private Property" sign:
(Another verse, in which Woody comments on seeing "his people" on depression-era breadlines, was taught by Woody to his children, but never recorded.)
The third disc contains another variation, sung as his radio theme song:
"This land is your land, this land is my land
From the redwood forest to the New York island
The Canadian mountain to the Gulf Stream waters,
This land was made for you and me."
Interestingly, this is also how Guthrie first published the lyrics in 1945. Place has elsewhere suggested "the Canadian mountain" was added on the fly, for a recording on which Guthrie and Cisco Houston narrated their adventures as hobos. Surely, though, if Guthrie published this chorus in his songbook, and sang it as his radio theme, it must have been his preferred chorus, at least for a time.
Is the "Canadian mountain" significant? Like the "Private Property" verse and the breadline verse, it suggests that Guthrie denied the boundaries that divided "his people," be they boundaries of class, property, or nation. Along with the title, this chorus shows us that Woody's America is not a nation but a land, which doesn't end at the Great Lakes or the Rio Grande, but rolls across the northern mountains and through the southern valleys, echoing with songs.
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