Guthrie’s songs soon found an audience, and he began singing “hillbilly” music on radio station KF VD. There he met newscaster Ed Robbin, a left-leaning fellow who introduced Guthrie to socialists and Communists in Southern California, including a man who would become Woody’s lifelong friend, Will Geer.4 Many of you will remember Geer as Zebu-lon (Grandpa) Walton, but it is interesting to note that Geer was also a folksinger and a political radical. “Which means I get to the root of things,” Geer was fond of saying. “That’s the Latin derivation for ‘radical.’” Geer refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and was subsequently blacklisted. His solution was to start a theatre company called Theatricum Botanicum, in which he and other blacklisted players presented the works of the Bard.
Geer, busy on the Broadway stage, invited Guthrie to New York City. It was there Woody made his first real recordings, musicologist Alan Lomax feeling that Guthrie’s songs should be documented for the Library of Congress.5 Guthrie decided to respond to the over-popularity of Kate Smith’s “God Bless America.” He had seen too much to endorse that kind of cheery chauvinism. He borrowed a melody from an old gospel song, “Oh My Loving Brother.” Although he wrote about the physical grandeur of America in “This Land Is Your Land,” he got a few good digs in too. Not everyone knows the final two verses to the song, in which Guthrie sees hungry people lined up outside a relief office and wonders if this land is really made for you and me.
Song can be an effective vehicle for political statement, in particular for complaint and damnation, song being an extension of speech, and speech being what it is. Alan Lomax described a scene that occurred during the “ballad hunting” he undertook with his father across the American South.
A few ragged sharecroppers had been gathered together by the plantation manager to sing for us. They had sung some spirituals, and finally everybody said, “Let’s have Old Blue sing.” A big Black man stood up in front of the tiny Edison cylinder recorder. He said, “I want to sing my song right into it—I don’t want to sing it in advance.” We said, “Well, we would like to hear it first because we don’t have very many unused cylinders.” He said, “No sir, you are going to have to have this right straight from the beginning.” We agreed, and so he sang:
Work all week
Don’t make enough
To pay my board
And buy my snuff.
It’s hard, it’s hard It’s hard on we poor farmers,
It’s hard.
After a few more stanzas, he spoke into the recorder horn as though it was a telephone. He said, “Now, Mr. President, you just don’t know how bad they’re treating us folks down here. I’m singing to you and I’m talking to you so I hope you will come down here and do something for us poor folks here in Texas.”
On another afternoon in the early twentieth century, on a street corner in Spokane, Washington, a political agitator named Jack Walsh was busily recruiting for the Industrial Workers of the World, standing on a soapbox and preaching unionism. Down the road, the Salvation Army was recruiting on its own behalf. The Holy Soldiers disliked Walsh’s exhortations of revolution, so they elected to march the band down—tambourines pounding, trombones baying, trumpets keening—and attempt to drown him out. Walsh fought back, starting a musical aggregation of his own that included Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock pounding out cadence on a bass drum. Among the songs McClintock wrote was “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” a beautiful evocation of a hobo’s Utopia. McClintock had another song, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” which the street-corner crowds found very rousing. Walsh penned a couple of parodies of the Sally Ann’s high-test spirituals, “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” and “Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?” Those four songs became the foundation of the IW W’s Little Red Songbook, which sold for ten cents. The volume soon contained not only more songs but “The Preamble,” the manifesto of the Industrial Workers of the World:
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things in life.
It’s hard to say how this all connects to a chubby little eleven-year-old kid playing “This Land Is Your Land” with cross-eyed, tongue-biting concentration. I knew nothing then of pie in the sky or sharecroppers or the Industrial Workers of the World. All I knew was that Woody Guthrie’s song was fun to play and sing. Without realizing it, I suspect I was also absorbing the idea that songs should mean something, that they should make a point, and that the point should be beneficial.
I had another musical lesson coming, too. At the end of seven months of arduous performance on the mandolin on my part, my younger brother, Joel, came along, picked up the mandolin, stared at it for a few seconds, and then proceeded to play it with aplomb. Tony, meanwhile, had become something of a hotshot on the banjo. Suddenly there was a guitar in the house as well, and Tony began his adventures on the fretboard, adventures that continue to this day. All of which is to say, my brothers very quickly demonstrated themselves to be much more musically gifted than I.
I could, however, sing. When I sang, pleasant things happened. My father would pause in the doorway to his den and pull on his pipe reflectively. My mother would lay aside her book (for she read constantly), and a vague, somewhat wistful smile would visit. When we three brothers joined forces, my brothers would let me sing lead, while Joel undertook the higher harmony and Tony essayed the bass.
The music we favoured was bluegrass, popularized in those days by groups like the New Lost City Ramblers. During those sessions with my brothers, I imprinted upon myself particular notions of music-making. For one thing, in bluegrass (the result of a backwoods tryst between English traditional folk music and the blues), instrumental virtuosity is encouraged, the musicians bellying forward in turn to improvise over the changes. Also, bluegrass features harmonies, dense and often a little dissonant, the characteristic “high lonesome” wail of Bill Monroe. And I adopted, back then, an iconography of trains and birds and churches that would show up later in my songs. Finally, bluegrass music, for all its up-tempo spirit, often embraces dark subject matter: murder, alcoholism, the untimely death of loved ones.
ALL RIGHT: on that note, here comes the new thematic material. As Martin and I drove home from the meeting with Dr. Frazier, we weren’t sure how to proceed. There seemed to be very little to do. Very little to say. At one point Martin ventured, “Well, I guess if you ever wondered what you’d do if someone gave you that news, now you know.”
“Uh-huh.”
Martin is not technically my oldest friend, but he is my dearest. He had come with me to the doctor because several people had suggested it was good to have two sets of ears. But the truth of the matter was, Marty had been every bit as gob-smacked as I, and neither of us had heard much more than dick-all of what was said. Somewhere in there Dr. Frazier had seemed to suggest that I was going to die in a few months.
I called Dorothy at work. Dorothy and I had divorced several years prior to all this, but when I first got ill she took me back into the house on First Avenue. (The house on First Avenue is next door to the house owned by Martin and his wife, Jill, which is no coincidence. We bought the houses together, two adjacent row houses, and then we tore down the fence separating the gardens, giving us a larger shared space. This wasn’t done for any Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice type reasons, rather so that both couples would have handy babysitting. Indeed, my daughters, Carson and Flannery, think of Marty and Jill as a second set of parents, especially since their first set of parents split up.)
Anyway, Dorothy worked part time for E & C Marine, the “C” of which was Charles Gallimore, who had sold me my houseboat, and she arrived home a little while later, seeming very calm and collected. (I found out later, from Charles, that she’d done her crying there in the shop, a nor’easter