WOODY GUTHRIE

Woody was a constant wander, a Hobo of sorts, did all kind of odd jobs, hoeing figs, orchards,
picking grapes, hauling wood, helping carpenters and cement men, working with water well
drillers and picking cotton.  He hitched the highways and road the rail.  He would be in Texas
then hop a freight out to California, then time would find him in New York in 1942.  During this
time Alan Lomax was getting the Library of Congress to procure and preserve a copy of
Woody's extensive songbook.

It is said in Bill C. Malone's Country Music U.S.A. "His guitar playing was a modification of
Maybelle Carter...Guthrie's hillbilly emphasis, however, was accompanied by a flowering of
radicalism.  Guthrie felt a strong emotional kinship with the homeless and often persecuted
migratory workers, especially his fellow Okies, and he began to compose songs which
expressed his sympathies as well as his anger at the system which caused their misfortunes.
By the end or the thirties he had accumulated an extensive collection of original compositions
dealing with the dust bowl refugees and other victims of social and economic persecution:
"Talking Dust Bowl Blues," "Pastures of Plenty," "Vigilante Man," and others.  When Guthrie
moved to New York in 1940, he was no longer simply a singer of hillbilly songs and would
never again be identified as such.  The post-1940 Guthrie would always be known as a pro-
test singer.

He was a pioneer playing on early radio on Los Angeles at KFVD.  He helped carry "Hobo"
music out of the 1920's, and was a true wandering troubadour.  If there was a father of folk
music Woody.  Urban folk interest dates to the Depression years, at the time this was
America's grass roots music...and Woody was there in the early days when social activists
and labor sympathizers began singing folk songs as political statements.  The folk music that
was rooting up in these early days would take full steam with Woody into the forties and fifties.
During his days in Los Angeles he would play with the Bevery Hillbillys and hang out up in
Topanga Canyonwith Will Geer.  He bought a 9-acre piece of land and with the help of Will
Geer and friends built what Woody called "Pretty Polly canyon."  Will Geer had a shack at his
place where Woody would stay.   Will, who was having great success with his part on the
"Waltons" moved into the canyon and started what they called "the Shakespeare Garden"
that later became THEATRICUM BOTANICUM (the Theater of Plants).  Pete Seeger,  Arlo
Guthrie, Burl Ives, Odetta, Ramblin' Jack Elliot and many others played and contributed to
the start of the Topanga Theatre.

Hootenannys were becoming the breaking ground for the new groups that would lead on into
the sixties.  Woody was doing these hootenannys, barn dances and playing in the streets.

 

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