Woody and Race
Woody Guthrie spent damn little time worrying about authenticity. If the concept meant anything at all to him, it was backing up the words he’d written on his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.” The folk revivalists who looked to Woody as a mythic hero could certainly have learned some things from taking a closer look at how he dealt with race. By the time Woody recorded “This Land Is Your Land,” which Lyndon Johnson suggested should be made the national anthem, his concept of America included blacks, Mexicans, and Indians as well as the sometimes virulently racist white folks of the Oklahoma hills where he was born.
The voices Woody heard as a boy in Oklahoma came from all over America’s racial map: the black town of Boley lay ten miles down the road from Okemah, where he grew up in what had been called Indian Territory until the white folks developed an interest in the oil pooled beneath what they’d mistaken for a barren wasteland. But like his white companions, Woody was taught to hear the phrase “people” as “white people”; a part of the local Democratic political machine, Woody’s father at least condoned and probably participated in several lynchings. One of the turning points of Woody’s political development came in 1937, when he received a letter protesting his use of a racial slur on the Los Angeles radio broadcast where he played the role of the naive hillbilly. The listener wrote: “You were getting along quite well in your program this evening until you announced your ‘Nigger Blues.’ I am a Negro, a young Negro in college, and I certainly resented your remark. No person . . . of any intelligence uses that word over the radio today.” Rather than downplaying the situation, Woody admitted his upbringing had blinded him to the issue; he simply hadn’t thought about it. He apologized and promised not to do it again.
And he didn’t. Which no doubt helped him build friendships such as the one described in the first chapter of his autobiography, Bound for Glory, which opens with the line “I could see men of all colors bouncing along in the boxcar.” Strains of the old spiritual “This Train”—“This train is bound for glory, this train”—echo through the chapter, which focuses on Woody and a black companion as they attempt to avoid the railroad bulls.
Like his descendants in the folk revival, Woody wrote dozens of message songs including “Hang Knot,” a blistering condemnation of lynching, and “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportees),” written after he’d read a newspaper story about the crash of a plane carrying migrant farmworkers back to Mexico. The news report identified the Anglo crew members by name but cloaked the migrants in anonymity. Adapted by activists working for immigrant rights in the nineties, the chorus of “Deportees” redresses the dehumanization. Guthrie bids farewell to his “amigos”—Juan and Rosalita, Jesus and Maria—and laments the white world’s refusal to value them as anything other than disposable labor: “You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane. / All they will call you will be deportees.”
Woody consistently backed up his songs on racial justice with action. Recounting his experiences as Woody’s shipmate in the merchant marine during World War II, Jimmy Longhi told a story about his friend’s confrontation with segregation in the military. Midway through a particularly perilous Atlantic crossing, their ship came under heavy attack. Jimmy, Woody, and Cisco Houston ventured belowdecks to sing for the troops, hoping to take their minds off the depth charges exploding all around them. During a pause in their performance, Woody heard the sound of a “glorious Negro chorus.” Seeking the source of the sound, Woody discovered fifty black soldiers crowded into a toilet room. Longhi described entering the room to encounter an energetic call and response between the group and its commanding officer, Daniel Rutledge. Reaching deep into the shared images of the gospel tradition, Rutledge sang out his sermon on the coming “Judgement Day” and the soldiers responded with cries of “Free! Free!”
Accepting Rutledge’s invitation to sing for the troops, Woody surprised them by singing “John Henry,” initiating an exchange of songs. When Woody offered to let Rutledge play his guitar, the black officer noticed Woody’s slogan and improvised a sermon on the connection between the war against Hitler and the struggle against American racism. Rutledge called out, “An’ we know that after we win this war, when the king of slavery is dead, when the king of slavery is dead, things is gonna change for the people of Israel!” When the men responded “Change! Change!,” Rutledge held Woody’s guitar “above his head like a weapon” and hammered home the main point of the movement that returning black veterans would help define and carry through: “An’ the walls will come tumblin’ down!”
The most immediate wall, Longhi recalls, was the one separating the black and white troops on Woody’s ship. Hearing the commotion in the toilet, a white officer arrived to summon Woody back to the white soldiers waiting for him to resume his performance. Woody refused to return unless the black soldiers could come with him. Refusing to accept the officer’s insistence that segregation was a policy he didn’t support but was powerless to change, Woody insisted on seeing higher and higher ranking officers until he found himself face-to-face with the ship’s commander. Determining that the commander was a fan of Benny Goodman’s swing band, Woody pointed out that Goodman’s group included black musicians Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton. Although many of the clubs Goodman played in banned integrated “dance bands,” Goodman circumvented the Jim Crow laws by defining Wilson and Hampton as “concert performers.” When the commander acquiesced, Woody and Rutledge proudly led the black troops back to the “white” area of the ship, where Woody’s “no dancing” pledge lasted about as long as it did in the clubs where Goodman played.
But the part of Woody’s life that most directly relates to the folk revival’s race problems was his admiration for and work with black musicians including Leadbelly and the duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Woody’s music shared the rough edges, intensity, and immediacy of Leadbelly’s “The Midnight Special” and “The Bourgeois Blues.” Neither Woody nor Leadbelly produced commercially successful popular music, perhaps because neither held a nostalgic ideal of returning to an “authentic” music located in some mythic rural past. While Woody thought of his music as a voice of, from, and for the people, he knew the people’s voices changed as their experiences changed. As a committed leftist, he welcomed any change that would reduce the violence and poverty beneath the nostalgic images.
Until Huntington’s disease muffled his voice, Woody struggled to make musicians on the American left understand how crucial race was to that change. Once, Woody arrived in North Carolina to perform for a strike fund in the textile mills only to find the union segregated. He refused to play for an all-white audience. As a result, he played for an all-black one when the white union boycotted his “open” performance.
Woody was distressed when folk music began to move toward the mythic notion of authenticity. The first folk group to enjoy major mainstream success was the Weavers, whose lineup included Woody’s old leftist friends Pete Seeger and Ronnie Gilbert. Paving the way for the even greater popular success of the even less political Kingston Trio, best known for their version of the Appalachian ballad “Tom Dooley,” the Weavers had major hits with Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene” and Woody’s “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You.” The traditional melodies remained but the politics and the polyrhythmic drive that connected Brownie and Sonny with the South and, at second remove, the electric blues, faded away along with the black presence in the folk scene.
The Weavers’ triumph marks the real beginning of what music critic Dave Marsh calls the “rhythm problem” in the folk scene. Woody saw it coming and tried to resist. In response to the Weavers, he announced plans to form an integrated group with Leadbelly, Brownie, and Sonny. But when his illness silenced him, no one pursued the vision of an interracial folk group, maybe because some of the fifties folksingers felt compelled to downplay their leftist pasts in response to McCarthyism. After all, this was an era in which FBI agents were trained to spot “communists” by their comfort around Negroes. Or maybe black/white groups didn’t match the folk revival criteria for authenticity. Whatever the cause, by the early sixties not many of the politically serious folk revivalists were willing or able to get down with the sounds coming out of Sam Cooke’s Chicago or Berry Gordy’s Detroit. And even though folk drew on black sources, it had precious