"woody guthrie and his folk tradition," by richard a. reuss

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RICHARD A. REUSS

Woody Guthrie and His Folk Tradition'

IT IS IRONIC THAT the man who perhaps was the most creative and dynamic folk artist of the past generation is so little known to folklorists. The name and works of Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) are familiar to many of us, at least in a general way, and occasionally comments are made about Guthrie in record reviews or in articles containing brief illustrations of small points. But Guthrie as yet has received no serious attention from scholars, folkloric or otherwise, with the exception of some essays by John Greenway and my recently published bibliography of printed materials relating to his life.2 Many rewarding and fascinating studies of Guthrie as a representative of the folk and as a gifted re-creator of folk materials still await exploration in detail, even though the bulk of his writings and recordings were completed some twenty or more years ago.

That folklorists thus far have failed to come to grips with one of the most unique personalities ever to stray within their range is regrettable but by no means surprising. Guthrie's own talents as a writer and songmaker have been so strongly emphasized that his repertory of traditional songs, stories, and sayings has been overshadowed. Friends and associates such as Pete Seeger, who did most to pub- licize Woody Guthrie's name over the years, with few exceptions knew him after

1 This article is a revised version of a paper read at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society in Boston, November 20, 1966. I am grateful to Archie Green, John Greenway, Ellen Stekert, Neil Rosenberg, Lisa Feldman, and Alan Lomax for their helpful comments and sugges- tions, and to Richard Hulan, Roger Abrahams, and Marjorie Guthrie and the Guthrie Children's Trust Fund for permission to reprint materials quoted.

2 Except for the discussion in his chapter "The Song-Makers" in American Folksongs of Protest (Philadelphia, 1953), 275-302, and "Woodrow Wilson Guthrie," JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE, 81 (1968), 62-64, Greenway's commentaries on Guthrie have appeared in popular and folknik publications. See especially "Woody Guthrie: Modem Minstrel," This Trend (Spring- Summer 1948), 22-28; "The Folk Informant," Good News, vol. I, no. 2 (May 1961), I-2; "The Anatomy of a Genius: Woody Guthrie," Hootenanny, vol. i, no. 3 (May 1964), 16-17, 69-72; and "Woody Guthrie: The Man, The Land, The Understanding," The American West, vol. 3, no. 4 (Fall 1966), 25-30, 74-78. My own work is A Woody Guthrie Bibliography (New York, 1968).

274 RICHARD A. REUSS

he had severed his ties with his early traditional environment. Their published reminiscences accentuate Woody's later activities, observed by them firsthand, rather than his early life, which is of greater interest to folklorists. Guthrie's creative abilities reached full flower just as he was leaving his folk milieu for good in 1940 and 1941. As Greenway has pointed out, Woody subsequently drew less and less on his own traditional folk culture for his work produced in New York City.3 Thus, as scholars became familiar with his name in the I940s, Woody correspond- ingly produced less of folkloristic interest.

Nor did Guthrie emerge into public view as a result of the efforts of some dili- gent field collector whose name became linked to his, as is often the case with famous informants. Leadbelly, for example, will inevitably be associated with the Lomaxes; but there is no comparable scholar or collector primarily responsible for bringing Woody Guthrie to the attention of folklorists. In truth, Guthrie first became widely known through folknik and left-wing circles rather than as a result of academic conclaves. Alan Lomax did record him for the Library of Congress in 1940, but the recordings were not widely publicized and remained generally in- accessible for twenty-five years. Lomax himself published virtually nothing on Woody until I960.4

The brief notices accorded Guthrie in folklore publications in recent years have done little to further research on his work, in part because of their brevity. No folklore journal reviewed his autobiography Bound For Glory, published in 1943, or even mentioned him in passing until the first issue of the New York Folklore Quarterly appeared in 1945, where he is listed among other folksingers appear- ing occasionally on radio.5

The first meaningful comment of any kind by a scholar appeared in 1948, in Charles Seeger's important "Reviews" article, which noted Guthrie's relatively slow adoption of stylistic performance traits characteristic of urban singers of folksong.6 The only detailed analysis of Woody Guthrie in an academic publica- tion is found in John Greenway's American Folksongs of Protest (i953). Not only have folklorists generally neglected Guthrie; literary critics, social historians, and other scholars by and large have done the same. Woody's creative work as literature and art has yet to be evaluated seriously. Certainly his songs and prose are an eloquent chronicle of the Depression and World War II generation, pre- sented from a unique perspective, and might profitably be studied.

I. Guthrie's importance to the folklorist lies not in his negligible contribution to

oral tradition but in his role as spokesman for various folk or folklike groups. His ability to communicate the life, feelings, attitudes, and culture of his people from the inside-using their terms, concepts, and modes of expression rather than

3 Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest, 281-282. 4 The Folk Songs of North America (Garden City, New York, I96o), 426-431; see also Lomax's

"Compiler's Postscript" to Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People (New York, 1967), 364-366, and his notes in the brochure accompanying the Woody Guthrie Library of Congress Recordings, (Elektra EKL 271/272), released in 1965.

5 Elaine Lambert Lewis, "City Billet," New York Folklore Quarterly, I (1945), II3. 6 Charles Seeger, "Reviews," JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE 6I (1948), 217.

WOODY GUTHRIE AND HIS FOLK TRADITION 275

those of elite American society-renders him worthy of the attention of the folklorist. In other words, Guthrie was a unique distillation of the cultural experiences of several groups possessing folk elements, at once a mirror in which they saw themselves and their most articulate and able chronicler.

In enumerating Guthrie's "folk communities," one is faced with the problem of defining what constitutes a folk society. Classical anthropological definitions have equated folk groups with the land-tied peasantry that historically has no comparable analogue in the American society-the small farmer and frontiersman pushing the line of settlement continually westward, forming and re-forming the frontier, leaving in its wake a string of communities fashioned out of the con- glomeration of elements at hand. The older and more isolated of these communities solidified and became more or less homogeneous in character, that is to say, "folk groups." The newer ones were affected by more sophisticated forms of education, communication, and technology that developed within an increasingly urbanized American society and in varying degrees leveled or prevented the erection of cultural barriers separating each community and region from the rest of the nation. Thus, spatial isolation and relatively simple technological and com- munications systems have formed the basic criteria for determining folk society in the United States. My quarrel with this traditional definition is that it is too limited. Other factors besides geography, minimal formal education and industrial- ization, and lack of mass media may combine to enable a group to produce lore, as will be seen later in Guthrie's case.

A folk group or society is a relative concept, and absolutes are impossible to come by in the field, nor can they be unanimously agreed upon in the abstract (much as folklorists in the past have failed to agree on the precise number of years or versions needed to declare a song a "folksong"). The same holds true with regard to the southwestern regional culture in which Woody Guthrie grew up as a young man. The area was settled and developed extensively by whites as recently as the early twentieth century, just as newspapers, high-school education, and industrial technology were becoming familiar in most parts of the country. The "Last West," therefore, had no time to develop either a prolonged isolation or narrow homogeneity. But it was populated by people who had in common certain broad cultural attitudes and traditions, predominantly southern, and a stock of lore rooted in the Anglo-American experience. If the settlements in the parts of Oklahoma and Texas where Woody lived were not fully developed folk cultures in comparison to others in America (the Pennsylvania Dutch and Ozark, for example), they perhaps were the closest to be found in white society in that region, and they certainly approached the notion of folk communities more than most others in the United States in the second through the fourth decades of the present century.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born July 14, I912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, then a town of about a thousand people located some fifty miles southwest of Tulsa. In Woody's childhood years, Oklahoma was scarcely removed from its frontier stage of development. The white population consisted largely of settlers who had emigrated from nearby southern and prairie states, most of them having lived in the territory no more than a generation. Significant numbers of Indians and Negroes also resided in Oklahoma and often were in close contact with whites.


Woody later reckoned the population of Okemah in his youth to be half white, one-fourth Indian, and one-fourth Negro.' Oil was discovered in the vicinity of Okemah, and the influx of oil workers and the motley assortment of individuals who followed in their wake infused yet another element into the town's diversified setting. Not surprisingly, Woody absorbed traditional material from many parts of his society. His mother sang old ballads as well as "heart" and religious numbers; his father performed cowboy songs, dance pieces, and blues. Negro boys taught him jigs and harmonica tunes, and the day-to-day life of the town instructed him in the tales, salty sayings, and picturesque language common to the region and its peoples. He early exhibited an uncommon talent for making music, or at least noise, as is well attested by old-time Okemah residents,8 who recall his dexterity with the harmonica, Jew's harp, and bones and less frequently his attempts at picking out tunes on the mandolin, guitar, and family piano. Woody performed regularly for high-school assemblies, the boys in the schoolyard, and casual listeners on the street corners of Okemah, but his musical bent was primarily instrumental rather than vocal. There is no evidence from this period of his life to suggest that he would later become a balladmaker or a prolific writer. Few long- term residents of Okemah claim that Woody made up songs as a youngster; only one, Colonel Martin, a boyhood friend, is specific in this respect. Martin asserts that Woody, while in his early teens, created the chorus of what became "So Long, Its Been Good to Know You" from a phrase used as a cliche.9 No corroboration of Martin's account, however, has yet come to light. Similarly, what evidence there is for an early manifestation of talent in the young Woody Guthrie suggests that it lay primarily in the field of drawing rather than songmaking or writing. The few songs with an Oklahoma setting that Woody composed-such as "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Oklahoma Hills,"-and his detailed sketches of latter-day Okemah frontier life in nine chapters of Bound For Glory and elsewhere all were written after he moved from the state.

In 1929 Woody left Okemah and followed the oil boom to Texas, eventually settling with relatives in Pampa. The Texas Panhandle culture was much the same as the one he left behind in Oklahoma, except that in Pampa his associates were more often drawn from the roustabout and bootlegger segments of society than had been the case in Okemah. It was in the Panhandle that Woody received his principal exposure to the early commercial hillbilly medium. He now learned to play the guitar, mandolin, tenor banjo, fiddle, and drums sufficiently well to travel about the countryside as a member of pick-up country dance bands and in his Uncle Jeff's magic show. He began composing his own songs, though he still sang only infrequently in public, and there is abundant testimony that his uncle and aunt (Jeff and Allene Guthrie) were in far greater demand locally as musical entertainers. His prose at this time was limited largely to "psychological" specu- lations, now lost. His descriptions of life on the Texas Plains were written later.x0

7Woody Guthrie, Library of Congress Recordings (Elektra), Side i.

s Field data collected from Okemah residents by Rosan A. Jordan and Richard A. Reuss, August 15-18, 1966.

9 Interview, August i8, 1966. o10 See Bound For Glory (New York, 1943), chs. 9-12; American Folksong (New York, 1947),

3-5; and Hard Hitting Songs For Hard-Hit People, 21-26.


It was also in Texas, not Oklahoma as is frequently asserted, that Woody encountered the Dust Bowl-still a vivid regional folk memory today-which he was to depict so graphically in his songs and in his autobiography Bound For Glory.

In summing up Guthrie's formative years and the environment that molded the directions his talents would take him, it may be said that the cultural milieus of the Oklahoma and Texas periods accomplished different functions. The Okemah years were essentially a time of passive absorption, not just in terms of repertory, but of style, form, and idiomatic expression. The Texas years, on the other hand, saw the crystallization of Guthrie the performer, as he was generally to be in his best years. As a writer Woody did not reach creative maturity until 1940, but as a performer the only significant element missing by the time he left the Texas Panhandle was his radical commitment, which he acquired on the West Coast in 1938 and 1939. In March 1937 Woody hoboed to California. For the next five years he led a nomadic life, simultaneously moving in three cultures: hobo, migratory, and labor-radical. He had been exposed to the first two while still in the Pampa vicinity but became part of them only after moving to the West Coast. Woody witnessed the Okie exodus as it passed through the Texas Panhandle, chiefly over Highway 66, and also made several trips around the Southwest by himself in hobo style before migrating to California. It was in this latter state, however, that his contacts with both Okie and hobo groups were sustained to the point that he actually became a temporary member of each. For the better part of two years (I937-1939), Woody sang on radio station KFVD, Los Angeles, at first with Missouri-born Maxine Crissman as "Woody and Lefty Lou," later alone as "Woody the Lone Wolf." His listening audience was comprised mostly of Okie migrants and other transients who preferred the sentimental folksongs and hillbilly humor he dispensed as a singer, yarnspinner, and down-home philosopher. His recurrent wanderings through the length and breadth of California and the Pacific Northwest broadened his personal contacts with the life and hard times of the Dust Bowl refugees, with whom he found a deep cultural and spiritual identity and about whom he would write with compassion and a gentle humor. The extreme trauma of their uprootal and their struggle for survival in the hostile California atmosphere bound the Okies together in common spirit and cultural experience. In the few years that the Okie community existed as a discernible entity in California (having been absorbed by the war industries during World War II), it produced lore born of its traumatic life to supplement the older materials brought along in the trek west. Traditional forms of folksong and folk expression were retained, but lyric and prose content frequently were altered to reflect contemporary experience, as amply demonstrated in Todd and Sonkin's collection of more than two hundred Okie songs-now in the Archive of Ameri- can Folk Song, Library of Congress.11 Woody Guthrie was in no way a stranger

11 For published examples see Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin, "Ballads of the Okies," New York Times Magazine (November 17, 1940), 6-7, 18; reprinted in American Folk Music Oc- casional, No. I (Berkeley, California, 1964), 87-91. Migrant mimeographed publications such as The Towsack Tattler (Arvin, California) also contained songs and versification by the Okies about their experiences.


to this milieu, and his talents made him by far the greatest spokesman produced by the Okie migrant community.

Woody belonged both to hobo and Okie groups at various times. In the long run, however, he probably spent more calendar time with hoboes, tramps, and bums than with displaced Okies. But there can be no doubt which of the two groups is more important insofar as his overall creative work is concerned. His Dust Bowl ballads, the rambling lyrics like "Hard Traveling," "This Land Is Your Land," and "Rambling Round," and the triumphant Columbia River songs all stem principally from his migrant experiences. By contrast, only his great ballad "East Texas Red," part of four chapters of Bound For Glory-nos. I, 13, 14, and I8-and a few other incidental writings directly reflect his contacts with the hobo world.

The last important subculture for which Woody acted as spokesman was chiefly distinguished from the other groups by its ideology-the labor-radical syndrome created by the militant rise of the CIO and the communist movement during the depression of the 1930s. Broadly speaking, any group having a continuous existence in time is bound to develop traditions as an outgrowth of its isolating features, with quantity and form to be determined by local circumstances. The Depression's labor-radical movement was no exception. Though its impact on the national scene of the 1930s was profound, its lore paradoxically was the end product of a largely self-imposed isolation from the broader American culture.

The same radio broadcasts on KFVD that brought Woody local fame among Okie migrants in California eventually brought him to the attention of political radicals. Ed Robbin has told how he introduced Woody to left-wing audiences in 1939, beginning with a Tom Mooney rally early in the year.12 For many "pro- gressive" intellectuals, Guthrie was the living incarnation of social issues they had grappled with either in the abstract or at first hand. The timing of his emer- gence on the scene hardly could have been more auspicious. John Steinbeck had just published The Grapes of Wrath, the La Follette Committee was investigating crooked labor practices against migratory farm workers in California, and the Okies were very much a part of the national consciousness. The sudden presence of a dynamic, articulate spokesman from the Dust Bowl community, not only socially conscious but able to verbalize about contemporary issues in the vernacular of the "folk," produced a substantial impact on many urban individuals politically left-of-center. Ed Robbin remarked about Guthrie's initial debut before a radical audience: There was this skinny lad on the stage, the very embodiment of these people [the Okies], speaking their language and in their voice, in bitter humor and song, with the dust of his hard traveling still on him, a troubadour, a balladeer, a poet, who had ridden the rails and the jallopies, worked the orchards and the fields, lain in the jails, faced the cops and the clubs of the vigilantes-here he was drawing out his hard, bitter, humorous songs.13

Not every left-winger took to Woody or his idiom, then or later, but enough who did were so imbued with the spirit of proletarian romanticism that a natural tendency developed to drape Woody in the venerable garb of the Noble Savage

12 Edward Robbin, "This Train Is Bound For Glory,' " People's World, October 28, 1967, 6-7. 13 Robbin, 6.

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WOODY GUTHRIE (1942)


stereotype. He was quickly idealized as a "rusty-voiced Homer"14 and "the best folk ballad composer whose identity has ever been known."•5 He became a radical prototype of the democratic and enlightened white "folk," much as Leadbelly and Josh White were left-wing symbols of the Negro "folk" during the same period. In what became a widely quoted passage, John Steinbeck wrote: Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.16

The Left's romantic vision of Guthrie also flourished in the communist press of those years. One early Daily Worker feature on Woody displayed his photo- graph and caught the essence of the Noble Savage stereotype neatly in the caption: "'Woody,' that's his name. He's a native of Oklahoma, who's come East for a time. He can tell you all about the Dust Bowl, the original characters of 'The Grapes of Wrath' and of the latest letter he got from John Steinbeck. He strums a guitar, sings people's songs and writes columns for the Daily Worker.'"• No one, however, ever contributed to building Guthrie's image with more exuberance and gusto than Mike Quin, popular columnist for the People's World. On one occasion he wound up an extravagant review praising Guthrie's appearance on CBS radio's "Pursuit of Happiness" in a state of lyric euphoria. "Sing it Woody, sing it!" he exhorted. "Karl Marx wrote it and Lincoln said it and Lenin did it. You sing it, Woody. And we'll all laugh together yet."'8

Such simplistic characterization of the vagabond people's minstrel was, of course, an illusion. Friends and close associates realized that Guthrie was a far more complex personality than the image projected by the mass media would suggest. Yet, encounters with Woody's erratic behavior and unorthodox utterances often proved disquieting to many leftists. Irwin Silber wrote a fiery partisan critique on the subject for the radical National Guardian. Like most revolutionaries, Woody was, at best, only partially understood by the revolu- tionary movements of his time. The puritanical, nearsighted left of the forties and early fifties didn't quite know what to make of this strange bemused poet who drank and bummed and chased after women and spoke in syllables dreadful strange. They loved his songs and they sang "Union Maid" or "So Long" or "Roll On Columbia" or "Pastures of Plenty"... on picket lines and at parties, summer camps and demonstrations. But they never really accepted the man himself-and many thought that as a singer, he was a pretty good songwriter, and they'd just as soon hear Pete Seeger sing the same songs.... 19

14 Olin Downes and Elie Siegmeister, A Treasury of American Song (New York, 1940), 338. 15 Alan Lomax as quoted by John Greenway in American Folksongs of Protest, 275. 16 Steinbeck wrote these words in 1940. They may have been intended for the liner notes of

Guthrie's Victor Dust Bowl Ballads or for the anthology of Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, published in 1967 after a twenty-five year postponement. In any event the statement was being quoted in feature articles on Woody (see A Woody Guthrie Bibliography, nos. 152 and 153) by September 1940o. 17 "Sings People's Ballads," Daily Worker, April 2, 1940, p. 7.

18s "Double Check," People's World, April 25, 1940, p. 5. 19 Irwin Silber, "Woodie [sic] Guthrie: He Never Sold Out," The National Guardian, October

14, 1967, p. o10.


For many, indeed, the Noble Savage image was less threatening. The stereotype of the Dust Bowl troubadour gave way to a more urbane representation in the left- wing press as the 1940s progressed, but as a whole the Left was never really able to fathom Woody Guthrie nor seriously wanted to try to do so.

Recent academic criticism, notably that by John Greenway and Ellen Stekert, has emphasized the negative influence of the left-wing milieu on Woody Guthrie.20 It does not, however, give proportionate consideration to the positive features of the relationship, for it was the communist-dominated labor-radical atmosphere that provided Woody with the spiritual nourishment and raison d'etre he needed to produce his best work. For nearly a decade prior to his initial contacts with urban radicals, Guthrie had sought a rationale for his existence. He had read avidly and sometimes dabbled in the occult sciences: popular psychology, hyp- notism, astrology, spiritualism, faith healing, fortunetelling, and Oriental philos- ophy and mysticism. He was at various times a member of the Church of Christ, a practicing faith healer, an author of a book on "psychology," a collector of Rosi- crucian literature, and an admirer of Lao-tse and Omar

Khayy.m.21 None of these

interests proved sustaining intellectual props or capable of guiding his energies into meaningful channels of productivity. It was the radical social gospel of the New Deal era that finally filled his spiritual void and elevated his hillbilly versification to quite another plane of social commentary, where he spoke for the national traumas and triumphs as well as for regional conditions. One may plausibly argue that Guthrie's communism was politically naive and humane, in large measure rooted in frontier agrarian radicalism rather than in Marx or the Party line; but only sheer bias and anticommunist fervor will permit the critical observer to deny the emotional solace, social direction, and organic synthesis the Left gave to Guthrie's work in the days when both the Movement and he were dynamic and young.

The years 1939-1941 were a transitional period in Woody's life, as he continued to move easily in and out of his earlier southwestern, hobo, and Dust Bowl environments; but he gradually forsook all of them for the urban left-wing milieu in which he largely functioned thereafter to the end of his active career. It probably would be accurate to say that the first significant break with his earlier environments came in February I940, when he made his first trip to and prolonged stay in New York. In the next year and a half he made two extensive journeys back to old familiar scenes in the Southwest and on the West Coast and then toured some of these same areas again with the Almanac Singers. But during this time he consistently used his talents to describe concepts, events, and political causes that were not central to the experience of the groups he had previously represented in California prior to his going East. By the fall of 1941, when Woody settled in New York more or less permanently, the separation from his earlier folk milieu was complete. Bound For Glory and occasional songs like "East Texas Red"-drawn from his life in the southwestern, hobo, and migrant folk com- plexes-continued to come from his pen in the next year or so; but from the time

20 Greenway, "The Anatomy of a Genius" and "Woody Guthrie: The Man, The Land, The Understanding"; Ellen Stekert, "Cents and Nonsense in the Urban Folksong Movement: 1930- 1966," in Folklore and Society, ed. Bruce Jackson (Hatboro, Pa., 1965), I61-164.

21 Data collected from Pampa, Texas, residents and Maxine Crissman Dempsey, June I968. See also Bound For Glory, ch. 12.


he entered the merchant marine in 1943, the great mass of his voluminous writings, personal reminiscences, and songs ceased in most instances to reflect his former traditional environments.

It would be hard to underestimate the importance of these transition years for Woody Guthrie, for in them he produced the bulk of his greatest work: most of the Dust Bowl ballads, all of the Columbia River songs, the long ballads "Pretty Boy Floyd," "East Texas Red," and "Tom Joad," the lyric songs "This Land Is Your Land" and "Hard Traveling," most of his best labor and war verse, Bound For Glory, and several of his finest essays. All were written between 1939 and I942. This material is a creative fusion of Guthrie's folk heritage with a left- wing social consciousness. The rural Southwest of Woody's youth gave him an instinctive knowledge of ballad structure, folksong style, and the folk idiom. Migrant and hobo wanderings of his early manhood provided crucial themes for his pen, drawn from first-hand observation, to mold into verse and prose. Con- tacts with Communists and other radicals sharpened and focused an innate sense of social concern developed out of the experiences of his early life. His own artistic abilities enabled him to weld these diverse strands into a unique synthesis of folk-styled poetry and social gospel.

Prior to the time Woody encountered the Left, he held no special status within society other than that of another "good" hillbilly songwriter. Later, after radical publicity brought him to the attention of urban intellectuals, he became a symbol of the Okie trauma and the turmoil experienced by anonymous millions of Ameri- cans during the depression. The folksong revival ultimately enshrined him as one of its culture heroes, admiring or worshipping him not only for his songs and prose, but for his "free" life-style, uncompromising honesty, and spiritual inde- pendence. Guthrie's most unique and viable period as a creative artist, however, lies during those years of his life when he belonged exclusively to no one group, when he was able to effectively blend old forms and new experiences and draw freely on the varied esthetic and intellectual material his several worlds had to offer him. Much of his voluminous output is unworthy of remembrance, but his more lasting creations have made no small contribution to the American heritage. An appreciative national government tendered him official recognition for his efforts to awaken the American people to "their heritage and the land" in cere- monies sponsored by the Department of Interior on April 6, 1966.22

II. The folk tradition Woody Guthrie inherited from the Southwest is usually

evaluated in terms of the songs he acquired there, but it should be noted that Guthrie's folk repertory was by no means limited to songs alone. He knew large numbers of anecdotes, jokes, toasts, proverbial phrases, and witty sayings, which he effectively utilized in his varied roles as raconteur, soothsayer, humorist, and writer. Many of these were clearly traditional; others might prove to be so with a little investigation. His language, for example, was studded with colorful neo- logisms and idiomatic expressions: "colder'n old Billyhell," "out like Lottie's

22 Robert B. Semple, Jr., "U.S. Award Given to Woody Guthrie," New York Times, April 7, 1966, p. 47.


eye" (went kaput), "That boy don't care if school keeps or not," "Take it easy, but take it," and endless others. Apparently no one made any effort to collect these, or his yarns and other witticisms; and such as are extant must be culled from his writings and the memories of friends. A more detailed record, however, does exist for the traditional songs in his memory.

At the time he was singing on Los Angeles radio (1937-1939), Woody drew his song material almost entirely from his southwestern cultural experiences. His repertory consisted of folksongs, hillbilly pieces, and compositions of his own based on folk and hillbilly models. His contacts with the few popular singers of folksongs of that period were almost nonexistent; yet, within two years after leaving California for New York City, he had absorbed numerous songs alien to his own musical tradition from the small clique of urban folksingers gathering in the East during the early forties.

No folklorist ever tried systematically to collect Guthrie's traditional song repertory. The Lomax recordings for the Library of Congress in March 1940 were conceived of as a documentary word-portrait rather than as a folkloristic probe.23 Moses Asch recorded a large number of traditional songs from Woody, frequently in conjunction with Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, Cisco Houston, and others; but, in the absence of external documentation and control data, it is often difficult to tell whether Guthrie is singing a song from his own tradition or one he learned from the early folksong revival milieu. For instance, his version of "Buffalo Skin- ners" has been praised by scholars as an excellent example of American folksong style, which it is; yet I know of no evidence indicating that Woody knew the song prior to the mid-i94os, when it was released on the Asch album Struggle (Asch 36o). Indeed, his lyrics closely follow the text published in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.

It is largely through surviving manuscript collections kept by Guthrie himself, and the fortuitous actions of Alan Lomax, that there is any clear delineation of Woody Guthrie's "pre-revival" folksong repertory. Lomax recorded Guthrie for the Library of Congress scarcely a month after the latter arrived in the East in 1940, and before Woody had much chance to absorb new material from other singers. Lomax, however, was not interested in the hillbilly songs that comprised a significant portion of Guthrie's repertory; hence there is little trace of such material in the Archive of American Folk Song recordings. Far more significant than these recordings was a manuscript collection Lomax procured from Woody shortly thereafter and had copied for the Library of Congress. Entitled "Songs of Woody Guthrie," typed copies of the collection are on deposit in the Archive of American Folk Song. A photocopy of the original manuscript in Woody's hand and type- script is on microfilm in the Music Division of the Library of Congress. This collection contains texts of two hundred songs Woody sang over the radio in Cali- fornia to his Okie and political audiences on the West Coast. A breakdown shows half of the songs to be of Guthrie's own authorship, the rest being divided roughly into 6o percent folksongs and 40 percent hillbilly items, parlor ballads, or sentimental religious pieces. Among the traditional songs are versions of three Child ballads ("Barbara Allan," "Gypsy Davy," and "The Golden Vanity") and more

23 Interview with Alan Lomax, August 29, 1966.

"woody guthrie and his folk tradition," by richard a. reuss

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