Biography: Woody Guthrie is a giant redwood. A song-and-dance man, a poetry man, a blues man, a radio man, a hard-travelling man, an American man, your man, my man. Ed Cray styles him a ramblin' man, and that he surely was.
Born on July 14th, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, the third child of Nora and Charley Guthrie, his father insisted that the 8lb baby boy be named after Woodrow Wilson, who had been chosen by the Democrats as their presidential nominee 12 days earlier.
"Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was by all accounts a happy child with blue eyes and brown hair. 'Bubbly and bouncy' his younger sister recalled. From his earliest days, music captivated the boy they called Woody," writes Cray.
This book is the most complete account of Woody Guthrie's life that I have read, and, of it, Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, says: "Cray's research into my father's life taught me things that I never knew." Most of us know the songs - Car Song, Philadelphia Lawyer, Hobo's Lullaby, Pastures of Plenty, Grand Coulee Damn, Jesus Christ, I Ain't Got No Home, This Land is Your Land (for many, America's real national anthem). Many will have read or heard of his autobiography, Bound for Glory, written in his own glorious lyrical vernacular. We know of his rambles, of his roots in music and of the storms of his personal life, snippets, bits and pieces we could put together to make a picture of the man we call Woody.
Cray pulls all these elements of the Guthrie story together and its cohesive strength lies in the personal accounts of friends, families, acquaintances and many other witnesses to Guthrie's sprawling life. We are taken inside his world, we see through the dust and find a deeply complex man who would write some of the simplest and yet most resonant songs of the 20th century. As a boy he played and sang and danced; it came naturally to him. He carried a harmonica - or the French harp, as he called it - everywhere he went. He learned to play the blues, and most particularly the train wails, from the "Big old coloured boy George, who shined shoes sitting on a bench in front of Jiggs Barber shop". Guthrie said of railroad blues: "That's undoubtedly the lonesomest music I ever run into in my whole life . . . I'm walking down the tracks, I got tears in my eyes, and I'm trying to read a letter from my home." From the same source he learned the talking blues form, which he made his own (which subsequently passed through Dylan and returned to its source as rap). He was also captivated by the Carter Family, his mother's singing, his uncle's fiddle - and all of them, distilled together, became Guthrie's voice.
While still at school, "music and music-making captured his imagination". Guthrie doted on "ear players", and "music, or more importantly performing, seized him, the applause nourished him". He needed it. In 1919, his sister Clara, after an argument with their mother, poured kerosene over herself, set herself on fire and died when Woody was only seven years old. In 1927, his father Charley "was startled awake by the kerosene splashed across his chest, his shirt on fire and his wife standing over him numbly watching the flames". Nora, his mother, was taken to the state hospital for the insane:
Nora sat in a locked ward, her limbs jerking spasmodically, a shrunken hulk who stared blankly at her visitors. Woody sought to talk to her, but she did not respond, only at the end, as he was leaving, did she dredge a name from her memory. "You're Woody, aren't you?" she asked vaguely . . . Woody was crushed, Nora had barely recognised him. The image of the tiny figure, his mother twitching dumbly beside her bed, rather than anything the doctors had said, pressed on him.
His mother died in September 1930; she had been diagnosed as suffering from a rare, unnamed disease ("This disease," Guthrie said, "it's hereditary, it can be passed on from mother to son"). The disease was Huntington's, which was later to destroy Guthrie himself.
Guthrie journeys out from Okemah to Texas, to the town of Pampa, to the rackety world of oil men, riggers, venereal disease and cheap liquor. There he meets the Jennings family and marries for the first time, the 16-year-old Mary Jennings. They live a life of relentless poverty, scraping a living spittoon-washing, street-singing and doing anything to make a crust. Guthrie is always reading, always listening, always moving, always rambling, the sound of the steel rails echoing in his ears. He calls this sound "the hobo's lullaby", living in boxcars, riding the rails, sleeping under the stars (which he calls "checking in at the Green Leaf Hotel"). Fetching up in California he writes the great Do, Re, Mi: "Thousands of folks back East they say/ Leavin' home every day/ Beatin' a hot and dusty way/ To the California line./ O'er the desert sands they roll/ Tryin' to get out of the old dust bowl./ They think they're a- comin' to a sugar bowl./ But here's what they find:/ The police at the port of entry say:/ 'You're number 14,000 for today!' Oh!/ If you ain't got the do-re-mi, folks/ If you ain't got the do-re-mi/ Better hang on in beautiful Texas . . .".
"California is the garden of Eden," Guthrie says, "The Pastures of Plenty" - but the plight of the migrant workers really angers him and he becomes the worker's voice, singing on the radio and street corners. His songs, as Studs Terkel says, "lifted the lonely spirits of the ordinary, the millions of dispossessed". We learn from this book that Guthrie hated money - he says of it: "it's something you got to get rid of like a varmint". He himself held every job known to man, except that of a lawyer or a banker.
"He was always for the underdog, anyone who was low on income he had his heart out to him . . . for every farmer that was dusted out, or tractored out, Guthrie came to understand another 10 were chased out by bankers," writes Cray.
His rambling took him away from his wife, Mary, for extended periods. Cray says that she and her family often felt he didn't do the manly thing - to provide for them, but "the disintegration of his family, the death of a beloved sister, the injury to his father and the loss of an idealised mother, left its scars, Mary Guthrie came to understand".
PETE SEEGER AND Alan Lomax play an important part in Guthrie's life. Lomax in particular encouraged him to write his autobiography, which became Bound for Glory and was published in 1943. Cray has sifted through all of the original 150 reviews: "The New York Times Book Review said: 'Like Sean O'Casey, Guthrie likes violence and sentiment . . . Like O'Casey he is verbally sportive, makes 'em dance, makes 'em cry, makes 'em sing. Like O'Casey too, Woody is on fire inside, a natural born poet, trying to make prose do the big job of verse' . . . Clifden Faidman, of the Book of the Month Club, said 'Some day people are going to wake up to the fact that Woody Guthrie and the 10,000 songs that leap and tumble off the strings of his music box are a national possession like Yellowstone or Yosemite'."
And so it came to pass.
Guthrie had eight children, over three families. Huntington's, the hereditary disease that took his mother, haunted him, his partners and his children all of their lives. Cray's account of the onset of Huntington's in Guthrie himself is chilling and disturbing. He finally agreed to voluntary commitment to the Bellevue Institution on June 14th, 1952. By 1958 he was at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital and by 1966 he was at Brooklyn State Hospital. He died in 1967.
Guthrie influenced everybody, from Dylan to The Band, to Jerry Garcia, to Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits. Emmylou Harris told me that listening to Guthrie was like reading the morning news. Andy Irvine and Christy Moore brought his music to Ireland and Geldof named The Boomtown Rats after reading Bound for Glory. Ani DeFranco, Billy Bragg and Wilco continue to sing the Guthrie canon. Guthrie had "This machine kills fascists" emblazoned on the front of his guitar. He was a radical with a twang - where are you now when we need you? As Cary writes: "As long as Guthrie's lyrics can be adapted to contemporary issues, his songs will be sung. As long as there remain the social inequities against which he protested, his songs will be sung. So the songs live. So does Woody Guthrie, American."
Cray has written a good book, because it brings us close to Guthrie. But as we thumb through the 400-odd pages, the facts are blown away by a wind gathering up the dust. The man swirls out of our grasp; we hear his reedy voice singing So Long, It's Been Good to Know You carried away by the breeze and the dust as he rambles off into the distance.
Philip King is a musician, writer and producer/director. He is currently producing the TV series, Other Voices, from Dingle, Co Kerry, and produced RTÉ's recent Arts Lives film on John McGahern, directed by Pat Collins
Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray Norton, 405pp. €28