Voice Of The Migrants

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30686, 27 February 1965, Page 5

Voice Of The Migrants

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DERRICK ROONEY]

The Peopl

YVOODY dUTHRIE, the ’ ’ great American folksong Writer and singer, composer of "So Long, it’s Been Good To Know You,” the “Philadelphia Lawyer” and countless other songs, was an Okie, born to follow the migrant trail west to California with thousands of other refugees from the Dust Bowl. He carried his guitar Wherever he went and played (by ear; "I never could play any chord from a book and I’ll wager you the chordin’ books Leadbelly used in his grey and greying years wouldn’t make a pile big enough for you to find on your floor”) in migrant camps, pool halls, mess-rpoms, union halls and radio stations —wherever there was an audience to listen and a song that needed to be sung.

“Your World” “I knew that my trail would be a story that whirls, and a song that spins in the middle of the sun, a hunt for a universe on the points of our needles,” he wrote. “I hate a song that makes you think you’re not any good. I hate a song, that makes you think you are just bom to lose ... No good to nobody . . . Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that ... I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that If it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down and rolled over you, no matter what colour, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.”

And for a whole generation of migrant workers, Guthrie did just that: ‘‘Goin’ Down This Road Feelin' Bad” “Dust Bowl Blues,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You,” “This Land Is Your Land," “Tom Joad,” “The Sinking of the Rueben James” and other songs—songs that reflected the hopes, fears, and unbreakable pride of the Okies. That old dust storm killed my crops down. But it can’t kill me, Lord, It can’t kill me. That old dust storm killed my baby. But it can’t kill me, Lord, It can’t kill me. Guthrie was born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma, the heart of what later became the

Dust Bowl. His father was a real estate agent and, at the height of the land boom, a wealthy man. When the boom collapsed he lost, in Woody's words, “a farm a day for 30 days”; and Woody went on the road in his teens, penniless and a virtual orphan. “I carried my harmonica and played in barber shops, at shine stands, in front of shows, around pool halls.” He stayed around the oil fields long enough to marry and live in the “rickiest of the oil town shacks” with no clothes, no money, no groceries and two children, both girls. Finally, like thousands of families from the Dust Bowl, the Guthries hit the road for the promised land—California. Woody talked his way to a a radio programme in Los Angeles, got “20,000 letters in two years,” sang around union halls and union meetings, wrote articles and drew pen sketches for union newspapers.

But the union movement could not provide enough money to support a wife and family, and Woody drifted to New York. He lived on the Bowery, sang at “a hundred IWO lodges,” recorded 12 songs—the Dust Bowl ballads —for Victor and met Alan Lomax, for whom he recorded “several hours of questions and answers and all of the songs I could remember on a pint of pretty cheap whisky” —a valuable collection of Americana that now rests in the archives of the Library of Congress.

During the war he shipped out in the Merchant Marine, to “get torpedoed twice, to walk all over the British Isles, Canada, Mexico, to see 46 of our 48 states.” He was drafted into the Army on the day the Germans surrendered. After the war Guthrie settled in New York with his second wife (his first marriage had cracked under the strain of Woody’s peripatetic existence), joined the Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays (founders of the Weavers) and CISCO Houston and met Moses Asch, the son of Sholem Asch and one of the men responsible for the present renaissance of folk music on records. Asch recorded 120 of Guthrie’s songs and published his second

book—a 54-page collection of reminiscences and songs titled "American Folksong.” One of the songs included was “Tom Joad," a Dust Bowl song based on John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath."

“I wrote this song." Guthrie explained, “because the people back in Oklahoma haven’t got two bucks to buy the book, or even 35 cents to see the movie, but the song will get back to them and tell them what Preacher Casey said.”

In the introduction to Woody’s first record album for Asch, John Steinbeck returned the compliment: “Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he had any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs iff a people and I suspect that be is, in a way, that people.” Free Of Charge Woody saw himself in somewhat less elevated terms: “Let me be known as the man who told you something you already knew.” He occasionally signed himoelf “The Trouble Buster” and once scrawled on a notice-board: “Trouble ain’t worth nothin* so I won’t charge nothin* to fix it.” In recent years there has been considerable public recognition for Guthrie; his records, including the historic Library of Congress sides, have been reissued on long players, his 1943 autobiography, the rambling and patchily brilliant “Bound for Glory," has been republished as a paperback and he has many folk-singing heirs, such as the precociously brilliant Bob Dylan. But Woody, though nominally alive, is not around to cash in. The voice and fingers that caught the pulse of a generation of migrant workers have been stilled by Huntingdon’s chorea, a progressive disease of the nervous system. For more than 10 years Woody has lain in a Brooklyn hospital, unable to talk, let alone sing.