by John Szwed
That season started with minimal direction and a straightforward format: an announcer introduced the show, and Alan presented the songs. The singing was the main attraction, and children listening in school were encouraged to sing along with them. The first show’s theme was “On the Trail”—songs of the cowboys—and Alan did all the songs: “Git Along, Little Dogies,” “The Old Chisholm Trail,” “Doney Gal,” “The Lone Star Trail.” Then the orchestra played “Sheep and Goats Walkin’ to Pasture” by David Guion, a Texas composer who had built a small career arranging folk songs and writing compositions drawn from his Texas heritage. The show then ended with an orchestra arrangement of a Mexican love song, “Allá en el Rancho Grande.”
The CBS people were happy with the first shows, as was Spivacke and the staff at the library. Alan’s father, however, wrote him several withering letters in response to the first few shows, complaining that his speaking voice was ragged, stilted, and unnatural and his choice of singers completely wrong. John’s edginess was one of the signs that their relationship had begun to reverse, with Alan now seeking funding for his father’s collecting trips, acting as his agent with recording companies, and taking over the lead in editing their new book of folk songs. Neither of them was completely comfortable with his new role.
With his commitments in New York getting longer by the week, Alan now invited guests on his show to come and stay with him in Washington so they could rehearse at home, to help him keep up with his work at the library. His job description at the archive in 1939 read more like a work schedule for an entire staff of researchers and scholars than it did for a part-time worker. He was to answer correspondence; lead recording trips for the archive; plan collecting trips for other folklorists; supervise the cataloging and indexing of records and texts; prepare the annual report; assist in budget planning, grant requests, and press releases; lecture at universities, scholarly gatherings, and congressional groups; write and edit notes for recordings issued by the library; write and appear on CBS’s American School of the Air; develop plans for the use of folk song in the National Defense Program; interest composers, educators, writers, and theater people in using the archive; convince recording companies that they should be recording American folk songs; and encourage institutions and individuals to donate their recordings to the archive.
Alan had pushed back his trip to Vermont several times, finally settling on November. As he prepared to leave, he received a letter from his local guide, Helen Hartness Flanders, a woman well known for her proprietary ways, who made it clear whose territory it was that he was traversing: “I am recognizing that by November 3, I am letting you come into Vermont to go about as I do, with potential addresses of unknown quantity.” Flanders was from a wealthy industrialist’s family, had been one of the founding members of the governor of Vermont’s Commission on Vermont Country Life, and was the wife of one of the state’s most distinguished senators, Ralph E. Flanders. Whatever tension there may have been between the New England matron and the young Texas New Dealer, over the ten days they spent together they managed to gather more than 150 songs, tales, and fiddle tunes in Vermont in the towns of Bennington, Chelsea, East Calais, Quebec, Springfield, and in Orford and Walpole in New Hampshire.
New York hummed nightly with one political performance or another in those days, and such events could always be counted on to fill the biggest concert halls, as they usually featured an incredibly diverse roster of well-known artists. Alan was asked to sing for a benefit shortly after arriving back in town, this one for the Spanish Loyalist refugees at the Mecca Temple on 56th Street on February 25, 1940. One of the most anticipated performers that night was a recent arrival, Woody Guthrie, a wiry little man from Oklahoma with his hat tilted back, his guitar slung behind him, and his voice as dry as the Dust Bowl he sang about. He had been coaxed to the city with a vague promise of a role in the Broadway hit play Tobacco Road. It was a long shot, but he was broke and hopelessly stuck in Texas with a family he couldn’t feed. Woody hopped a bus to Pittsburgh, which was as far as his money would carry him, and thumbed the rest of the way to New York, arriving just in time to stroll onto the stage, scratch his head, and begin singing a couple of his migrant worker songs, as well as a new one, “Why Do You Stand in the Rain,” critical of Franklin Roosevelt’s brusque handling of a meeting with the American Youth Congress that month in Washington.
Alan had heard some of the extravagant claims about Woody, but now that he had seen him sing, he too was drawn to the rustic cool of his performance and the ease with which his speech and songs flowed together—like a country opera, Alan said.
Woody was on the show.... He stepped out on the stage, this little tiny guy, big bushy hair, with this great voice and his guitar, and just electrified us all. I remember the first song I heard him sing....
Come and gather round me children, and a story I’ll tell, About Pretty Boy Floyd the outlaw, Oklahoma knew him well.
Well, I realized, listening to this song, that I was meeting a guy who was a ballad maker, in the same sense as the people who made “Jesse James,” and “Casey Jones,” and all the ballads that I spent my life trying to find and preserve for the American people. I thought they were from anonymous people. Well, here was Mr. Anonymous singing to me.
When Lead Belly followed Woody onstage, it occurred to Alan that he could document and present Woody just as he had Huddie. After the concert he asked Woody to consider coming to Washington to visit the archive and record his songs and autobiography, and later appear on his radio show in New York. Alan’s fast talk, his references to “folk” and “folk songs”—terms Woody claimed he’d never heard before—put Guthrie off. Despite his Texas accent, Lomax seemed too eager, too fired up, maybe just another city hustler.
To many who saw him perform that night, Woody looked like the real thing, a southwestern Walt Whitman, or, better still, the missing link to the working classes and a part of American history that would help authenticate their dreams of freedom or revolution. But Alan had no such illusions. He was well aware that Woody had been a radio performer and a reporter in California, that his father was a land speculator and politician, and that only a string of family tragedies and reversals had brought him to where he now was. Though he would sometimes call him a natural, Alan knew that Woody approached his songs and writing as conscientiously as any professional. He could improvise and toss off verses when he had to, but he worked hard at his writing, often deep into the night. He was not a pure product of the country, the passive heir to Anglo-Saxon tradition, but a synthesizer, a bard of a region of the country that was changing quickly:
Woody came up in a frontier place in Oklahoma, Injun territory, which was new country, in an oil boom. And everything was happening there. The town was full of Injuns, Mexicans, blacks, people from all over the country, and Woody lived in those honky-tonks, and he picked up his guitar, and he learned how to make music that would make sense to all those folks. It was composed of ragtime, hillbilly, blues, of all the currents of his time. He made a new idiom that really represented the opening of this new Western frontier of new highways and power lines and Dust Bowl migrants and all that. It had the sound of movement in it. His guitar has the sound of a big truck going down the highway with the riders bouncing around in the front seat. It was a new idiom.
Alan saw Woody as a self-made intellectual, with the curiosity and critical ability necessary to succeed with a public tired of the usual politics. But he could do so without the canned corn of a Will Rogers, that folksy comedian-philosopher from Oklahoma, on whom Woody modeled part of his persona. Woody was a great talker onstage, sometimes forgetting to sing, maybe striking a chord on the guitar, then launching into a joke or story; or, starting to sing, he might be reminded of a story and leave the song behind.
Guthrie could play the hillbilly to perfection when it suited him. He would claim that he hadn’t read The Grapes of Wrath or seen the movie, or seem to be as spontaneous as a jazz musician when he had pre
pared for hours in advance. The highbrow disguised as a primitive was a role that Alan understood and tolerated most of the time, the double disguise of the true revolutionary. Still, Woody could drive those around him crazy with his offstage posturing, sleeping on the floor, refusing to eat at a table, declining to bathe. Once when he came into Alan’s apartment and deigned to climb into bed with wet clothes and muddy boots, Alan erupted: “Your lumpenproletariat act is too much, Woody! Grow up!” Guthrie seemed to be driven to test those around him, pushing them to reveal the extent of their belief in him.
After he met Lead Belly that night at the concert, Guthrie became friends with the Ledbetters, often spending the night at their apartment. To Woody, it was Lead Belly who was the real thing, who had been tossed into southern prisons as brutal as concentration camps (which is what Alan called them) and survived them physically and spiritually, who had come out of them whole and laughing and joyous and confident. Lead Belly, for his part, saw Woody as proof that some poor white folks could be decent people and understand the plight of black folks. Woody often defended him to blacks who criticized Lead Belly for working and living with a white man. Both singers came from oil boomtowns in the Southwest and knew many of the same songs, the stories of the cowboys, the epics of the railroad workers, oil riggers, and hobos, the plights of lonely women and men, the ballads of the brokenhearted. They had come up at a moment when the old West was giving way to the new, the country opening up, and like everyone else they had suffered from the fragmentation of a society under the pressure of industrialism. “Their music has grabbed the attention of the world because it sums up the whole country,” Lomax said. “It has everything in it: ballads, mountain music, ragtime, jazz, blues, and yet remains a genuine rural folk music that doesn’t depart from the canons of that.” Lead Belly and Woody were recording just at the moment when the commercialization of all forms of music was beginning, and were among the last performers to come of age without electrical amplification or the demands of the recording studio.
The guy in back of the glass there, a person who had no knowledge of what the songs actually signified emotionally, was saying, “Oh, put in a little bit more of that, do a little bit more this way. No, no, that’s too long. No, speed it up! Slow it down! Stomp your foot harder!” and so forth. Lead Belly and Woody managed to escape that and brought their pure country style right to town. They liked each other for that reason. And Woody learned from Lead Belly. Some of his best things are based on Lead Belly tunes. And I think they were of enormous help to each other, because they were, aside from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the only folk singers in the city at the time.
John Ford’s film of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath opened to a packed house in New York in late January 1940, and continued to pull in audiences for weeks. Taking advantage of the film’s success, a folk music benefit was staged for a committee that Steinbeck had formed to aid farm workers. The organizer of the event was Will Geer, an actor who had built his reputation as a Shakespearean in the 1930s, but by 1940 was appearing in Tobacco Road, a play that, like the novel of rural Depression life on which it was based, had been a critical failure, a target of censors, but a huge success with its audience, eventually running for over seven years in New York. Offstage, Geer was fiercely active in social causes and union organizing, and did stints in political theater and cabaret, all of which would lead to him being blacklisted in 1951 by the House Un-American Activities Committee and kept out of work until the 1960s, when he returned to win awards for his film acting and his work on the TV series The Waltons.
At midnight on March 3, the “Grapes of Wrath Evening” benefit opened on the stage of the Forrest, the theater where Tobacco Road was playing, with Geer, Aunt Molly Jackson, Alan and Bess Lomax, the Golden Gate Quartet, Lead Belly, Burl Ives, Josh White, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie (who kept calling it “the Rapes of Graft”), and others performing before a large audience and a curious press. Alan would later proclaim this the moment when the folk revival in America was born.
Before Woody could drift off, Alan finally got him to agree to be a regular guest on his American School of the Air radio program and to come to visit him in Washington. For a month that summer, Guthrie stayed with the Lomaxes and the Rays, and Alan took him into the archive and played him records, and talked to him about the folklore of the American people and its importance for the political moment. When Woody agreed to record for him, Alan wanted to use the best-quality record blanks to do it, so they moved over to the Department of the Interior’s studios and engaged a professional engineer, Jerome Wiesner. Later Wiesner would travel with Alan as recording engineer, and the two of them began experimenting with innovative recording techniques such as multitracking and editing. (When World War II began, Wiesner became one of the early developers of radar, rising up in the science world until he became adviser to President John F. Kennedy, and ending his career as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)
Woody recorded for Alan and Elizabeth three days straight until seventeen 16-inch aluminum discs were filled. He sang and played forty songs, talked about his life, and answered questions. It was oral autobiography, but a very different one from Jelly Roll Morton’s. Since Alan planned to use the recordings for a radio program called “Dust Bowl Ballads,” some of the recordings were sketched out in advance, if not actually scripted, with Alan introducing each day’s sessions on the first disc, and then closing out the day’s last recording as if a program were just ending. Woody swept through his entire repertoire of blues, ballads, church music, and songs about the migrants who fled west from the drought that uprooted them in the middle of the Depression. Some of the songs were prompted or set up by Alan, and he steered Woody away from some subjects and toward others.
But Alan was not happy about all of the songs that Woody chose to sing. He found some of them “thin,” and he may even have taught Woody a few other songs to replace them. Still, he was less of a director than on his sessions with Lead Belly. He sensed that Guthrie was still developing, working out his own creative destiny, and tried to leave him alone to do so. It was not purity of tradition that he wanted from him, but to get him before the public as quickly as possible. Still, there was a vérité feel to the sessions, the songs interspersed with stories of Guthrie’s early life, his family, travels, and occupations, with some of his memories evoking strong emotions in him, as well as some humor:
LOMAX: When did you make that one up, Woody?
GUTHRIE: Yesterday up in your office. (laughter)
LOMAX: Where did you come up with the idea of it?
GUTHRIE: Well, I was looking through a magazine here ...
For the radio version of Guthrie’s interview, Alan asked him to write out a few paragraphs about his life that he could use in the script. After a night at a borrowed typewriter, Woody came back with twenty-five single-spaced pages that Lomax said were “a kind of combination of Joyce, Mark Twain, and the musical Oklahoma ... something that I had tried to write myself, and I had dreamed about but there it was, on the paper.” He rushed a copy of it off to an editor he knew, who also became excited by what he read.
Alan was aiming to make this the most complete documentation of any singer who had ever lived, and he had no end of ideas of how it should be done. Woody could write out all the songs he knew and he would help him make a book out of them; he told him that he was going to start keeping his letters, and suggested Woody do the same with his; maybe they’d write a folk opera together. Another thought was that Woody, Pete Seeger, and Alan would put together a book of protest and workers’ songs drawn from the Lomax collections, the archive’s holdings, commercial recordings, mimeographed song sheets from union labor schools in Tennessee and Georgia, and wherever else they could find them. It would be “a testament to an unknown America, the folk poets who had been politically active and still kept their gift for song-making,” as Seeger put it. Using Woody’s phrase for a title, Hard Hitting So
ngs for Hard-Hit People was completed in rough form by 1940, with a foreword by John Steinbeck and a lengthy autobiographical statement by Woody. Woody also wrote the introduction, since he had lived the life the songs were about, and he and Pete transcribed words from commercial recordings and did the final work of assembling it.
This book would be a triumph for the kind of song collecting Alan had done. The scholar-collectors treated the songs they gathered as nostalgic remnants of a simpler life. They had never stood in the cornfields or sat in the workers’ shacks, nor had they come to see the singers they heard as poor people, full of anger and pain. This collection would vindicate Alan’s approach by revealing that protest against injustice could be found even among the older singers and the hillbilly and race recordings sold across the South, as well as in the repertoires of the younger folk poets. Still, such songs were not an easy sell: they were not the sort of thing that children sang at camp, or church groups might join in on at a picnic, and the more popular songs from commercial records seemed illiterate when they were written down. Lomax tried repeatedly to get the book published over the years, but no publisher would take it. Moses Asch of Folkways Records finally brought it out in 1967, a tumultuous time when such songs would be framed by other kinds of protest, connecting that moment to an American tradition of resistance and struggle that had been buried by time, neglect, and misrepresentation.
R. P. Wetherald, the recording supervisor at RCA whom Alan had worked with on reissues, offered Alan the opportunity to make a record of himself singing some southwestern songs, but he didn’t consider himself a good enough singer and told Wetherald he knew of others who should be recorded instead. Woody Guthrie, for example, was the voice of the Southwest, “the poet of its people,” a singer who could bring the characters of The Grapes of Wrath to life in music. The popularity of the film and Lomax’s recommendation were sufficient incentive, so, without an audition, Guthrie was offered a two-album contract to write a suite of songs based loosely on the film, providing he could get them ready in less than a month. Though the short writing period worried him, what Woody produced was some of the best work he had ever done, songs like “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Dusty Old Road (So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You),” and “I Ain’t Got No Home.” The keystone of the albums—titled Dust Bowl Ballads—was “Tom Joad,” a song drawn directly from the Steinbeck book, and that Woody finished writing at Alan’s apartment one night after hearing the Carter Family’s recording of “John Hardy” and seeing how he could fit his words to its melody. Its seventeen verses are a masterly condensation: a six-hundred-page novel had been reduced to fewer than seven minutes in a song. At one point, he collapsed six chapters into two lines:
