Searching for Woody Guthrie

There is no lack of interest in folk icon and political activist Woody Guthrie. Over just the past two decades, a great number of admirers, musicians, visual artists, journalists, and even his family members have taken the self-styled everyman folk singer as a subject for book-length works. Biographies, photograph and ephemera collections, children's books—even a ukulele-centered songbook, a graphic novel, and a coloring book have appeared. These offerings mainly have been directed to a general audience, but scholars from various fields have also written on Guthrie, with impressive efforts by Ronald Cohen, Will Kaufman, Robert Santelli, and Gustavus Stadler setting a high standard for further exploration. Striding into this ongoing conversation can be daunting, but recently, historian Ron Briley has offered his take on this well-known folk figure.As Briley states, Searching for Woody Guthrie: A Personal Exploration of the Folk Singer, His Music, and His Politics is “a thematic rather than a biographical work” (p. 13), even as it highlights many instances from Guthrie's life as a means of explaining the philosophy that underpinned the musician's writing and actions. Briley seeks to identify Guthrie as an adherent of “indigenous, American radicalism” that reflects his own idea of populist faith, expressed through his self-coined term “commonism” rather than any rigid adherent to the tenets of Communism or any one political force (p. 14). Here, Guthrie becomes a self-made man, taking wisdom from many sources and forging his own path to a radical ideology. Briley reveals these influences and their results in three major sections, each with its own loose unity.Chapters 1 through 6 follow Guthrie's journeys throughout America from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. We get stops in Oklahoma, Texas, and California, with the pressing force of the Great Depression being resisted through the populist fervor of the plains and the political imaginings of the Popular Front. Then it is on to New York City and the Pacific Northwest, with these forays allowing the singer to absorb East Coast intellectualism and to witness the collective power of the Roosevelt Administration's New Deal programs in action. Finally, Briley tracks how the singer reacts to the mighty conflicts of World War II and the Korean War: the former allows Guthrie to celebrate the defeat of fascism and to be somewhat optimistic in what might come next; but the latter reveals disillusionment as McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the atomic bomb come to haunt his thinking. Throughout this first section, Briley strives to isolate particular forces that Guthrie encountered in his travels and to explain how they shaped the singer's own personal philosophy. But Briley's secondary drive is to separate moderate or negative media and political representations of Guthrie from the radical figure that this book suggests. There are successes with both goals, but much of these chapters follow well-worn paths rather than pioneering new ground.The next section, chapters 7 through 11, eschews the earlier geographic and chronological framework, and instead explores how Christian socialism and outlaw rebels—along with the labor, civil rights, and women's rights movements—all aided Guthrie in throwing off various prejudices, at least to some degree, so that he could expand the realm of people whom he celebrated and defended in his writing and activism. However, earlier works have already well-analyzed these topics, and Briley only occasionally finds exciting new opportunities. For example, he notes that “Woody . . . expressed discomfort with same sex male relationships” (p. 215), but this issue gets short shrift rather than the more nuanced discussion that it deserves.The final section centers on three of Guthrie's albums: Dust Bowl Ballads (1940), Struggle (1946), and Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti (1960 but recorded in 1947). These chapters often address issues noted in previous sections, such as the Great Depression, the Okie migration, and racial conflict—thus, analysis of particular songs here could have been folded into the first two sections without any significant loss. But the one chapter on the two Italian American anarchists who were executed for a crime they did not commit really does not fit Briley's book, as it has little to say about Guthrie's compositions from the album and is more of an overview of popular depictions of the ill-fated pair. Perhaps the reason for its disjoined nature is that it was previously published as “The Legend of Sacco and Vanzetti: Keeping the Story Alive in Literature, Song, and Film” (2009), which focused on the historical figures and many of their media representations rather than on Guthrie's album.This example of material being forced into Briley's narrative brings up another, even more important issue. In his subtitle, the author alludes to a “personal exploration” of Guthrie. But this desire ends up only manifesting itself as an “examination of Woody's legacy, through the lens of the Briley family” (p. 1). Briley promises readers fruitful insight into the singer, his moment in time, and his lasting value through the author's personal experiences, but readers may be disappointed to find that Briley has merely documented moments from his own life wherein he also dealt with some of the issues that motivated and shaped Guthrie. These intermittent interludes appear without the fullness that true personal revelations could provide. Additionally, Briley seems to forget this commitment, as many chapters have only a few words in relation to him or his family, and many have none at all, leaving an uneven adherence to a supposedly central tenet.Perhaps these comments suggest enough weakness in Briley's work to set it as an inferior effort, but that would not be a fully fair assessment. Even as the book sometimes comes across as a passion project with an overly emotional connection to its subject, it is largely a considered and well-researched effort that would be of value to scholarly readers who want to learn more about Woody Guthrie, his personal philosophy, and his historical moment. For as Briley argues in his conclusion, we can still look to this singer and activist for an ardent consideration of the rights and ideals of the American people as we continue to work to create a nation that is just for all

Aesthetics · Art · Folk music · Folk song · Literature · Musical · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Visual arts · Communication · History · Law · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Poetry Analysis and Criticism

• “This Land Is Your Land”

  Open Access•Heinrich Detering•Interlitteraria•2023

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