Mapping Woody Guthrie“I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-roamin’ round,” Woody Guthrie lamented in one of his most popular songs. A native of Oklahoma, he was still in his teens when he moved to Pampa, Texas, where he experienced the dust storms that would play such a crucial role in forming his identity and shaping his work. He later joined thousands of Americans who headed to California to escape the devastation of the Dust Bowl. There he entered the West Coast stronghold of the Popular Front, whose leftward influence on his thinking would continue after his move in 1940 to New York, where the American folk music renaissance began when Guthrie encountered Pete Seeger and Lead Belly. Guthrie kept moving throughout his life, making friends, soaking up influences, and writing about his experiences. Along the way, he produced more than 3,000 songs, as well as fiction, journalism, poetry, and visual art, that gave voice to the distressed and dispossessed. In this insightful book, Will Kaufman examines the artist’s career through a unique perspective: the role of time and place in Guthrie’s artistic evolution. Guthrie disdained boundaries—whether of geography, class, race, or religion. As he once claimed in his inimitable style, “There ain’t no such thing as east west north or south.” Nevertheless, places were critical to Guthrie’s life, thought, and creativity. He referred to himself as a “compass-pointer man,” and after his sojourn in California, he headed up to the Pacific Northwest, on to New York, and crossed the Atlantic as a merchant marine. Before his death from Huntington’s disease in 1967, Guthrie had one more important trip to take: to the Florida swamplands of Beluthahatchee, in the heart of the South. There he produced some of his most trenchant criticisms of Jim Crow racism—a portion of his work that scholars have tended to overlook. To map Guthrie’s movements across space and time, the author draws not only on the artist’s considerable recorded and published output but on a wealth of unpublished sources—including letters, essays, song lyrics, and notebooks—housed in the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This trove of primary documents deepens Kaufman’s intriguing portrait of a unique American artist. |
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Contents
DUST BOWL BLUES | |
CALIFORNIA CALIFORNIA | |
PASTURES OF PLENTY | |
SOMEWHERE AT | |
NEW YORK TOWN | |
BELUTHAHATCHEE | |
Down or Up or Anywhere | |
Notes | |
Sources | |
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Common terms and phrases
activism Almanac American Angeles artistic Asch Beluthahatchee Bill Blues born California called City Collection Columbia Communist Correspondence cultural disc Dorothea Lange Dust Bowl Ballads Dust Storm East farm farmers fight Florida folder folk folks Front Grand Coulee Guthrie’s hand Hard Hill House hundred John kill labor Land later Left Library of Congress live Lomax look Marjorie meets migrants movement Music Myth of Sisyphus natural never North notes Okie Oklahoma organization Pastures People’s political Popular Press published quoted radical radio Ramblin recalled Recordings refugee River road Roll seen Series ship Singers singing social songs South southern Stetson Kennedy Talking things town track turn Union United University voice walked Washington Woody Guthrie Archives Woody’s workers writing wrote York
Bibliographic information
| Title | Mapping Woody Guthrie Volume 4 of American Popular Music Series |
| Author | Will Kaufman |
| Publisher | University of Oklahoma Press, 2019 |
| ISBN | 0806163798, 9780806163796 |
| Length | 178 pages |
| Subjects | › › › History / United States / 20th Century History / United States / State & Local / Southwest (AZ, NM, OK, TX) Music / History & Criticism |
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