The Book in Many Sentences

A tremendous, well written work that succeeds in the goal of every biography – the reader should have no unanswered questions after completing the book. In fact, this biography answered every question I had, raised some more questions and answered those too. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in American folk music or American political sentiment in the 20th century.

I’d read the Joe Klein biography sometime in the early 2000s and thought it did a good job of puncturing the Guthrie mystique, but after reading the Cray book I find the Klein book nearly a hagiography. No punches were pulled and both the good and the bad of Guthrie was unveiled. The good was mostly public and publicized, but the bad was hidden and much weirder than I anticipated.

Surprising Insights

1. The bits about “Prairie Socialism” of the early 20th century was quite insightful. I had no idea about much of that. The teaching of American history does not lend itself to gradual increases and decreases. Guthrie makes much more sense in that light
2. For all his talk of working people, Guthrie himself never held much in the way of a regular job. I knew this already, but this book came close to quantifying it. In my reading, outside of his late in the war military service, and “Let’s avoid the military” merchant marine service you could measure his working a steady job in days.
3. At no point in his life did he care about money, or what money could bring. The marginal value of money over bare subsistence (for him and family) was essentially zero.
4. His father was much more of a political insider than I would have thought. Very much a local apparatchik.
5. Guthrie was much more of an alcoholic that I previously thought.
6. His ability to attract people he could endlessly sponge off of, and steal from (including guitars!) was immense.
7. He was definitely a CPUSA stooge
8. Songs for John Doe! Which I knew about, but should be an eternal reminder that people are loyal to political parties, not political principles
9. The Communist Party USA’s slogan “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” is a great slogan and I wander why no one has used that in modern times.
10. Guthrie’s mom was much more violent than I would have thought.
11. He spent far, far more time in New York and Los Angeles talking about ‘ramblin’ than I would have thought, and far less time actually ‘ramblin’ from place to place.
12. I actually have a lot more thoughts than this, but will have to wait for another blog post

Highlights

Once prickly proud and fiercely independent, a figure larger than life, now he seemed shrunken, even emaciated, his wiry hair graying at forty-four, his face weathered by wind, sun, and tragedy. The voice was all but mute. Fire had seared his right arm, the angry skin drawn red and taut, the elbow cocked so he no longer could play an instrument or lift a pen.

They saw their father on weekends, sometimes visiting him at the state mental hospital in Montclair, New Jersey, occasionally taking him home to Brooklyn.

People across the country were singing the song now—at hoots and sing-a-longs and, better still, in public schools. Often the kids didn’t know who wrote it, didn’t care even. No matter, the skinny man in the oversized sport jacket sitting in the box at stage right had never bothered to copyright his thousand or more songs.

Restless Jerry P. had moved his family, including then-eighteen-year-old Charley, from the cattle and cotton country of Bell County north across the state to Indian Territory in 1897. The federal government was awarding land grants as large as 160 acres to anyone with Indian blood; Jerry P.’s second wife, Charley’s stepmother, was one-eighth Creek. It was enough to qualify.

They were Scots-Irish, MacGuthries in a distant past, more recently settled in Tennessee. The Guthries had migrated to Texas in covered wagons after the War Between the States, fervent Confederates still. It was no accident that Charley had a younger half-brother named Jefferson Davis Guthrie.

With statehood in the offing, Charley Guthrie, a solid Democrat, ran for election as district court clerk and won on September 18, 1907—after 395 votes from all-Negro and heavily Republican precincts were arbitrarily thrown out on the pretext that their ballot boxes had been stuffed.

The new district court clerk moved five miles from Castle to Okemah, a town “partly western in its optimism and quick acceptance of outsiders, and partly southern, in the soft accents of its inhabitants, its prejudice against blacks, and its tolerance of booze, sidewalk fights, and public drunkenness.”

More galling still, once-independent farmers found themselves renting back from speculators and banks the very acreage they had owned the year before.

His children as young as three might be drafted to pick cotton, and still it was never enough.

Their home was completed at a cost of $800, and the Guthries moved in during the fall of 1909.

There were, in fact, two forms of socialism. One was the orthodox dogma imported from Europe, atheist, rigidly Marxist in its demand that the land and engines of production be held in common. The other was a peculiarly American hybrid, one that blended the apocalyptic Protestant beliefs of small-town America with the Marxist principle of shared wealth.

The Socialist vote had steadily grown until Oklahoma had the largest membership of any state in the union. In Okfuskee County, the socialists had skimmed off 15 percent of the votes in the 1908 presidential election.

On July 2, 1912, after forty-six ballots, the Democrats nominated the governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, to be their presidential nominee. When, twelve days later, Nora delivered her third child and second son, Charley insisted the eight-pound boy be named after the Democratic candidate.

Nora favored the moralistic parlor ballads so popular in the last decades of the nineteenth century, “The Dream of a Miner’s Child,” “A Picture from Life’s Other Side,” and “A Story I Know Too Well”:

By World War I, Oklahoma was the nation’s largest oil-producing state. The huge Midcontinent field—with Okfuskee County sucking up its share—sprouted thirty thousand wooden derricks pumping easily refined “sweet” crude.

Mounting anger and the frustration of the state’s small farmers erupted in the wartime summer of 1917. Members of a small, radical tenant farmers’ organization, the Working Class Union, began an implausible, even absurd march to Washington. Once there, they intended to protest “Big Slick” Woodrow Wilson’s war and the newly adopted draft act. This was a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” and they wanted none of it.

Meanwhile, World War I doomed the Socialist Party. As patriotic fervor rose, buoyed by higher farm prices, the Socialist vote fell. From a peak in 1914 when some rural areas in Oklahoma delivered half of the vote to the Socialists, the party’s tally steadily dropped. Okfuskee County, which had given 31 percent of the vote to the Socialists in 1912, mustered a scant 3 percent six years later.

Real estate and insurance agent, Charley Guthrie was counted a successful businessman, holding as many as thirty pieces of rental property.

At least some of the neighbors thought the Guthries were too generous. Charley was easy with a dollar while Nora was sometimes so lost in her own thoughts she did not pay attention to the children. “The children always had expensive toys,” one sniffed, “but necessities were scarce.”

Return Barry to the state legislature, Charley thundered, and “he will want to amend that certain one of the Ten Commandments which says ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ so as to read ‘Thou shalt not steal on a small scale.’”

The election behind him, Charley had other things to worry about, in particular, his wife’s odd behavior. More and more she was acting like her older brother Jess, giving silly orders, behaving strangely or not paying attention, then finally just slipping off into a private world.

Woody found his own comfort. He would ever after deny that Clara had deliberately set herself on fire.

In the aftermath of the Great War, the solid citizens of Oklahoma had transformed militant patriotism into fervent self-righteousness. Once the Tulsa World had urged citizens to “Get Out the Hemp,” and “strangle the I.W.W.’s. Kill ’em just as you would kill any other snake.” Now American Legionnaires and a newly revived Ku Klux Klan, nothing less than “an extralegal arm of the business community,” took up vigilante enforcement of public morality. The Klan, particularly in boomtowns like Okemah, rallied support for Jim Crow and Prohibition, while decrying the new sexual freedom and those it deemed radicals, particularly union organizers.*

Crazy indeed. Even to an eight-, nine-, ten-year-old boy, who noted that before the oil boom, poor Indians could marry blacks but not whites, while after the boom, oil-rich Indians could marry whites but not blacks.*

But each tenant’s default compounded Charley’s mounting debt to the bank, and eventually he failed. “I’m the only man in this world that’s lost a farm a day for thirty days,” he groaned. In all, he tearfully told his sons, he had lost fifty thousand dollars.*

He was forty-three, a man scraping by while others skimmed the quick riches any boom proffered. For the first time he felt like an old man. Arthritis gripped his hands. Too many fistfights had broken too many bones.

The Cain house was on Okemah’s east end, where folks were “too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash.”

Nora alternated unpredictably between forgetfulness and blinding anger. She would stand in the yard, oblivious of the rain, staring at distant horizons. She failed to heat water for a bath, but forced George to bathe in the chilled tub anyway. Another time, she chased George around the house with a butcher knife, he later told his younger sister.

In a last gesture to preserve memories of the free-spirited girl he had courted, Charley hid the truth of just what happened on Saturday afternoon, June 25, 1927. He dismissed it as merely “an accident.” According to one account, he lay dozing, startled awake by the kerosene splashed across his chest, his shirt on fire and his wife standing over him, numbly watching the flames.* Charley dashed from the house, slapping at the flames and rolling on the ground. A neighbor helped to smother the fire, but too late. Charley had been severely burned, his torso a welter of blackened, peeling flesh from his collarbone to his navel.

Word quickly circulated around Okemah that Nora, seized by a fit of rage, had thrown a kerosene lamp at her husband. Even if the story was not true, she was plainly unhinged, Charley’s Masonic brothers decided. With the permission of Grandma Tanner and Nora’s half-brother Warren, they arranged for her immediate commitment to the Central State Hospital for the Insane in Norman on Monday, June 27.

the four of them drove the hard-packed roads of central Oklahoma to Norman and Central State Hospital for the Insane. There Nora sat in a locked ward, her limbs jerking spasmodically, a shrunken hulk who stared blankly at her visitors. Woody sought to talk to her, but she did not respond. Only at the end, as they were leaving, did she dredge a name from her memory. “You’re Woody, aren’t you?” she asked vaguely. She had markedly deteriorated in the past year, doctors told the young man. They held out little hope for either a recovery or her return home.

The young man effectively became a ward of Okemah’s more prosperous families. Because he was a burden to the Smiths, he shifted to the E. L. Price family home on Sixth Street. The

If he excelled in anything, it was ninth-grade typing; not only did he earn an A, but he became an accomplished typist in the process.

The vast sweep of the Staked Plain rose forty-seven hundred feet above sea level, so high that the cold winds blowing down the Great Plains from Canada had blasted the land bare of trees.

The young man stood a wiry five feet five inches tall, perhaps an inch shorter than his father, but at 120 pounds, stronger than the badly scarred and arthritic Charley.

If there was a problem with Guthrie, Harris said, it was that the young man “didn’t care if he had ten cents or ten dollars in his pocket.” Nor was he dependable.

He characteristically made light of the long hours he spent woodshedding, listening to others and copying what he heard played. “After a while, I was rattling around with [Jeff], playing my way at the ranch and farm house dances. We worked our way up to playing inside of the city limits.” In fact, he was to work at it harder than anything else he had taken up in his young life. Certainly harder than at school.

Meanwhile Woody was practicing guitar, Jennings said, trying to master “the Carter Family lick” shaped by Maybelle Carter on a series of RCA Victor shellac records. Because “he wanted to do all the runs,” Jennings explained, Guthrie listened to the records repeatedly in Shorty Harris’s drugstore, imitating what he heard. He listened, he imitated, he listened again, he imitated once more, learning by rote.

He read constantly, Matt Jennings recalled. “We’d go to the library together and check out two or three books, and he’d recap them for me before I got through one book.” Guthrie systematically worked his way through the shelves, concentrating on psychology, Western religions, and Eastern philosophies, what Jennings called “yogi stuff.” Guthrie read and reread the newly published mystical parables of Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet. “He just wanted to know something about everything in the world,” Matt explained.

In time, young Guthrie felt confident enough to write in his tight longhand a book about the fundamentals of psychology, then to stuff his notebook pages inside a salvaged cover from another book, and donate the volume to the library. Mrs. Todd catalogued the manuscript under “Guthrie, Woodrow Wilson,” and put it on the shelves.*

“Had a letter last week that my mother’s dead.” Charley had gathered his three children together and read them the official notification; Nora Guthrie had died three months before in the state hospital at Norman.†

Woody’s prospects as either innkeeper or bartender hardly improved when Texas Rangers swept down on the town in July 1930, declared martial law, and rounded up those they deemed undesirable. Hundreds found themselves escorted to the edge of town, then summarily ordered to move on. The Rangers returned to the jail, arrested Sheriff E. S. Graves, and padlocked the cribs, jake joints, and remaining cothouses along South Cuyler that Graves had protected. For three days Pampa was quiet, until the Rangers left; the gamblers, bootleggers, and prostitutes crept back, more discreet now, but still offering the same pleasures.

In his music as well, Woody sought to simplify. Instead of learning the more difficult fingering that would allow him to play in all the keys, Guthrie became “a clamper fiend.” He used a capo, a spring-loaded clamp that enabled him to shorten the length of the strings, and thus raise the pitch, fret by fret, half-step by half-step.

With Jeff and Allene, Woody made his first unpaid radio broadcasts, on WDAG in Amarillo, then early in 1936 on tiny KPDN on the second floor of the Culbertson Building in Pampa. While the appearances on WDAG were sporadic, “two-by-four” KPDN offered Guthrie and the Corncob Trio more regular fifteen-minute bookings on “The Breakfast Club.”

People who knew the Guthries, particularly the men who performed with Woody, came to think the young man a “born natural” musician. “Give him a French harp and he was an artist on it,” Shorty Harris said of his on-again, off-again employee. Sooner or later Guthrie learned to play virtually anything with strings—guitar, mandolin, violin—anything

Some of Mary’s attraction for Woody came with his desire for a family life. Mary embodied that, and a stable, loving family. As his uncle noted, “The Jennings were fine people, very up-and-up nice people, all of them.”

Furthermore, Guthrie was virtually unemployed, with no prospects to speak of. How was he going to support a wife, a girl barely sixteen at that? And what about children? Despite their opposition, Mary was determined to follow her heart. Eventually she prevailed upon her mother to sign a consent form allowing the underage girl to be wed.

Sharecroppers, who only rented the land they farmed, received nothing; the effect was to drive them from their farms as landowners put their acreage into the land bank.

They—and tens of thousands of other sharecroppers throughout the South—raised cotton and lived off a vegetable garden and the hog they slaughtered. Each year they mortgaged their mule to buy seed and start over, always hoping for better weather, a bigger crop, and higher prices. But the good times never came.

By the end of the decade, only 35 percent of farm families owned their own homes; most farmers rented the land they worked.

A half-million farm families were turned from the land, to become itinerant “honk-honk hoboes” in the 1920s. Hundreds of thousands more followed as the Great Depression set in.

Mary was undemanding, “a good, easy girl,” Guthrie wrote in a notebook of random thoughts he began to keep. “She’s about the only person in circulation that knows just exactly how to handle me.” Handling Guthrie meant leaving him free to do whatever he wanted when whim overtook him. “She very seldom ever complained, and she worked hard all of the time. She could straighten up a house almost as fast as I could litter it up with scrap paper.”

Even with the birth of his daughter Gwendolyn in November 1935, Guthrie was an indifferent husband, “the least adapted to marriage of anyone who ever took the vow,” said Matt. Guthrie, who came and went as he pleased, seemed to think his daughter no more important than anyone else’s kids, Matt said. Guthrie played with Gwen, but left the hard task of child rearing to Mary.

Three years of drought had brought down upon the Panhandle two- and three-hour windstorms, furies that sucked fertile topsoil high into the air to sift down in a fine grit two or three inches deep on road and roof. If the winds were from the Southwest deserts, the dust was tan or gray; if they blew off the rich farmlands of Kansas to the north, the dust clouds were black. And all the while, the biggest storms flattened hundred-mile fronts.

The dust storm heaved up without warning late in the afternoon of Palm Sunday. From Amarillo on the southwest across a seventy-mile front to tiny Miami, Texas, on the northeast, it suddenly loomed, towering three, four, five thousand feet into the sky, rolling steadily onward. The sky turned black, black as night, so black, Pampans remembered, “you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.” Nothing was more frightening than that first half hour of darkness. The cloud rolled in from the north, tumbling black earth swept up from the rich Kansas topsoil and the lighter red dust of the Texas Panhandle, “like the Red Sea closing in on the Israel children,” Woody Guthrie wrote later. He and Mary stuffed wet newspapers around doors and windows, then hunkered down in their shotgun shack on South Russell. They struggled to catch a good breath as the fine dust filtered through cracks until the naked electric light hanging on a cord from the ceiling glowed no brighter than a lighted cigarette.

John Gikas, hunting rabbits north of town, raced the black cloud to Pampa at sixty miles per hour. Overtaken by the storm, his car shorted out by static electricity, and Gikas groped his way the last block to home.

By 1935 he was copying portraits in oils; Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ were repeated subjects. His sister-in-law Ann remembered too copies of “Whistler’s Mother” and “A Boy and His Dog” (“Blue Boy”) in the house on South Russell.

In fact, his involvement in the superstition business was more deliberate, and Woody less passive than he later portrayed. In the first issue of “News Expose,” a mimeographed “newspaper” he wrote and edited for friends at the end of 1935, Guthrie announced “ALONZO M. ZILCH BECOMES PSYCHOLOGICAL READER.” Zilch, Guthrie’s alter ego, had “turned to a strange field of endeavor, that of psychology, philosophy, and things of the mental realm.” The white house on South Russell Street was now “The Guthrie Institute for Psychical [sic] Research.”

Guthrie spent some seven months in Pampa as a fortune-teller and sometime faith healer. In that time, he scraped out a precarious living for a man with a wife and a year-old daughter; too many of his visitors could pay him only in gratitude.

In the evenings, Guthrie often disappeared to stomp the railroad tracks, to swap songs with the men huddled in hobo jungles or listen to stories about a fearsome railroad detective known as East Texas Red.

Steady work made Pampa all the more confining and less attractive to Guthrie. Life with Mary, as much as he admired her, was stifling. Beyond frolicking with his daughter, he had little to do with Gwen.

The more Betty Jean contributed financially to their income, the more demanding she became. Once an accommodating stepmother, she now insisted that the children—George, Mary Jo, and the boy born Lee Roy Buzbee, now dubbed Fritz Guthrie—call her “mother.” When they refused, she whipped them.

As a boy in Okemah, he had occasionally attended the First Methodist Sunday school. In Pampa, he had gone along to tent revivals when those touring attractions came to town, but no one in his immediate family regularly attended church

Woody would also vote for Roosevelt; what else could he do in Pampa, where, as Matt Jennings put it, “Republicans were just about as powerful as the Vegetarians”?

Sometime in late February or early March 1937, Matt’s older brother Fred drove Guthrie in Jennings’s beer delivery truck the twenty-five miles to the federal highway south of Pampa. Just outside Groom, Texas, Guthrie climbed down from the cab, stuffed his paint brushes in a hip pocket, slung his guitar over his shoulder, and put up his thumb. Out there, at the end of Route 66, lay California and opportunity.

He kept moving, singing in honky-tonks for a beer and a sandwich, thumbing rides on the side of the highway by day, by night looking for a dead-headed freight or asking police to let him sleep in their warm jails if the boxcars rumbled through town without slowing. He was in a hurry. “You hate to just sleep all night and not get anywhere,” Guthrie wrote later.

A second housewife down the line packed four “great big juicy sandwiches” in a bag for him; he shared them with three other hoboes in the freight yard. “I felt like I had learnt the secret of all religion. To give away all of the stuff you can’t use. All other baloney is bull.”

“There is a stage of hard luck that turns into fun, and a stage of poverty that turns into pride, and a place in laughing that turns into fight,” Guthrie had discovered.

Turlock was a thriving town of more than 4,000, surrounded by hundreds of small farms. Nurtured by a sprawling irrigation system that siphoned the glacier-fed Merced River, the rich alluvial loam produced alfalfa, watermelons, row crops, peaches, and apricots nine months of the year.

The federal government was going to build a huge dam, the first step in a vast irrigation plan to water the central valley; there were said to be jobs for laborers there.

Guthrie was a few months shy of twenty-five, the father of one child, his wife pregnant with another. He sent occasional, small money orders to Mary, who depended on her concerned parents most of the time. “I know it upset my dad a lot—my mother too,” she said. “Woody wasn’t doing the manly thing.”

Most important, Jack Guthrie was as ambitious as his cousin Woody was directionless. And he had a suggestion. Why not team up and see if they could make a go of it in Los Angeles? The big city would offer lots of opportunities the small towns of the central valley lacked.

Publicity was everything; furthermore, the program would give them enough prestige to ask for a two-dollar guarantee for six hours of singing in saloons.

As editor of the air, Burke was caught up in the welter of California’s unusual politics. A leader in the state’s newly reborn Democratic Party, he presided over a clangorous array of retirees seeking twenty-five- or thirty-dollars-a-week pensions, old-line socialists grubbing for a utopian community in the desert, technocrats and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California advocates with their rival schemes to end the hegemony of big business, the open shop, and the unchallenged sway of the Los Angeles Times in southern California.

Burke offered them a daily, fifteen-minute slot at 8:00 A.M. They could do the program and still make it to a construction site early enough to pick up at least a half-day’s work. They could begin next Monday.

BEFORE 8:00 on the morning of July 19, 1937, Woody Guthrie and his cousin Jack stepped up to the microphone in the cramped studio on the third floor of radio station KFVD. As the engineer’s finger snapped in their direction, they began singing the theme song of the first Oklahoma and Woody Show.

From the earliest days of silent films, former cowboys like Bronco Billy Anderson had turned out one—, two—, then four-reel flickers. Over the years, particularly after the invention of the talkie, the heroic cowboy of a legendary West gave way to singing cowboys in a West that existed only on Hollywood’s back lots.

By the time Woody Guthrie reached Los Angeles in 1937, the “horse operas” of Maynard and Gene Autry were Saturday matinee favorites.

Even in such urban areas as Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles, country or western music filled large blocks of airtime. The NBC network broadcast two country programs weekly, National Barn Dance from Chicago and Grand Ole Opry from Nashville.

Not only was the music popular with listeners, it was inexpensive. Station managers and program directors had no trouble finding musicians like the Guthrie cousins willing to perform for free in the hope of building a following.

Woody and Maxine were different from the cowboy singers who favored artificial “buckaroo ballads.” Rather than sing of a West that never was, Woody preferred to re-create in song a West that had vanished, with ballads like the gritty “Sam Bass,” learned in Pampa from his Uncle Jeff, or the hardbitten “Corinna, Corinna,” picked up somewhere between Pampa and California.

Just twenty-five, Woody’s singing style was evolving. The unusual two-part harmony with Maxine Crissman stemmed from the century-old church tradition of shape-note hymn books, with the male voice providing the tenor harmony above the alto carrying the melody. At the same time, he forsook the traditional, nasal, pinched-throat voice of the southern mountains; he sang with a harsh head tone, more of the West, a rasping voice at once old and new.

Despite his affable radio demeanor, Guthrie was still stiff with the prejudices of Okemah and Pampa. He casually referred to African-Americans as “niggers,” and once after an unpleasant clash with blacks on the beach at Santa Monica Bay,

His racism was unconscious and unexamined, a by-product of a boyhood spent not far from that part of Oklahoma known as “Little Dixie.” (Both Matt Jennings and Woody’s Uncle Jeff later remarked how they had to take pains not to use the word “nigger,” though Matt, practicing Catholic that he was, ignored racial differences.)

Guthrie was shaken. He apologized on the air, declined to play the harmonica showpiece again—under that title—and from then on spoke of “colored men.”

Maxine came to understand at least one source of the pressure. She and Woody were spending a considerable amount of time together, usually alone. While it was all innocent, whispers of a romance, a dalliance, something, got back to Mary in Pampa.

They were not only broadcasting locally, but because of the peculiarities of the frequency, KFVD’s signal reached far beyond California. When atmospheric conditions were right, the nighttime program bounced off the cooling ionosphere as far as Hawaii to the west, and well into the Great Plains to the east. In Pampa, at 1:00 A.M., Mary Guthrie tuned to 1000 kilocycles on the dial to listen for the code words of love Woody had promised in his letters.

Sponsors meant they had taken the first step to fame, if not fortune. Sponsors did not care how good you were, Crissman said. Instead, they asked, “How much mail do you get?”

(Woody had already worked out deals whereby he would periodically mention nearby Henry’s Service station in exchange for free repairs on Roy Crissman’s weary automobile, and Polly Gasoline for a full tank. Guthrie also received complimentary tickets when he plugged a touring rodeo.)

That evening, Guthrie called Mary in Pampa and asked her to bring their two daughters and join him in Glendale. He suggested that Matt drive them to California; Woody would send the ten-dollar gas money.

Woody was less pleased with the living arrangement. With Mary’s arrival, his plan to “sail the seas and walk foreign lands” was overtaken by her dream of owning a ceramic shop; she would run the business, and Woody would paint.

Such domesticity was beyond Woody. “He just wasn’t a nine-to-five man,” Maxine said. He liked to work through the night, do their morning show, then return home to sleep during the day. With five children running through the house, that schedule was difficult to keep. He loved his two daughters and Mary, Maxine concluded, “but he just wanted to get away from them.”

The oldest of the stations, XER, built its transmitter and antenna in Villa Acuña, Coahuila, in 1930, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. Free of the wattage limitations imposed by the Yankees’ Federal Communications Commission, the signal of XER and its successor, XERA, blanketed the entire American Midwest well into Canada.

Broadcasting from Mexico also freed promoters from Federal Trade Commission restrictions. Consequently, patent medicine and snake oil salesmen prospered on these “border blasters,” selling cure-alls for feminine ailments and unlikely concoctions like J. R. Brinkly’s goat-gland extract for sexual impotence.

But not for long. Apparently at Horton’s instigation, a squad of six armed soldiers marched into the XELO building and ordered Guthrie and his friends from the country. An army officer informed them in English that their visas did not have the necessary work permits to continue broadcasting. They would be arrested if they returned to work in the morning.

After three weeks, the Mexican adventure was over. Horton ducked out without paying the group’s last two weeks’ salary. The tantalizing WLS offer also mysteriously vanished.*

Burke responded to the listeners’ mail—eventually, Maxine would estimate, they received ten thousand pieces in a ten-month period—by moving the Woody and Lefty Lou program

A foot of rain in the first week of March 1938 brought widespread flooding throughout Southern California. Streets became raging spillways, intersections flooded to cover wheel hubs. More than 130 people died in the floods; many of them were literally washed out to sea, their bodies never recovered.

Guthrie was paying more attention to the newspapers, and from them acquiring a broader vision of the world. On his copy of “Chinese-Japs” he jotted a reminder, “Rewrite with better slant on the chinamen.”

On Saturday, June 18, 1938, some ten months after they first went on the air together, Woody and Lefty Lou from Old Mizzou broadcast together for the last time.

On that last broadcast, Guthrie announced he would become the Light’s roving “hobo correspondent.” First he planned to ride freights five hundred miles north to Chico, California, where hungry migrant farmworkers anxiously waited for the almonds and peaches to come in. From there, well, they could read the Light to find out.

Guthrie hitchhiked to Sacramento with the idea of getting arrested. As he told the story to Maxine—it would be elaborated in later retellings—he walked into the capitol, unslung his guitar, and started singing in the marble rotunda. A crowd of secretaries and tourists applauded his impromptu serenade, and some good-naturedly threw coins for him. After a few songs, capitol police simply escorted Guthrie from the building—but not before he swept up and pocketed the change on the floor.

In this fifth year of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, an older Woody Guthrie saw with a new understanding. These migrants were desperate amid plenty, proud folk trapped by the “crooked work and starvation going on all around.”

The constant dread of the wandering worker is to be arrested by some city officer, charged with idleness or vagrancy and sent in almost chain gang style to the bean patch to work without pay.

No hand at picking cotton himself, and not one to take another man’s job in any event, Guthrie watched from the edge of the road as the American Legion’s vigilantes in their “black sedans with hot searchlights” scattered picket lines with flailing axe handles.

The misery Guthrie saw that summer and fall struck him hard. For the first time, this man who masked his serious thoughts with deflecting humor spoke to his wife about what he had seen, “about people being hungry and not having a place to live.” The plight of the migrants, “dust bowl refugees” he now called them, was pathetic. “His main object in life from then on was to help the poor man.” Her husband still cared nothing for money for himself or his family, Mary Guthrie added with a faint tone of exasperation. He

Once again, he was not “doing the manly thing,” Mary complained. As her brother Matt put it, Guthrie loved his family, “but had this idea of equality [that] all children are equal. ‘Mine aren’t better than anyone else’s.’ ” Emotionally, the runny-nosed kids of the migrants playing in the fields were his children too.

They came, lured by handbills distributed from Oklahoma to Arizona by agricultural associations touting high wages in the Golden State. A labor surplus assured growers a supply of hungry people ready to work for a penny less than their neighbor.

The flow of migrants westward had steadily increased in inverse proportion to rainfall in the Great Plains. The drier the growing season “back home,” the poorer the crop, and the harder it became for sharecropping families to hold on. Compounding the problem was the fact that southern-grown short-staple cotton could not compete with the higher-quality long-staple imports from India and, particularly, Egypt.

Contrary to the myth, the great majority of the people on the roads were neither blown out by windstorms nor tractored out by farm mechanization. In eastern Oklahoma, untouched by the dust storms, landlords and bankers were evicting tenant farmers in order to turn patchworks of small farms into vast cattle ranges. “For every farmer who was dusted out or tractored out,” Guthrie came to understand, “another ten were chased out by bankers.”

When the seasons changed and the walnuts had been bagged, the last cotton, lettuce, and ’chokes shipped to market, the suddenly unemployable workers became “Okies.” Texan Buck Owens, later to become a major country music figure, remembered the signs, “No Okies Allowed in Store,” propped in the shop windows of his hometown Bakersfield. “Well, I knew I wasn’t from Oklahoma, but I knew who they was talking about.”

The migrants camped where they could. Guthrie ruefully joked he had relatives living under every bridge in California.

To supplement his dollar a day, Guthrie sang for tips in the bars along “The Nickel,” Los Angeles’s Fifth Street Skid Row.

A number of Ed’s friends were black, and only the Communists seemed truly concerned with the plight of the Negro in America.

Guthrie was cavalier about the fees. “If you’re afraid I wouldn’t go over in your lodge or party, you are possibly right. In such case, just mail me $15 and I won’t come. When I perform, I cut it down to $10. When for a good cause, $5. When for a better cause, I come free. If you can think of a still better one, I’ll give you my service, my guitar, my hat, and sixty-five cents cash money.”

“Woody was a great lover of humanity in the abstract, but was rough on people individually.”

He became outspoken in his opposition to international fascism, so prominent an antifascist that in May 1935, Geer was briefly kidnapped at a Hollywood theater, beaten by four Nazi sympathizers, and dumped, bruised and half-conscious, in the hills under the Hollywoodland sign.

Guthrie was to meet Burl Ives and Gilbert Houston there, the one a pudgy character actor who played a polished guitar and sang a few folk songs he had learned from his Illinois family, the other a black-browed, handsome youth whose acting career foundered on his extreme myopia.

Geer and Robbin, Guthrie also found men who shared his newborn dedication to the people of the dust bowl migration. Geer and Robbin provided an embracing, extended family while their Marxist views offered a political and social explanation for the poverty Guthrie saw all about him. Guthrie reveled in their acceptance and he borrowed what he thought useful of their politics.

Like the Socialists of pre-statehood Oklahoma, Guthrie remained a bedrock Christian, unchurched, undisciplined, but certain of his faith. “I seldom worship in or around churches, but always had a deep love for people who go there,” he explained.

For all his interest in communism, he remained his own man. When others praised the Soviet Union and the purported superiority of its economic system, Guthrie remained silent. According to brother George Guthrie, “He never did run the country down to me, or the way it was run, or anything like that.”

He also endorsed “Ham and Eggs,” a California-based pension movement that promised thirty dollars every Thursday to the poor and the elderly. The Communist Party officially sneered at the scheme.

Certainly, doctrine of any sort bored Guthrie; Ed Robbin remembered his new friend dropping off to sleep during meetings at the Robbin home as the interminable discussions of the nuances of Marxist thought ground on. Guthrie instead picked up the slogans, if not the dialectic of the Communist Party U.S.A.

For all his conviction, Guthrie did not join the Communist Party—despite his later claim that “the best thing that I did in 1936, though, was to sign up with the Communist Party.” But in 1936, Guthrie was living in Pampa, Texas. He had not yet visited Sacramento, where he claimed he purchased a copy of the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and fell under its sway. His wife Mary insisted Guthrie did not join the Communist Party. They wouldn’t have him, she added.

Ed Robbin, the first party member to take Guthrie in tow, deemed his friend a poor recruit. He was not asked to join. Will Geer agreed. “Woody never was a party member, because he was always considered too eccentric by the party apparatus. . . . But he was a convinced socialist, positive that this country had to be socialist.” Guthrie instead served as what the party called a “fellow traveler,” a nonmember who generally agreed with the Communist Party’s platform but was not subject to party discipline.

Communism, ran the freshly minted party slogan, “is Twentieth Century Americanism.”

“Naturalization” was intended to submerge Moscow’s influence on the Communist Party U.S.A.’s daily affairs and to mask the “foreign” origins of the party. (Party members, at least those with identifiably ethnic names, even went so far as to adopt American noms de politique.)

Richmond took on the column despite his skepticism about Guthrie, the folksiness of his columns, and their deliberate misspellings.

As the summer of 1939 wore on, Guthrie’s reputation among Los Angeles’s leftists grew.

Forester decided to hire this new voice to write an opinion piece for his “independent weekly.” From now on, writing would take more of Guthrie’s time and energy.

War in Europe was no concern of theirs. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were involved—the one was too far away, the other had signed a nonaggression pact with Berlin just a week before. And just as suddenly, American communists were no longer speaking of “antifascist fronts.”

Even with his wife due to deliver their third child, Guthrie abruptly drove off with Will Geer to the Imperial Valley on a Friday night in October. Mary did not bother to protest; her husband did what he wanted.

It was one thing to allow a Communist airtime on KFVD when “antifascism” was the watchword among liberals everywhere. It was quite another when the Soviet Union not only signed a nonaggression pact with Germany, but also joined Hitler in carving up hapless Poland. The Burkes did not want lame excuses or strained explanations for Moscow’s land grab, for its escalating threats on neighboring Finland. Ed Robbin, spinning apologia for the Soviet Union, would have to go.

When Mary insisted that Guthrie take a steady job, he reluctantly worked a few days for Shorty Harris in the drugstore. “I hated this worst than anything in the world,” wrote the man who had boasted he was “born working, raised working.” To Guthrie, soda-jerking once more for Shorty Harris was an acknowledgment of how little he had achieved.

Guthrie was impressed, particularly when Geer told him the rent was $150. “I thought at first that was for a whole year.”

She had loaned it to him, with “no question I would get it back.” But when she asked Guthrie to put the guitar in its case because it was raining, he refused on the ground he never used a case. “I knew then I would never see that Martin again.”

He borrowed the tune from the Carter Family’s “Little Darling, Pal of Mine,” which had itself been inspired by a southern gospel hymn, “Oh, My Loving Brother.”

A classically trained composer, a lyricist, and performer in his own right, Robinson was struck by Guthrie’s sense of timing. “Woody was a performer, a natural performer,” Robinson continued. “It was terribly understated. It didn’t look like much. But he made you look twice.”

Alan had accompanied his father on lecture tours as early as age six. Later, father and son worked together, lugging a 350-pound Presto recording machine from schoolhouse to mountain cabin, eventually to amass some ten thousand songs and ballads on three thousand aluminum discs.

And he had picked the artists to perform for the Steinbeck Committee fund-raiser—all but Will Geer’s friend from California, this bushy-haired Okie with the exaggerated drawl.

In the meantime, Guthrie fit himself into New York’s radical circles—what Maxine Crissman, left behind in California, disdained as “the wrong crowd back there.” Guthrie resumed writing his “Woody Sez” column for the People’s World, periodically sending a sheaf of columns to Al Richmond in San Francisco. The Daily Worker picked up the short commentaries—giving Guthrie a certain cachet among New York City’s sectarian Left.

Once again, Guthrie played the country boy, remaking Okemah and his early life to appear an authentic proletarian.

Woody Guthrie was deliberately reshaping himself to the fantasies of the Communist Left: a voice of the people, unlettered yet intelligent, perceptive and droll. As Al Richmond described it, Woody “put on like he was less sophisticated than he really was. . . . He was not totally unsophisticated in terms of what might be called dogma.”

(Such sentiments did not prevent Guthrie from applauding the Soviet Union’s attack and victory in the Russo-Finnish War.)

In New York, Guthrie was to remake himself as an “untutored” spokesman for the underclass and an authentic voice of social protest. In a commentary he sent to Alan Lomax, the young man who had read his way through the Okemah and Pampa public libraries wrote, “I’ve not read so many books. I doubt if I’ve read a dozen from back to back.”

Early in his stay, Guthrie went to bed still wearing his muddy boots, provoking Lomax to scold his guest. He ought to behave himself and act like an adult, Lomax barked. From then on, Guthrie slept on the floor, his heavy jacket serving as a blanket. As if he were asserting his independence, he insisted upon eating while he stood at the sink.

It was an act, “and it was very annoying actually. Everybody knew it was an act,” Bess Lomax said. “It was perfectly obvious that he was quite a literate person, and he was writing up a storm all the time.” He played the primitive when he was unsure of himself, she added. It was a test of their trust in him.

Guthrie was a prize to be treasured, the one-in-ten-thousand informant who was close to his roots yet was supremely articulate. “Take care of Woody,” Alan advised his younger sister Bess.

“My father, mysteriously, for some reason caught fire,” Guthrie asserted, adding Charley’s was a failed suicide attempt prompted by financial reverses. Charley, living still in Oklahoma City with his half-brother Claude, was to take the blame for mother Nora, dead for more than a decade.

Lomax proposed to make a preliminary selection of the songs. Guthrie would write introductions to each while a young man Lomax had hired as an intern at the Archive of American Folk Song, Peter Seeger, would serve as the music editor.

Guthrie and Seeger, who would shoulder most of the burden of editing Lomax’s book, were an unlikely pairing. The Seegers were patrician New Englanders, people of “old money” and older lineage. It was a heritage that twenty-one-year-old Peter Seeger both honored and hid. Though Seeger’s father and mother were musicians, he a composer-conductor, she a concert violinist, their third son had declined formal musical training. A ukulele, a whistle, an Autoharp, anything would do for the boy—except the violin and compulsory lessons.

Though money was tight in the Seeger household, Peter spent most of his youth at boarding schools, drawing closer to his father, Charles, and eventually taking up his pacifist, leftist views. Together they attended meetings of the Pierre Degeyter Club in New York’s Greenwich Village to hear talks about music in a world cleansed by revolution.*

In father Charles Seeger, the patrician’s noblesse oblige toward those who were neither Seegers nor Seeger friends had grown to an embracing concern for the working class.

Guthrie and Seeger got on well together. “He must have liked my banjo picking, because everything else about me must have seemed strange,” Seeger said later. “Didn’t drink. Didn’t smoke. Didn’t chase girls.” Woodrow Wilson Guthrie certainly did all three.

The two albums gained only limited distribution and scattered sales; fewer than a thousand copies were sold—and those largely among college intellectuals and members of the political Left. When Guthrie eventually asked Wetherald to reissue the two sets, he was turned down. The fuming Guthrie finally concluded that RCA refused to re-release the albums for political reasons “in order to silence him.”

The dalliances came easily, according to Will Geer. At parties or fund-raisers, “Woody was a very sexy fellow and he wrote sexy ballads, the way he would sing them in a sexual manner. . . . He got a lot of the girls with charm.

Guthrie supported himself with well-paying radio appearances, earning as much as eighty-three dollars for a sustaining show and even more if the program was sponsored. He sang “Do-Re-Mi” on Corwin’s Pursuit of Happiness and earned fifty dollars for the one song, his best pay ever.

The trip with Guthrie through the Southeast was Seeger’s first brush with poverty and with racial bigotry.

Seeger was startled by the whitewashed house on the corner of Russell and Craven, “not much better than a shack, and not much bigger than a trailer.” Here was Guthrie, devoting himself to the plight of the unemployed and dispossessed, yet his own family hardly lived any better.

Seeger was taken aback only when Mary’s mother, deciding he was trustworthy, reached up to shake him by the shoulders. “You’ve got to make that man treat my daughter right,” she earnestly insisted.

Three days in Pampa playing with his children, now five, three, and fourteen months, were seemingly enough for the restless Guthrie.

When he was not broadcasting, Woody was making music in the fifth-floor apartment of Martha and Huddie Ledbetter on East 10th Street. Despite the obvious differences of race, age, and even size, Guthrie and the burly man known as “Leadbelly” were unusually close. Guthrie “just adored Leadbelly,” Yurchenko stressed, and “Leadbelly was just crazy about him.

On January 16, 1925, in one of his last acts as governor, Neff signed a full pardon for the songmaker. His was one of just five the governor granted during his entire term. Ledbetter, having sung his way to freedom, was now draped in legend.

If there was a “star” in the nascent folk song movement, it was Leadbelly.

Furthermore, for all his being on time, being prepared with his songs, Ledbetter could not read the lines Lomax wrote for him. Ray insisted Lomax not book Ledbetter again.

Pipe Smoking Time went on the air on November 25, 1940, with Guthrie singing a theme song set to “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You”: Howdy, friend, well, it’s sure good to know you. Howdy, friend, well, it’s sure good to know you. Load up your pipe and take your life easy With Model Tobacco to light up your way. We’re glad to be with you today.

Mary chose to ignore the obvious evidence of her husband’s dalliances with young women. After all, she was responsible for three children. Besides, Texas girls knew that was a man’s way.

The array of food, the expansive bar, the expensive formal dress both attracted and angered Guthrie in his everyday work clothes. The fact that the women in their gowns had shaved under the arms intrigued Guthrie.

No matter her husband had finally found a job to support them. No matter they were left homeless. No matter three-and-a-half-year-old Sue, when Alan Lomax asked where she lived, replied, “In the car.”

Their alcohol-propelled adventure ended when Guthrie lost his car keys in the desert.

Robbin thought they would drive to Pasadena. Instead, Guthrie pried open a window in the empty house and promptly moved his family in. (Some two months later, Guthrie finally met his unsuspecting landlord, charmed her with his singing, and settled on ten-dollars-a-month rent for the dilapidated house. He would never pay it.)

Writing came easily to him, even with the three children clamoring to sit in his lap or crawling underfoot. It was nothing so much as “a conversation with yourself . . . just a quiet way of talking to yourself.” His prose was free-form, flowing and seamless, typed quickly, single-spaced and virtually without margins. “Its mighty seldom that I know what I’m a gonna . . . write till I read it back over to myself and the biggest part of the time its news to me.”

There they rented rear rooms behind a gift shop run by the state. Lacking electricity, Guthrie punched a hole in the wall separating the units, ran a drop cord through it, and bootlegged power.

Kaiser had constructed a gasoline-powered, five-mile-long beltline to move gravel to the construction site, where dozens of bulldozers and moveable cranes crawled like bugs far below their lookout point.

For two weeks he had hitchhiked his way across the country. He was still on the road on June 22, 1941, when he learned that Hitler had sent five great army columns eastward into the Soviet Union, a brazen stroke that sundered the Soviet-Axis Pact and drove the Red Armies into bloody retreat. Guthrie had a wry grin as the fifth-floor door opened and he shook Pete Seeger’s hand. “Well, I guess we’re not going to be singing any more of them peace songs,” he offered.

No group had been a more consistent foe of Franklin Roosevelt and his pro-British policies than the tenants in the fifth-floor flat. They had turned about with the Stalin-Axis agreement in August 1939; so they reversed themselves twenty-two months later.

“it became one war, instead of two, and there was some chance of beating fascism on its own ground, which everybody was for. But it sure knocked hell out of our repertoire.”

Guthrie was to have a profound influence on the Almanacs. The Oklahoman spanned the distance between rural and urban. “There was the heart of America personified in Woody. . . . And for a New York Left that was primarily Jewish, first or second generation American, and was desperately trying to get Americanized, I think a figure like Woody was of great, great importance,” said one man close to the group.

They sang folk songs Hays had learned from neighbors around Commonwealth College and hymns his father had boomed from the pulpit. They sang songs Seeger had plucked from the Library of Congress collections. But the majority of their songs were deliberately composed to protest any U.S. involvement in the threatening European war.

The Almanacs’ antiwar posture uncomfortably aligned them with the strutting fascists of the German-American Bund and the bitter Roosevelt haters gathered into America First. Bernay decided to release the three-record album as Songs for John Doe on an expedient “Almanac” label.

With the $250 fee they earned for the day’s work, Mill Lampell bought a 1932 midnight blue Buick from a New Jersey relative. Once owned by a thug nicknamed “Joey the Mouth,” the armor-plated car got seven miles a gallon and burned a quart of oil with each tank of gas. It had one advantage; it was big enough for the five of them, their instruments, and luggage.

Guthrie’s rage against the Interests could be petty, even “unpardonably rude,” as Alan Lomax’s gently reared sister Bess put it. Invited with Lampell to the expansive home of a friend of Lampell’s former girlfriend, Guthrie was uncomfortable and grew hostile. He brazenly tried to pocket a silver cigarette lighter, then silverware, and a cigarette box. Each time the hostess snatched them back. Guthrie finally went off—to the hostess’s relief—with a wedge of cheese and a bottle of brandy stuffed in his pockets.

They crossed the northern tier of states, first to Butte where they sang for mine workers, then on to Duluth and a lumber camp near the Canadian border, where fifty taciturn Scandinavian jacks listened to the men’s songs in utter silence and then asked for encores—which they also greeted with silence.

“He was so dominant because he was the authentic thing. For the rest of us, it was more or less something we adopted. For Woody, we assumed, it was authentic stuff,” Hawes added.

Behind on their rent, the electricity and gas bills unpaid, Seeger grumbled that Hays the hypochondriac was malingering. Contrary to all socialist doctrine, the Almanacs voted to ask him to leave the 10th Street house.

Their working-class background offered them an insight into Guthrie; it also left them with no illusions about the real estate agent’s son. “He pretended to be something else,” Cunningham explained years later. “He loved to have people think of him as a real working-class person and not as an intellectual. “Gordon told Woody once, when Woody was boasting about how he had gone to work with the migratory workers, ‘You never picked a grape in your life. You’re an intellectual. You’re a poet.’”

Guthrie was self-engrossed, she added. “He seemed to feel that it was perfectly all right for other people to support him, to see that he had whatever he wanted, and furthermore, he did not see why he in return should assume any responsibility towards others.”

Deferring musically only to his friend Huddie Ledbetter, Guthrie was the de facto featured performer at these hootenannies.

Guthrie, said his friend, Pete Seeger, “was really a writer more than a performer. He’d write a song, and restlessly go on to write another song, and restlessly go on to write another song, and restlessly go on to write another song.” He sang some of the songs a few times, “but more often than not, we wouldn’t even hear them. He’d write it, and go and write another.”

Assuming the pointed insults were part of their act, the booking agent laughed off the jibes at the Rockefellers and Standard Oil Corporation. With the right costumes and a few hay bales as props, these kids would be fine. He offered them a two-week engagement.

As many as 30 million people reportedly heard the Saturday-evening program broadcast over an unusual four-network hookup on February 14, 1942. No group of folk singers ever had a larger audience.

Then, as quickly as the Almanacs rocketed to national attention, they were to fall from grace. On Tuesday, February 17, the Scripps-Howard World-Telegram trumpeted “Singers on New Morale Show Also Warbled for Communists.” The article, which linked the Almanacs to the antiwar album Songs for John Doe, ignored the fact that Communist policy had changed in the year since its release. Once antiwar, the Almanacs were now militantly determined to beat the Axis. They were as “American” in their patriotism as any Legionnaire or Ku Kluxer.

His backlighted curls glowing, “this little boy turned around and looked at me, and I knew right then and there that I was going to marry him.” It was a stunning realization for the twenty-four-year-old woman born Marjorie Greenblatt in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She was already married, to Joseph Mazia, a metallurgist who worked on a classified job at the government’s Frankfort Arsenal.

Once again, as Cisco Houston admiringly put it, here was this scrawny guy who “was a little bit unwashed, but he always managed to get the beautiful women.”

Joe Mazia was alternately angry and disbelieving. He had just had a visit from two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who were conducting a security check on him. The agents asked him if he knew his wife “was having an affair with a Communist.”

While he was now organized, his manuscript was not. According to Gordon Friesen, himself a published novelist, the twelve-hundred-page, single-spaced manuscript did not have an acceptable conclusion. “There was a beginning, a middle, but then the story just went on and on.”

Aware of the protective fictions he had crafted and the heroic yarns he spun, Guthrie invariably called his book “an autobiographical novel.” Others were to assume Guthrie’s fantasies were true; there lay the seeds of myth.

Leadbelly and his wife, Martha, looked on Guthrie in a parental way. Their apartment “was always a place where Woody could go and did go often for food and a place to sleep and probably gave Martha, Huddie’s wife, fits, . . . considering some of his personal habits, because Martha had one of the best kept houses I’ve ever seen,” Lee Hays commented.*

Still married to Mary and the ostensible supporter of three young children, Guthrie was exempt from the draft.

All the while Marjorie wavered between her duty to her faithful husband and her love for Guthrie. On December 20, 1942, she finally found a compromise, and a decision. She would stay in Philadelphia with Joseph until he received his security clearance from the FBI in April.

To Mary he inscribed, improbably, generously: “Anything good I ever do will be because of you, Mary.” In return, Mary mailed Guthrie a copy of the divorce papers she had signed in El Paso on March 23, 1943. She was doing well, working her way up from a three-dollars-a-day waitress to manager of the Welcome Inn, with a staff as large as thirty-five people.

Cisco Houston, when he was not at sea, chided him for growing soft, an Okie too comfortable in New York’s honeyed luxury. There was a war to be won, and Guthrie was not doing his part. If Houston’s comments were a goad, Guthrie’s draft board was a prod. He was divorced, and though the father of four—three legitimatized by marriage, the fourth acknowledged by birth certificate—he was legally single and therefore subject to induction.

Guthrie would mind Cathy while Marjorie taught dance lessons during the day. He pushed Cathy in her stroller along the boardwalk, prepared her bottle, and diapered her, all chores he had avoided with his first three children.

Despite Asch’s seeming indifference, these were the first of more than three hundred different songs, ballads, and fiddle and harmonica tunes Guthrie was to record for him over the next eight years.

Three days after recording the first two songs, Guthrie was back in the Asch studio with Cisco Houston. In a day-long session they recorded fifty-six songs and ballads. They returned the next day—probably with Sonny Terry—to cut seventeen more masters. On April 24 and 25, the pair recorded another fifty songs.

Proud holder of NMU Book No. 86716, Guthrie had remained draft-exempt so long as he served in the merchant marine. But as he told Jim Longhi, the FBI had lifted Guthrie’s seaman’s papers because of an article he had written for the Sunday Worker. He would regain his papers, he promised, and sail with Jim Longhi on the next voyage. Guthrie’s appeal failed. A self-important officer from Naval Intelligence now sat screening seamen in the NMU hiring hall off Eighth Avenue. Guthrie’s name was on a blacklist.

He was inducted, ironically enough, on May 7, 1945, the day the embattled Third Reich surrendered.

While he had written, and sometimes sent a few dollars or toys, Guthrie had not seen Gwen, Sue, and Billy in almost four years.

The marriage had not only bound Guthrie to Marjorie, but it served to free him from the service. As a married man, he could now claim Cathy as a dependent. The father of four children, Guthrie had enough points under the army’s complicated system to qualify for a discharge.

On December 21, 1945, two days later, Private First Class Guthrie was released from active duty. Like millions of other ex-GIs, he returned home to hang his dress uniform with its “ruptured duck” in the far corner of a dark closet; it had never fit his slender frame anyway. He was honorably discharged on January 13, 1946.

Guthrie seemed unable to concentrate. He wrote a great deal, but no two days’ work fit together coherently.

He hurt others as well. When one woman he impregnated asked him for money to help pay for an abortion, Guthrie refused. His seed, his “creation ore,” was too precious to be squandered; the woman found a cooperative doctor without his help, and ended their affair.*

During the war, Guthrie had no difficulty reconciling the two; American patriot and American communist were one and the same. But as the Red Army on the east and the Allied armies on the west closed on Hitler’s Germany, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died; in his place was Harry S. Truman, as reflexively anticommunist as Roosevelt was instinctively a negotiator. Truman was of no mind to compromise when the second in command of the French Communist Party fired the first shot of the Cold War.

By mid-June 1945, the transformation was complete. Loyal Communists across the country were hastily retracting support of Browder, of “Teheranism,” of what now was officially termed “revisionism.”

Almost as a refuge, Guthrie in mid-1946 spent days typing hundreds of pages of his wartime essays and songs, papers that had been damaged by sea spray and salt water.

There would be no funeral. Marjorie and Woody had the body cremated with the intention of scattering Cathy’s ashes along the Coney Island beach she loved. A day or two after Cathy’s death, Cisco Houston and Jim Longhi silently walked along that dark beach with Guthrie, the seamen three bonded in grief. Guthrie suddenly threw himself on the sand, his arms and legs in the air, raging into the dark sky. “He screamed for thirty seconds,” Longhi recalled. “And then he got up. And it was over.”

Guthrie’s drinking did not surprise Longhi; because of a shipboard confidence, Longhi knew of Guthrie’s fear of the madness that had swept away Nora in 1925. “The rum made him feel good.”

According to Guthrie, songs had to be about people to be interesting, to be art. “A song was a different kind of thing than a speech. . . . A song had to have some staying power.”

Guthrie surrendered on August 2, 1949, in New York City on an indictment that charged him with mailing three letters containing material so obscene they could not be spread upon the court records. He was freed on a thousand dollars bail posted by Marjorie and her brother David.

In a plea bargain arranged by Longhi, Guthrie pled guilty on October 5, 1949, to a single count of mailing “an obscene, lewd and lascivious letter.” Longhi spent the next seven weeks, with the aid of four continuances, getting Guthrie into a pioneering psychiatric counseling program—and keeping him there.

Longhi scrambled to free his former shipmate. “The sentence was long enough to go over Christmas, and I didn’t like that,” he explained. “I did a little talking around, and got him out before Christmas. The irony is that some of my right-wing friends got him out.”

While in the hospital, Guthrie was visited by a twenty-year-old college dropout who called himself “Buck” Elliott. Born Elliot Charles Adnopoz, the son of a successful Brooklyn surgeon, young Elliott was fascinated by horses, cowboys, and the mythical West. He had run away from home at fourteen to join a rodeo, changed his name to something more American, scraped through high school between journeys westward, and taken up the guitar as the suitable instrument for a would-be cowboy from Brooklyn.

“We started playing music, and one day led to another,” Elliott explained. “I ended up staying there for about a year and one-half.” There was never a formal invitation to move in, “but they didn’t kick me out and I became like a member of the family.”

The two men managed to play together daily, sometimes for hours on end, Nora recalled. Her father would sometimes spike the children’s morning orange juice with rum so they would be quiet while he and Elliott played guitar. (To save time, he also fed them hot dogs for breakfast and bribed them with candy during the day.)

Elliott was, as he put it, the “perfect mimic.” For years after, he “did Woody Guthrie songs exactly the way that Woody did.” He played guitar the same way; he sang in the same rusty voice so well that people often mistook one for the other.

Whether it was Matusow’s testimony, or Ives’s, or the earlier citations by the California senate’s Un-American Activities Committee, the blacklist snared Guthrie in early 1952. Decca dropped the Weavers, its number one act.

Guthrie was not to be placated. In a flash of anger, he struck Marjorie—“He beat the hell out of me,” she later acknowledged—cut the telephone cord, then threatened her with the scissors.

At the hospital, Guthrie told the doctors that he suffered dizzy spells and blackouts. The doctors responded with an unsurprising diagnosis of alcoholism.

Guthrie spent a month in Bellevue, first wringing the alcohol from his guts, then undergoing the repair of a hernia by Jack Elliott’s surgeon father, Abraham Adnopoz.

Eventually, Earl Robinson’s brother-in-law, a doctor, suggested Guthrie transfer to Brooklyn State Hospital. The staff there was experimenting with insulin shock therapy to treat alcoholism.

Huntington’s chorea—“chorea,” or dance, for the spontaneous muscular contractions that wracked the limbs—was an inherited degenerative disease. It struck most often when the victim was between thirty and fifty years old; the physical, emotional, and cognitive symptoms appeared gradually, but inexorably worsened. There was no cure.

In the end the helpless victim died, limbs twitching or grown rigid and unmoving. As often as not, death came from choking, or infection, or starvation, not from the disease itself. Huntington’s chorea was a sentence of death by slow degrees. Later they all would wonder just when the disease began. Guthrie himself stated it was shortly after he got out of the Army Air Force. Marjorie attributed the onset to Cathy’s death, convinced there was a psychological trigger. However it began, alcohol seemed to exaggerate, if not exacerbate, Guthrie’s condition.

Will and Herta Geer had come the year before to join a clutch of liberal friends already established in the sparsely settled town. Herta had found the tract with its rustic house in Topanga Canyon and insisted they buy it. Will, blacklisted for his politics, could not appear in films, on radio, or the disdained medium of television. Instead they would build a hillside amphitheater with help from other blacklisted actors and writers, and present plays. They would get by, Herta insisted.

“She was a nice person—generous, talented, open,” said Bob DeWitt, who had sold the house to the Marshalls. “She was the first hippie that I ever knew . . . a free-spirited person in 1952 and that was unheard of at the time.”

For her part, Anneke wrote later, “I didn’t stop to think how jealous my husband would be in this strange set-up. As a matter of fact, I really didn’t care what he felt. I just wished he would go away, and leave me alone.”

(In reality, Hamilton realized, Guthrie was an intellectual. “I didn’t get the feeling that he was really a laborer in the proletarian sense of the word.”)

Gerlach played a twelve-string guitar in the style of Leadbelly, which irritated Guthrie. “Guthrie didn’t like imitators. He didn’t like people imitating him. He was not much for fans,” Gerlach noted. Guthrie advised Gerlach to find his own way of playing the unwieldy twelve-string.

Within a week the triangular relationship became strained, Elliott said. “Woody seemed to be a little uncomfortable with young me around. See, I was twenty-one, and Anneke was twenty-one, and Woody was forty-one.”

“Woody was more of an emotional burden than anybody else would have been,” she added with a laughing snort. “It was too much emotion in one small house.” Finally, they asked Guthrie and Anneke to leave.

He tried to write those kinds of stories for Geer, who was presenting blacklisted actors and singers under the omnibus title of “Folksay.” Guthrie’s scripts were unpresentable, Geer said, the writing both cumbersome and pornographic.

Topanga did not seem as welcoming. Elliott suggested Guthrie “might have been aware of the fact that people there were not real in love with him on account of the way he took off with Anneke.”

“I got up the next morning, and Woody was gone and so was our silverware. I imagine he pawned it for a bottle.”

Guthrie left El Paso by Greyhound bus for Tulsa on August 9, 1954, FBI agents trailing after him.

He had been arrested for trespassing in the freight yards, nabbed while sleeping. “Before the officer hauled me off, the brakeman slipped me a dollar. Something like that always happens just when you get to starving. I can safely say that Americans will let you get awful hungry but they never quite let you starve.”

On Thursday, September 16, 1954, Guthrie put a pad of writing paper, a shirt, and the manuscript for “Seeds of Man” into a paper bag. Bag in hand, he checked himself into Brooklyn State Hospital, surrendering finally to the doctors’ diagnosis.

Marjorie made it clear Guthrie was a member of her family when she linked with a new suitor, Al Addeo. She was frank, Nora noted. “She said that he was marrying both of them, and that she came with a ‘husband,’ that she came with Woody.”

As the applause ran on, the legend of Woody Guthrie—the banty, brilliant songmaker who had stood for the underdog and downtrodden—crystallized, Silber decided.

Guthrie, hospitalized but alert, reviewed the agreement that turned over to the trust all rights to his songs and publications. Any future income was to be used to pay medical and educational expenses for Arlo, Joady Ben, and Nora. (Creation of the trust also served to prevent state authorities from seizing the income from royalties to pay for Guthrie’s hospitalization.)*

Dr. George Comeau determined that Guthrie needed to be restrained “for the welfare of patient and safety of others.” Judge Nelson K. Mintz committed Guthrie to the New Jersey State Hospital at Greystone Park.

I’m worried about how you boys are doing. Out there, if you guys say you’re communists, they’ll put you in jail. “But in here, I can get up there and say I’m a communist and all they say is ‘Ah, he’s crazy.’ You know, this is the last free place in America.”

There were increasingly more of these acolytes, including a nineteen-year-old dropout from the University of Minnesota, Robert Zimmerman, who arrived amid a New York City snowstorm almost twenty years to the day after Guthrie. In late January or early February 1961, Bob Dylan, as Zimmerman had taken to calling himself, knocked on the door of the home Marjorie had bought in Howard Beach. One of Marjorie’s teenage dance students, hired to keep watch over the children, took one look at the young man’s work boots and mismatched attire, then politely suggested he come back another time.

In later visits to the Gleason home, Dylan fastened on Jack Elliott, who had returned from a six-year stay in Great Britain, where he had introduced Guthrie’s songs to a host of young musicians. Elliott, as he acknowledged in a newspaper interview, “did Woody Guthrie songs exactly the way that Woody did,” and was criticized for “being a perfect mimic, aping Woody Guthrie down to the very last movement and gesture and facial expression.” Years before, Guthrie had drawled, “Jack sounds more like me than I do.” Now, watching Elliott—whose two made-in-Britain recordings Dylan had repeatedly listened to in Minneapolis—Dylan copied appearance, manner, and gesture.

John Cohen had known Guthrie for as long as eight years and had seen the creeping pace of Huntington’s chorea. Later, watching Dylan sing in a Greenwich Village club, “jerking around, tilting his head this way, and making these moves—I’d never seen anything like that except in Woody. When I first saw him, I said, ‘Oh, my God, he’s mimicking Woody’s disease.’”*

Guthrie had spent four years, ten months, and five days at Greystone. In that span, his third wife had put their daughter up for adoption, had divorced him, remarried, and fled the country. Greystone dentists had removed eight of his teeth. Surgeons had repaired hernias on both his left and right sides and performed a hemorrhoidectomy on him.

By early 1966, Guthrie weighed no more than 100 pounds, down from the 125 pounds he had weighed when he was confined to Greystone nine years earlier.

Guthrie died at 7:20 A.M. the next morning, Tuesday, October 3, 1967. He was fifty-five years old. He had spent the last thirteen years and seventeen days in state mental hospitals, essentially untreated, wasting away slowly.

Marjorie would ask resisting secretaries how old they were. “If they’re under thirty, I say I’m Arlo’s mother. If they’re over thirty, I say I’m Woody’s wife.”)

Tragedy stalked the children of Woody Guthrie. Cathy, the child he had nicknamed “Stackabones,” was dead, fatally burned in a fire twenty years earlier. Her death had seemingly drained her father of creative energy; certainly there were few notable works from him after that.

Perhaps it is in the nature of performers to adopt a stage persona; Jack Elliott, Bob Dylan, and Guthrie’s son Arlo—born like Elliott “on a 5,000-acre cattle ranch” in Brooklyn, later given speech lessons to lose the local accent, bar mitzvahed on the Lower East Side of Manhattan—all would end up on stage with a generic Western drawl.

While he was less disciplined than members of the party, he nonetheless followed the party line, even to the extent of endorsing Communist North Korea’s invasion of autocratic South Korea.

That might describe Peter Seeger, who, blacklisted, spent more than a decade playing before growing audiences at colleges, churches, and gatherings of 1960s activists. He encouraged the notion that anyone could play an instrument and sing songs for their own enjoyment without regard to professional standards. In doing so, he transformed tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of music consumers into music makers. Seeger is aware of that achievement; he himself described it as his most important work in an interview in 1998.

novelist John Steinbeck erroneously attributed to drought and dust storm the migration of his fictional Joads and the hundreds of thousands of other Oklahomans who fled the eastern part of the state looking for work. (In the main, these “Okies” were victims of poor farming practices and low farm prices.

Marjorie was furious when Elliott, Dylan, and others imitated Guthrie after the disease had set in. “They heard Huntington’s, the slur when singing, talking. In Elliott, Dylan, you hear early Huntington’s. Dylan didn’t even know the real person. Woody was mythology in his own mind.”

At the first annual Woody Guthrie Festival in Okemah on July 18, 1998, Arlo, by then a long-experienced performer, commented on the release two weeks before of a postage stamp honoring Guthrie: “For a man who fought all his life against being respectable, this comes as a stunning defeat.”

From My Notion Template

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. A wonderful memoir by legitimate legend Dave van Ronk – this book is a perfect long term view of the Greenwich village music phenomenon of the late 1950s and early 1960s written by it’s central participant. Van Ronk wasn’t it’s most well known participant, but he was the most connected and well situated for every event that took place. He provided context and perspective to every other history every written and every anecdote every spun about that time and place.
2. Musically he was concerned with “mastery” in the modern use of the term (which expressed itself as professionalism) and was enough of a stand up guy to build and maintain the community that helped him, eventually becoming something of a father figure to the newcomers. The book also provided some wonderful time with an interesting musician and observer (which is a wonderful attribute of any biography). Very insightful about the human condition.
3. The movie “Inside Llewyn Davis” was sort of based on the atmosphere described in the book though Dave van Ronk was the inverse in terms of personality and stature. For those who haven’t seen the movie the main character is a self absorbed musician who is an odd combination of unfriendly, dependent, charismatic, despised and admired (musically and as a musician). Van Ronk in real life was quite gregarious, charismatic, often providing for others (Bob Dylan crashed at his place for months apparently), a bit more mature than the other folk singers, while being admired both musically and as a musician (he could, and did, teach).
4. After listening to a lot of van Ronk’s music most other folk finger pickers sound quite a bit like him, i.e. most players wind up copying him, whether they want to or not.

How I Discovered It

One of the authors of Dylan Goes Electric co wrote this book.

Who Should Read It?

Anyone, and I mean anyone interested in the music or the time period. It’s a nice way to spend time with an engaging personality

Highlights

“Why should I go anywhere?” Dave said of the Village. “I’m already here.”

Whenever you got here, it was better ten years earlier. That’s what people say now, complaining about gentrification. It’s what they said twenty years ago, complaining about tourists. It’s what they said forty years ago, complaining about hippie kids.

Once, back in the early sixties, I decided to leave New York. I told Dave I was going to return to Buffalo. He was incredulous and asked why, a question I was somehow unable to answer. “Well,” I managed, “that’s my hometown. That’s where I’m from.” He thought about it, then looked off into the middle distance. “I know a woman,” he said, “who was born in Buchenwald.”

It was not particularly interesting, and by that time I had decided I was going to be a musician or, barring that, some other sort of colorful ne’er-do-well.

My mother had decided that I should learn to play the piano, so I used to have to go to the local Sisters of St. Joseph convent for my lessons, and then every afternoon I had to go to the same convent and practice for an hour after school. I leave it to the reader to imagine how much I hated that. It was the first time I learned how to read music, and I detested the whole experience with such a purple passion that until I was in my thirties, I had no desire to read standard notation or play the piano. At that point I began to notice how much better the piano would have suited my musical tastes, but by then I had been playing guitar for twenty years and had managed to make it into a serviceable substitute.

For the rest of my life I continued to use those big fat barbershop chords, especially when I was working out voicings for guitar arrangements.

We only had one gig, a Christmas party at a German fraternal hall in Ridgewood, Brooklyn. Our pay was all the beer we could drink—I suppose they figured, How much beer can a fourteen-year-old kid drink? I do not recall the answer to that, but I am told that they carried me home like a Yule log.

Then, with the help of a Mel Bay instruction book, I set out to prove Segovia’s dictum that the guitar is the easiest instrument in the world to play badly.

Jack showed me some of the fingerings I would continue to use for the rest of my life. He was of the old orchestral jazz school, the musicians who played nonamplified rhythm guitar in the big bands: “Six notes to a chord, four chords to the bar, no cheating,” as Freddie Green used to say. And he also would sometimes use wraparound thumb bar chords and things like that, which had dropped out of the jazz world when more classical guitar techniques came in.

Though he never put it in those terms, it was ear training. He was making us listen, and after a while, if you really paid attention, you got so you could at least make a pretty good guess as to who was playing every instrument. There are people you can’t fool, people who can tell you, “No, that’s not Ben Webster, that’s Coleman Hawkins,” or “That’s not Pres, that’s Paul Quinichette,” and be right every time, and to do that, you can’t just groove with the music. You have to listen with a focus and an intensity that normal people never use. But we weren’t normal people, we were musicians. To be a musician requires a qualitatively different kind of listening, and that is what he was teaching us.

Never use two notes when one will do. Never use one note when silence will do. The essence of music is punctuated silence.

By this time I had heard and read a good deal about Greenwich Village. The phrase “quaint, old-world charm” kept cropping up, and I had a vivid mental picture of a village of half-timbered Tudor cottages with mullioned windows and thatched roofs, inhabited by bearded, bomb-throwing anarchists, poets, painters, and nymphomaniacs whose ideology was slightly to the left of “whoopee!” Emerging from the subway at the West 4th Street station, I looked around in a state of shock. “Jesus Christ,” I muttered. “It looks just like fucking Brooklyn.”

There is no way I can sort out an exact chronology for this hegira, but it started around 1951 and continued in stages over the course of the next few years. I never officially left home, but I would go over to Manhattan and end up crashing on somebody’s floor overnight, and then it got to be two nights, then three, until eventually I was spending most of my time in Manhattan—though every few days I would make the trek back to Queens to change my underwear and see if I could mooch some money. Gradually these visits grew less frequent, and by the time I was about seventeen, I was living in Manhattan full-time.

In hindsight, both sides had their merits and both took their positions to ridiculous extremes. The modernists were aesthetic Darwinists, arguing that jazz had to progress and that later forms must necessarily be superior to earlier ones. The traditionalists were Platonists, insisting that early jazz was “pure” and that all subsequent developments were dilutions and degenerations. This comic donnybrook dominated jazz criticism for ten or fifteen years, with neither side capable of seeing the strengths of the other, until it finally subsided and died, probably from sheer boredom.

Being an adolescent, I was naturally an absolutist, so as soon as I became aware that this titanic tempest in a teapot was going down, I had to jump one way or the other. As a result, I turned my back on a lot of good music. When I was twelve or thirteen, Charlie Christian was my favorite guitarist, I had amassed a huge collection of the Benny Goodman sextet, and I listened to bebop and modern jazz. By the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I had come to regard all of that music as a sorry devolution from the pure New Orleans style. I was convinced, intellectually and ideologically, that the traditionalists had the better of it, and that led me to a lot of good music, but it also led me away from a lot of good music and toward a lot of truly terrible music. It was an ideological judgment rather than a musical one, and it was stupid.

So I switched over and quickly became one of the worst tenor banjo players on the trad scene. And to be the worst at tenor banjo, you’re really competing, because that’s a fast track.

Thus, with my Vega in hand, I set out to be a professional jazzman. By that time I was already six foot two and weighed about 220 pounds. Six or seven months later, thanks to my devotion to jazz, I weighed 170.

I had never starved before, and I had no idea of the great range of possibilities out there in the world—one of them being starvation.

Those were the waning days of the trad-Dixieland revival. I was “just in time to be too late,” as the song says,

The joke in the early 1960s was that I was the only folksinger in New York who knew how to play a diminished chord, and while that was not quite true, it does indicate what set me apart from a lot of the other people.

Eddie Condon once remarked that when you are a musician, a dozen people might offer to buy you a drink in the course of an evening but nobody ever walks up and says, “Hey, let me stand you to a ham sandwich.” Between starvation and inebriation, it’s a miracle that any of us survived, much less actually learned anything.

My acquaintance with the demon weed dates to around 1954, a halcyon year for vipers.*

As I was rapidly discovering, it is hard work surviving without a steady job. I could usually come up with a floor or a couch to crash on, but food was always a problem. We would have boosting expeditions—I never actually did this myself, but I was certainly party to the proceeds—where a group would go into a supermarket and secrete some small, high-value items such as caviar and potted shrimp about their persons. Then we would go out and shop these things off to our more affluent friends for bags of rice and bulk items that were too big to shoplift.

The sight and sound of all those happily howling petit bourgeois Stalinists offended my assiduously nurtured self-image as a hipster, not to mention my political sensibilities, which had become vehemently IWW-anarchist. They were childish, and nothing bothers a serious-minded eighteen-year-old as much as childishness.

I immediately buttonholed him and asked him to show me what he was doing. That was Tom Paley, who later became a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers.

Gradually, I improved—we all did, actually. When one of us figured something out, the knowledge would be shared, and our general level of skill rose. It was a combined process of experimentation and theft: you would come up with an idea, and the next thing you knew, all your friends would be playing it, but that was fine because when they came up with an idea, you would be playing it. As Machiavelli used to say, “Things proceed in a circle, and thus the empire is maintained.”

So I cast off my carefully cultivated jazz snobbery and set out to reinvent myself as a fingerpicking guitarist and singer. Like the man said, “Sometimes you have to forget your principles and do what’s right.”

In the 1950s, as for at least the previous two hundred years, we used the word “folk” to describe a process rather than a style. By this definition—to which I still subscribe—folk songs are the musical expression of preliterate or illiterate communities and necessarily pass directly from singer to singer. Flamenco is folk music; Bulgarian vocal ensembles are folk music; African drumming is folk music; and “Barbara Allen” is folk music. Clearly, there is little stylistic similarity here, but all these musics developed through a process of oral repetition that is akin to the game we used to call “whisper.” In whisper, one person writes down a sentence, then whispers it to another, who whispers it to a third, and so on around the room until the last person hears it and again writes it down; and then the two messages are compared, and often turn out to be wildly disparate.

And yet, self-announced folk revivals keep surfacing, just as they have at least since the days of Sir Walter Scott. The impulse behind them is generally romantic and anti-industrial—and, a bit surprisingly, among Anglophones in recent times it has almost always come from politically left of center. (Elsewhere, interest in folkloric traditions has often been found in combination with extreme nationalism of the most right-wing and fascist variety.)

a lot of both the middle-class left-wingers and the workers back in the 1930s were first- or second-generation immigrants, and the folk revival served as a way for them to establish American roots. This was especially true for the Jews. The folk revivalists were at least 50 percent Jewish, and they adopted the music as part of a process of assimilation to the Anglo-American tradition—which itself was largely an artificial construct but nonetheless provided some common ground. (Of course, that rush to assimilate was not limited to Jews, but I think they were more conscious of what they were doing than a lot of other people were.)

(The Industrial Workers of the World—IWW, or “Wobblies”—had done something similar back in the teens, but with the difference that singers like Joe Hill and T-Bone Slim were of the folk and generally set their lyrics to pop melodies or church hymns rather than to anything self-consciously rural or working-class.) It was part of the birth of “proletarian chic”—think about that the next time you slip into your designer jeans.

By 1939 this movement had its nexus in a sort of commune on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village called Almanac House. The residents included at one time or another, Pete Seeger, Alan and Bess Lomax, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell . . . the list is long and impressive. All were songwriters to one degree or another (many collaborations and collective efforts here), but Guthrie was by far the most talented and influential of the lot. Taking pains to conceal his considerable erudition behind a folksy facade, he became a kind of proletarian oracle in the eyes of his singer-song-writer associates, who were, of course, incurable romantics. With Guthrie exercising a very loose artistic hegemony (Seeger and Lampell seem to have done most of the actual work), Almanac House became a kind of song factory, churning out topical, occasional, and protest songs at an unbelievable clip, as well as hosting regular “hootenannies.”

the blacklist damn near killed the folk revival in its tracks. The full extent of the witch hunt is rarely acknowledged even today. Most people believe it affected only public figures—people in government and the entertainment world—but that is completely wrong. Trade unions and the professions in the private sector were all profoundly affected, and for a while no one to the left of Genghis Khan could feel entirely safe. Thousands of people lost their jobs and were harassed by the FBI and threatened by vigilante anti-Communist crusaders. I had to sign a loyalty oath to get a job as a messenger, for chrissake, and I have already mentioned Lenny Glaser being fired from his job as a waiter after the FBI came around and asked the restaurant manager some pointed questions about his political affiliations. The right-wing press—which is to say, almost all of it—was running stories like “How the Reds Control Our Schools,” and the whole country was in a paranoid panic that lasted almost two decades. Leftists and intellectuals were terrorized, many essentially unemployable, not a few in prison, and a couple (the Rosenbergs) executed pour encourager les autres. Thus the cheery atmosphere of the Golden Fifties.

The young CP-ers, called the Labor Youth League or LYL, would be spread out all across the park, five-string banjos and nylon-string guitars in hand, singing what they called “people’s songs.” They were very serious, very innocent, and very young, and except for talking (and singing) a lot about “peace,” their political opinions were generally indistinguishable from those of liberal Democrats. They all seemed to go to Music and Art High School, and their parents all seemed to be dentists.

few of the CP’s older and more politically conscious people were usually on hand as well, and these I found evasive, dishonest, and ignorant. After listening to them recite their catechism, I concluded that however loathsome and psychotic the Red-baiters were, they had got one thing right: the CP was the American arm of Soviet foreign policy, no more, no less. They were stolid organization men, and a revolutionary looking for a home might as well have checked out the Kiwanis or the Boy Scouts.

This was the first I had heard that you had to read anything to be an anarchist. It sounded distinctly unanarchistic.

(In those prelapsarian days, the word “libertarian” was still in the hands of its rightful owners: anarchists, syndicalists, council communists, and suchlike. The mean-spirited, reactionary assholes who are currently dragging it through the mud were not even a blot on the horizon. We should have taken out a copyright.)

He had fought in Spain as well, and came out of that experience an extremely bitter anti-Communist. He was convinced that he had returned alive only because he had been taken prisoner by the Fascists—that otherwise he would have been purged by his more orthodox comrades. (Tom Condit, one of my young cohorts in the league, recalls meeting a couple of people who felt this way, and if we knew two, there must have been quite a few others.)

(At the time we knew Sam as Sam Weiner, which was his alias in the movement. Esther went by their married name, but they pretended that they were just living together, because they were very hard-line anarchists and ashamed to have gone through an official marriage ceremony.)

did very little political material. It did not suit my style, and I never felt that I did it convincingly. I just did not have that kind of voice or that kind of presence. Also, although I am a singer and have always had strong political views, I felt that my politics were no more relevant to my music than they would have been to the work of any other craftsman. Just because you are a cabinetmaker and a leftist, are you supposed to make left-wing cabinets?

in that three-year period from the time of the Berlin uprising through to the time of the Hungarian Revolution, more and more of the dirt from the Kremlin was being exposed. In a way, I almost sympathized with them. I mean, put yourself in their shoes: here you are, you’ve spent thirty or forty years of your life peddling poison that you thought was candy—think what that can do to somebody’s head. On the other hand, we could see what was happening in Eastern Europe, and many of us had also had our share of run-ins with authoritarian, Stalinist die-hards in one group or another, and we knew them for the assholes they were. We of the non-Communist left, whether we were revolutionary socialists or anarchists or whatever the hell we were calling ourselves that week, felt that, as Trotsky once said, between ourselves and the Stalinists there was a river of blood. So even though we had a certain admiration for the singers who had stood up to the Red hunters, when you got right down to it we wanted very little to do with them.*

So in a sense, the justifiable paranoia that was common in some sectors of the folk music field in the 1950s left us pretty much untouched.

Naturally, a lot of us despised the idea of needing an official permit, but it did have one advantage: the rule was that everyone was allowed to sing and play from two until five as long as they had no drums, and that kept out the bongo players. The Village had bongo players up the wazoo, and they would have loved to sit in, and we hated them. So that was some consolation.

As a general thing, there would be six or seven different groups of musicians, most of them over near the arch and the fountain. The Zionists were the most visible, because they had to stake out a large enough area for the dancers, and they would be over by the Sullivan Street side of the square, singing “Hava Nagilah.”* Then there would be the LYL-ers, the Stalinists: someone like Jerry Silverman would be playing guitar, surrounded by all these summer camp kids of the People’s Songs persuasion, and they would be singing old union songs and things they had picked up from Sing Out! Sometimes they would have a hundred people, all singing “Hold the Fort,” and quite a lot of them knew how to sing harmony, so it actually could sound pretty good.

The bluegrassers would be off in another area, led by Roger Sprung, the original citybilly. As far as I know, Roger single-handedly brought Scruggs picking to the city—not just to New York but to any city.

Which is not to say that the greensleevers did not have politics—some did, some did not—but there was a consensus among us that using folk music for political ends was distasteful and insulting to the music.

We were all hanging out together, and if you were any kind of musician, you couldn’t find enough hands to pick all the pockets that were available. So I ended up with a very broad musical base, without even thinking about it, simply because of the range of people I was associating with.

Later on, when the scene got bigger, the niches became more specialized and the different groups didn’t mix as much, which was a real pity. The musical world became segregated, and today people no longer get that broad range of influences.

whether it’s me or Dylan or a jazz trumpeter. You have to start somewhere, and the broader your base, the more options you have.

Of course, to a great extent, it was a generational thing: we thought of them as the old wave and conceived of ourselves as an opposition, as is the way of young Turks in every time and place.*

We were severely limited, however, because much as we might consider ourselves devotees of the true, pure folk styles, there was very little of that music available. Then a marvelous thing happened. Around 1953 Folkways Records put out a six-LP set called the Anthology of American Folk Music, culled from commercial recordings of traditional rural musicians that had been made in the South during the 1920s and ’30s. The Anthology was created by a man named Harry Smith, who was a beatnik eccentric artist, an experimental filmmaker, and a disciple of Aleister Crowley. (When he died in the 1990s, his fellow Satanists held a memorial black mass for him, complete with a virgin on the altar.) Harry had a fantastic collection of 78s, and his idea was to provide an overview of the range of styles being played in rural America at the dawn of recording. That set became our bible.

They say that in the nineteenth-century British Parliament, when a member would begin to quote a classical author in Latin, the entire House would rise in a body and finish the quote along with him. It was like that. The Anthology provided us with a classical education that we all shared in common, whatever our personal differences.

they were trying to recreate the music of the teens and twenties, but what actually happened was that they unwittingly created a new kind of music.

Even when I tried to sound exactly like Leadbelly, I could not do it, so I ended up sounding like Dave Van Ronk.

That kind of passionate attention pays off, in terms of being able to learn songs, play, sing, or whatever one needs to do. I was learning more music, and learning it faster, than I have ever done before or since.

He knew theory, knew how all the chords worked and how to build an arrangement, and he was only too happy to show me or anyone else who asked. I latched onto him, and it was like having coffee with Einstein a few times a week.

The rooms were small and ill lit, very crowded, and insufferably stuffy, and the music would go on until four or five o’clock in the morning. Those Spring Street parties led directly to the opening of the first Village folk music venue, and the beginning of my professional career,

have always had the card luck of Wild Bill Hickok, so in self-defense I started up a small blackjack game in the crew mess room—the point being that if you play by Las Vegas rules and have enough capital to ride out the occasional bad night, the dealer simply cannot lose. On the home journey, I made out like a bandit, and I paid off the S.S. Texan with $1,500 and a six-ounce jar of Dexedrine pills provided in lieu of a gambling debt, not to mention a half kilo of reefer scored off a Panamanian donkey-man for $20 while trundling through the Canal. In short, I was loaded for bear.

In concept and design, it was a tourist trap, selling the clydes (customers) a Greenwich Village that had never existed except in the film Bell, Book and Candle.

The Bizarre opened to the public on August 18, 1957, and the entertainment was no slapdash affair.

Hitching to Chicago was easy. You just stuck out your thumb near the entrance of the Holland Tunnel, headed west, and switched to public transportation when you got to the Illinois suburbs. The main problem was sleep. It was about 900 miles and took roughly 24 hours, depending on how many rides you needed to get there. There were some rest stops on the recently completed Ohio Turnpike, but if the cops caught you sleeping, they would roust you, and when they found that you had no car, they would run you in. You could get thirty days for vagrancy, so it was a good idea to stay awake.

His face had the studied impassiveness of a very bad poker player with a very good hand.

By the mid- to late 1960s, there were folklore centers all over America, and every single one was inspired by Izzy Young.

Not a great living, but those were easier times—otherwise, none of us would have made it through. I knew people who were paying $25 or $30 a month for a two-person apartment. Not a good apartment, but it could be done.

What is more, I always thought Pete was a much better musician than most people appreciated—including most of his fans. He phrases like a sonofabitch, he never overplays, and he dug up so much wonderful material. Whatever our disagreements over the years, I learned a hell of a lot from him.

His masterpiece was “The Ballad of Pete Seeger,” a viciously funny reworking of “The Wreck of the Old 97” that began “They gave him his orders at Party headquarters, / Saying, ‘Pete, you’re way behind the times. / This is not ’38, it is 1957, / There’s a change in that old Party Line.’” It had a couple more verses, ending with a quip about how the People’s Artists were going on with “their noble mission of teaching folksongs to the folk.”

Dick was a friend from the Libertarian League and a fellow sci-fi addict (he was one of a group of sci-fi-reading lefties who called themselves the Fanarchists).

He was quite an unprincipled man, and he did not pay the performers; he would make an exception for someone like Odetta or Josh White, but whoever else was on the bill was doing it for the “exposure” (which, as Utah Phillips points out, is something people die of).

we were the cutting edge of the folk revival—though bear in mind, we were in our late teens and early twenties, and if you do not feel you are the cutting edge at that age, there is something wrong with you. Of course we were the wave of the future—we were twenty-one!

As a general rule, I tried to avoid getting mixed up in this kind of convoluted skullduggery, but ever since I was a teenager, I had been reading about Lautrec and absinthe, Modigliani and absinthe, Swinburne and absinthe—naturally I was dying to find out about Van Ronk and absinthe. Also, there was the sheer joy of conspiracy for its own sake. What can I say? I have always been a hopeless romantic.

As for the folk scene, it was beginning to look as if it might have a future, and me with it. Admittedly, a great deal of my concertizing was still at benefits, a clear case of the famished aiding the starving.

And he had found a song called “Who’ll Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone,” which he changed to “Who’ll Buy You Ribbons”—not a masterpiece, but it got to be a great point of contention later on when Dylan copped the melody and a couple of lines for “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

He had put his own name on a good many of his arrangements of older songs, and began saying that his motto was “If you can’t write, rewrite. If you can’t rewrite, copyright.”

For a while there, every time he needed a few bucks, he would go to the library and thumb through some obscure folklore collection, then go up to Moe Asch at Folkways Records and say, “You know, Moe, I was just looking through your catalog, and I noticed that you don’t have a single album of Maine lumberjack ballads.”

All of which said, I was right as well: having a record out made an immediate difference in terms of getting jobs, and the fact that it appeared on the Folkways label gave me the equivalent of the Good Folksinging Seal of Approval.

(Incidentally, further research has confirmed that if you must have a disaster, have it happen in the Midwest. Whatever their cultural quirks, those folks can be really nice.)

In any case, what were the odds on getting popped the same way twice in one night? Lightning doesn’t strike etc., etc. Well, just ask any lightning rod about that old saw.

All of this was done to the tune of a strident crusade against “beatniks”—the word had only recently been minted by Herb Caen of the Chronicle, bless him—in the gutter press. Until that damned word came along, nobody noticed us, or if they did it was just “those kids.” We had all the freedom anonymity could bestow—a lovely state of affairs.

Frisco was a place where lefties could really feel at home. In those days, it was still a working-class town and, since the general strike of 1934 (which I heard a lot about), a union town to boot. The joint was fully outfitted with hot and cold running Reds of every imaginable persuasion.

To be working seven nights a week was incredible to me. In a sense it was the first real test of my career plans, of whether I truly wanted to be a professional, full-time musician. And the answer was yes, without question or reservation. It also provided a lot of incentive to develop my music, build up my repertoire, all that kind of thing.

It was an absolutely essential education, because you can practice playing guitar in your living room, and you can practice singing in your living room, but the only place you can practice performing is in front of an audience. Those old coffeehouses did not have to shut down early like the bars did, so they would stay open as long as there were paying customers, and you would wind up working four or five sets a night. I think that is one of the things that set the folksingers of my generation apart from the performers coming up today. There are some very good young musicians on the folk scene, but they will get to be fifty years old without having as much stage experience as I had by the time I was twenty-five.

By the time I came on the scene, though, he was long gone from the Village. For most of the 1950s he was either on the West Coast or wandering around Europe with a banjo player named Derroll Adams,

The next evening Bob Gibson, who was riding very high in those days, gave half of his stage time to an unknown young singer named Joan Baez. That was Joanie’s big break, and anyone who was there could tell that it was the beginning of something big for all of us.

On the other hand, there were the beatniks, who were much the same sort of self-conscious young bores who twenty years later were dying their hair green and putting safety pins in their cheeks. We despised them, and even more than that we despised all the tourists who were coming down to the Village because they had heard about them.

In 1959 the poets still had very much the upper hand. I sometimes say, and there is more than a little truth to it, that the only reason they had folksingers in those coffeehouses at all was to turn the house. The Gaslight seated only 110 customers, and on weekend nights, there would often be a line of people waiting to get in. To maximize profits, Mitchell needed a way to clear out the current crowd after they had finished their cup of over-priced coffee, since no one would have bought a second cup of that slop. This presented a logistical problem to which the folksingers were the solution: you would get up and sing three songs, and if at the end of those three songs anybody was still left in the room, you were fired.

Basically, it turned out that we could draw larger crowds and keep them coming back more regularly. This was not because folk music is inherently more interesting than poetry, but singing is inherently theatrical, and poetry is not. Even a very good poet is not necessarily any kind of a performer, since poetry is by its nature introspective—“In my craft or sullen art / Exercised in the still night,” as Dylan Thomas put it. A mediocre singer can still choose good material and make decent music, while a mediocre poet is just a bore.

As in LA, we worked hard for the money, because being a coffeehouse it did not have to shut down when the bars shut down, so after “last call” at 4:00 A.M., we would get our second straight rush and that would sometimes keep us working until 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 in the morning. I loved walking up 6th Avenue on my way home to bed, watching all the poor wage slaves schlepping off to work.

He also used to preach sometimes in a storefront church, and his sermons were really remarkable. He would set up a riff on his guitar, and then he would chant his sermon in counterpoint to the riff, and when he made a little change in what he was saying, he would make a little change on the guitar. There was this constant interplay and interweaving of voice and guitar, and these fantastic polyrhythms would come out of that—I have never heard anything quite like it, before or since.

We used to hang around for hours, and we would talk and I would ask him how to play one thing or another. He used to say, “Well, playing guitar ain’t nothing but a bag of tricks”—which I suppose is true in a way, but he had a very, very big bag.

You can listen to the records I did for Folkways, and then my first recordings for Prestige, and you will hear a huge difference in the guitar playing, and Gary is largely responsible for that change.

Being blind, he was a target for people who would grab his guitar and run off, so as a result he never let it out of his hands. He used to take it with him into the bathroom—and he would play there. He also had concluded that he needed to be able to defend himself, so he used to carry this big .38 that he called “Miss Ready.” He would pull out this gun and show it to me, and one time, as diffidently as I could, I said, “You know, Gary, you are blind. Don’t you think maybe it’s not such a good idea . . .” He said, “If I can hear it, I can shoot it.”

he turned those books over to the press. That made a lot of noise, and at one point some lieutenant came down and informed John that if he kept stirring up trouble, he was going to be shot while resisting arrest.

And there was this weird rule that no applause was permitted, because all these old Italians lived on the upper floors and they would be bothered by the noise and retaliate by hurling stuff down the airshaft. So instead of clapping, if people liked a performance they were supposed to snap their fingers. Of course, along with solving the noise problem, that also had some beatnik cachet.

For a couple of years after that, the streets were pretty cool, but around 1961–62 it got nasty again, this time with the focus on blacks and especially interracial couples. In a way, the real issue was neither homosexuality nor race; it was that this had been the old residents’ turf and they were losing it. The rents were going up and the locals were feeling threatened, so the kids were taking it out on the most obvious outsiders.

Basically, what I think happened was that the New York singers simply were not as competitive as the newcomers. You do not stick it out in this line of work unless you are fiercely driven, and most of the New Yorkers, while they might have had the talent, did not have that competitive drive. It was simple economic determinism: they were going to college, getting money from their parents, and however much they might have told themselves that their real focus was the music, when push came to shove, they found they had an easier time doing whatever they were learning to do in school.

Even the people who got to be very, very good were not necessarily that way when they arrived. Phil Ochs was not a better performer than Roy Berkeley when he started working in the Village; he just needed it more. I was one of the few New Yorkers to stick it out, and that was because I was stuck with it.

During Milos’s tenure I started running the Tuesday night hootenannies (what would now be called “open mikes”), which I continued through the early 1960s.

That man had more capacity for enjoyment than anyone I have ever known; he could have found something amusing about Hell.

After the set, Fred introduced us. Bob Dylan, spelled D-Y-L-A-N. “As in Thomas?” I asked, innocently. Right. I may have rolled my eyes heavenward. On the other hand, all of us were reinventing ourselves to some extent, and if this guy wanted to carry it a step or two further, who were we to quibble? I made my first acquaintance with his famous dead-fish handshake, and we all trooped back to the Kettle for another drink. The Coffeehouse Mafia had a new recruit.**

The first thing you noticed about Bobby in those days was that he was full of nervous energy. We played quite a bit of chess, and his knees would always be bouncing against the table so much that it was like being at a séance. He was herky-jerky, jiggling, sitting on the edge of his chair. And you never could pin him down on anything. He had a lot of stories about who he was and where he came from, and he never seemed to be able to keep them straight.

What he said at the time, and what I believe, is that he came because he had to meet Woody. Woody was already in very bad shape with Huntington’s chorea, and Bobby went out to the hospital and, by dint of some jiving and tap dancing, managed to get himself into his presence, and he sang for Woody, and he really did manage to develop a rapport with him. For a while, he was going out to the hospital quite often, and he would take his guitar and sit there and play for Woody.

We all admired Woody and considered him a legend, but none of us was trucking out to see him and play for him. In that regard, Dylan was as stand-up a cat as I have ever known, and it was a very decent and impressive beginning for anybody’s career.

Bobby was doing guest sets wherever he could and backing people up on harmonica and suchlike, but there was no real work for him. He was cadging meals and sleeping on couches, pretty frequently mine.

and Peter Stampfel, who became the guiding light of the Holy Modal Rounders and later one of the Fugs. We didn’t socialize as much with them, except for Peter, who has always been one of my favorite people and is undoubtedly some kind of genius—though so far, no one has ever figured out what kind.

Back then, he always seemed to be winging it, free-associating, and he was one of the funniest people I have ever seen onstage—although offstage no one ever thought of him as a great wit.

And his repertoire changed all the time; he’d find something he loved and sing it to death and drop it and go on to something else. Basically, he was in search of his own musical style, and it was developing very rapidly. So there was a freshness about him that was very exciting, very effective, and he acquired some very devoted fans among the other musicians before he had written his first song, or at least before we were aware that he was writing.

Now, Jack’s mother and father were very prominent people in Brooklyn; I understand that his father was chief of surgery in a hospital, and the family had been in medicine for several generations. So the fact that Jack had turned into a bum was a great source of grief. However, he had been away for a long time, and now he was home, and they were making some attempt at a reconciliation, so Dr. and Mrs. Adnopoz came down to see the kid. I was sitting at a front table with them and the cowboy artist Harry Jackson, and Jack was onstage, and he was having some trouble tuning his guitar. The audience was utterly hushed—a very rare occurrence in that room—and Mrs. Adnopoz was staring at Jack raptly, and then she lets out with a stage whisper: “Look at those fingers . . . Such a surgeon he could have been!”

But there was a sort of Village cabal that had a certain amount of influence within our small world, and among other things, we pushed Mike Porco to book Bobby. Terri had been helping Mike by doing this, that, and the other thing, but she really had to call in every favor to get Bobby that gig. In the end, Mike put him on opening for John Lee Hooker, and it went OK. Then a few months later he opened for the Greenbriar Boys, and Bob Shelton wrote him up in the Times, and that was really what got Bobby started.

Still, there was a definite groundswell of interest, and he soon had a small but fanatical claque of fans who would show up anywhere he was playing; if he dropped by to do a guest set at the Gaslight or one of the other clubs, they would appear by the second song.

Baez was a completely different kind of artist. With her, it was all about the beauty of her voice. That voice really was astonishing—the first time I heard her she electrified me, just as she electrified everybody else. She was not a great performer, and she was not a great singer, but God she had an instrument. And she had that vibrato, which added a remarkable amount of tone color. I think that I was a technically better singer than she was even then, but she had a couple of tricks that were damn useful, and I learned a few things from her.

The thing about Baez, though, was that like almost all the women on that scene, she was still singing in the style of the generation before us. It was a cultural lag: the boys had discovered Dock Boggs and Mississippi John Hurt, and the girls were still listening to Cynthia and Susan Reed. It was not just Joan. There was Carolyn Hester, Judy Collins, and people like Molly Scott and Ellen Adler, who for a while were also contenders. All of them were essentially singing bel canto—bad bel canto, by classical standards, but still bel canto. So whereas the boys were intentionally roughing up their voices, the girls were trying to sound prettier and prettier and more and more virginal.

When Dylan met Grossman, it was truly a match made in heaven, because those were two extraordinarily secretive people who loved to mystify and conspire and who played their cards extremely close to their vests. You never knew what scheme Albert was cooking up behind that blank stare, and he actually took a sort of perverse pleasure in being utterly unscrupulous.

It also introduced the piece that some people continue to regard as my signature song, “Cocaine Blues.”

In a lot of ways the difference was economic. By that time, the scene in New York was relatively professional, made up of all these people who were coming into town and needed to make a living from their music just to pay the rent. We were playing five sets a night in rooms full of drunken tourists, and even if we didn’t necessarily think of ourselves that way, we were professional entertainers. Cambridge was a college town, and the scene—not necessarily the performers but the fans and the hangers-on—was a bunch of middle- and upper-middle-class kids cutting a dash on papa’s cash.

People started asking me to do “that Dylan song—the one about New Orleans.” This became more frequent as Bobby’s popularity took off, and with a combination of annoyance and chagrin, I decided to drop the song until the whole thing blew over. Then, sometime in 1964, Eric Burdon and the Animals made a number-one chart hit out of the damn thing. Same arrangement. I would have loved to sue for royalties, but I found that it is impossible to defend the copyright on an arrangement. Wormwood and gall. I also heard that Bobby had dropped the tune from his repertoire because he was sick of being asked to do “that Animals song—the one about New Orleans.”

There is one final footnote to that story. Like everybody else, I had always assumed that the “house” was a brothel. But a while ago I was in New Orleans to do the Jazz and Heritage Festival, and my wife Andrea and I were having a few drinks with Odetta in a gin mill in the Vieux Carré, when up comes a guy with a sheaf of old photographs—shots of the city from the turn of the century. There, along with the French Market, Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall, the Custom House, and suchlike, was a picture of a forbidding stone doorway with a carving on the lintel of a stylized rising sun. Intrigued, I asked him, “What’s that building?” It was the Orleans Parish women’s prison.

What had happened, as it turned out, was that Jack Elliott, who had been on before us, had finished his set by throwing his hat in the air, and he chose that moment to come out and retrieve it. He was goofing around behind us, waving at the crowd, and I had no idea what was going on, and was simply dying. I later learned that as Jack walked off, Terri met him at the side of the stage and coldcocked him, knocked him flat on his ass. Small consolation.

One of the odd things about him was that he did not like beds; he preferred a good, comfortable armchair. He was the easiest man to put up overnight: “Here John, we have a couch.” “Oh, I don’t need a couch. Say, that looks like a great chair

He started watching my right hand, and he said, “You’ve got those basses backward.” And he played me a few measures of it the way he did it. It was just like on the record, and by God, he was right. I said, “Oh, shit, back to the old drawing board.” And he says, “No, no, no. You really ought to keep it that way. I like that.” That’s the folk process for you: some people call it creativity, but them as knows calls it mistakes.

By now that man has been dead for almost forty years, and he’s probably still in better shape than I am.

There will undoubtedly be times when there is a heightened interest in folk music, but we simply do not have the deep sources of talent that we had in the 1960s. Unless we can hatch another generation like Gary, Skip, and John, or John Lee and Muddy Waters, the quality will be sadly second-rate—and the world that produced those people is long gone.

That was one of the most important things about their music, and why they had become famous in the first place: because they played and sang like people who knew who they were. So they were not people who could be overawed all that easily. It doesn’t much matter if you are a sharecropper from Texas or a Harvard grad; if you don’t know who you are, you are lost wherever the hell you find yourself, and if you do, you do not have much of a problem.

As for Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, they have as much to do with folk music as Schubert or Baudelaire.

In an attempt to avoid the migraines brought on by serious thought, most of the critics and music marketers have relied on a simple formula: if the accompaniment to this music is acoustic, it’s folk music. With amplified backup, it’s rock ’n’ roll, except in those instances where a pedal steel guitar is added, in which case it’s country. To be fair to the critics—which is no fun at all—the performers themselves have rarely been more perceptive when it comes to labeling their work.

“OK, if I’m gonna be a songwriter, I’d better be serious about it.” So he set himself a training regimen of deliberately writing one song every day, and he kept that up for about a year. The songs could be good, bad, or indifferent; the important thing was that it forced him to get into the discipline of sitting down and writing.

think people like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen felt toward Dylan sort of the way Ezra Pound felt toward Walt Whitman: “You cut the wood; now it’s time for carving.”

I was working down at the Gaslight, and I opened my set with “This Land Is Your Land” and closed it with “The International,” including the verse that goes, “We want no condescending saviors.”

The core problem with the New Left was that it wasn’t an ideology, it was a mood—and if you are susceptible to one mood, you are susceptible to another.

Phil’s chord sense was quite advanced, and he was the only person around aside from Gibson who used the relative minor and secondary keys. He was also one of the few songwriters on that scene who knew how to write a bridge.

As a lyricist, there was nobody like Phil before and there has not been anybody since. That is not to say that I liked everything he wrote, but he had a touch that was so distinctive that it just could not be anybody else.

Like a lot of people on that scene, Phil was essentially a Jeffersonian democrat who had been pushed to the left by what was happening around him. Two consecutive Democratic presidents had turned out to be such disappointments that it forced a lot of liberals into a sort of artificial left-wing stance, and Phil was of that stripe. That may seem a surprising thing to say about the man who wrote “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” but I think it is accurate. He had believed in the liberal tradition, and it had betrayed him, and naturally he had a special contempt for the people who espoused lukewarm liberal views but were supporting the Cold War, the war in Vietnam, the crackdown on the student movement.

Dylan was never as devoted to politics as Phil was, but I think that if you could have managed to pin him down, his views were roughly similar. He was a populist and was very tuned in to what was going on—and, much more than most of the Village crowd, he was tuned in not just to what was going on around the campuses but also to what was going on around the roadhouses. But it was a case of sharing the same mood, not of having an organized political point of view. Bobby was very sensitive to mood, and he probably expressed that better than anyone else. Certainly, that was Phil’s opinion. Phil felt that Bobby was the true zeitgeist, the voice of their generation.

One of the great myths of that period is that Bobby was only using the political songs as a stepping stone, a way to attract attention before moving on to other things. I have often heard that charge leveled against him, and at times he has foolishly encouraged it. The fact is, no one—and certainly not Bobby—would have been stupid enough to try to use political music as a stepping stone, because it was a stepping stone to oblivion. Bobby’s model was Woody Guthrie, and Woody had written a lot of political songs but also songs about all sorts of other subjects, and Bobby was doing the same thing.

In a way, the whole question of who influenced whom is bullshit. Theft is the first law of art, and like any group of intelligent musicians, we all lived with our hands in each other’s pockets. Bobby picked up material from a lot of people, myself included, but we all picked up things from him as well.

Within a couple of years, Bobby changed the whole direction of the folk movement. The big breakthrough was when he wrote “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” because in that song he fused folk music with modernist poetry. The tune was borrowed from an old English ballad called “Lord Randall,” and it was in the same question-and-response form, but the imagery was right out of the symbolist school.

Somewhere in my bookcases I probably still have a paperback collection of modern French poetry with Bobby’s underlinings in it. I have never traced any of the underlinings to anything he actually used in a song, but he was reading that stuff very carefully.

Blues is like a kielbasa, those long Polish sausages: you don’t sing a whole blues, you just cut off a section.

am absolutely ruthless about this, because I have no incentive to pad my repertoire with second-rate material of my own when I could just as easily add some first-rate material by someone else.

Poetry is automatically suspect to me, because if you are a good enough poet, you can make bullshit sound so beautiful that people don’t notice that it’s bullshit. I used to hear Dylan Thomas over at the old White Horse Tavern back in the 1950s, and when he had had enough to drink—which was frequently—he would recite his poetry, and my jaw would drop. It was beautiful, gorgeous stuff, and he recited it marvelously. But when I would go back and look at it on the page, a lot of it was bullshit. Not all of it, by any means, but I would challenge anyone to explain what some of those things were about.

I think it was a good thing that, back in the Renaissance, people like Michelangelo were treated like interior decorators. A well-written song is a craft item. Take care of the craft, and the art will take care of itself.

Leonard Cohen used to point out that the greatest problem for a writer is that your critical faculties develop faster than your creative faculties, and it is very easy to get so wrapped up in what is wrong with your songs that you quit writing entirely.

• Personally, I did not have to worry about this. I showed my draft card to a guy I knew over at the War Resisters League, to find out what my classification meant in terms of getting hauled off by the Feds, and he glanced at it and drawled: “Well, what it means is that when the Red Army is marching down 5th Avenue, you’ll be told, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’”

Most of the songwriters were writing well below their abilities, and people who were capable of learning and employing more complicated harmonies and chord structures confined themselves to 1-4-5 changes. Some of them were enormously talented, but they were like an enormously talented boxer who insists on fighting with one hand behind his back. The result was that we produced a Bob Dylan, a Tom Paxton, a Phil Ochs, a bit later a Joni Mitchell—but we did not produce a Johann Sebastian Bach or a Duke Ellington.

For me, one of the great things about that period was that I could make a living without leaving the Village. I was working weeks and weeks on end in clubs that I could walk to, so my living room was my dressing room, and I could even go home between sets. I was listening to music that interested me, and making music that interested my friends, and I felt that I belonged to a community of singers, songwriters, performers who were really cooking.

And I knew perfectly well that none of us was a true “folk” artist. We were professional performers, and while we liked a lot of folk music, we all liked a lot of other things as well. Working musicians are very rarely purists. The purists are out in the audience kibitzing, not onstage trying to make a living. And Bobby was absolutely right to ignore them.

The other reaction, which was even more damaging, was “I’m gonna be next. All I have to do is find the right agent, the right record company, the right connections, and I can be another Bob Dylan!” Yeah, sure you could. All you had to do was write “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—for the first time. That was what Bobby had done, and none of the rest of us did that. Bobby is not the greatest songwriter in history, but he was far and away the best on our scene, and whether we admitted it or not, we all knew that.

so when the scene shut down, I felt the satisfaction of a Seventh Day Adventist on the day the world really does come to an end.

liked the Village, and I still like it, and I would not like to live anywhere else. The country is a city for birds.

Dave was the most voracious reader I have known, and he would send me home with thick volumes of history or slim paperbacks of his favorite science fiction—“It’s mind rot, but good mind rot,” he would say.

I was with him when Sunday Street came out, the first solo album he had done in years.

“but if I start bloviating about how wonderful it was, what I say and what you hear will not be the same thing. It has been my observation that when you ask some alter kocker about the old days, his answer—however he may phrase it—will always be, ‘Of course, everything was much better then, because I could take a flight of stairs three at a time.’