Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  Woody was an unashamed political partisan, a self-styled “full blooded Marxican” and enthusiastic class warrior. His hatred for the rich was unwavering and his contempt for private property bracing. He wrote a weekly “Woody Sez” column for the People’s World, the Communist Party’s West Coast newspaper, and later contributed regularly to the Daily Worker in New York. His guitar was emblazoned with the motto, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” He composed hundreds of songs commenting directly on the issues of the day. He celebrated Jesus as a “socialist outlaw”—“the bankers and the preachers, they nailed him on a cross.” In “Pretty Boy Floyd,” he unmasked the real criminals—those who profit from an unjust system:Well, as through the world I’ve rambled, I’ve seen lots of funny men

  Some rob you with a sixgun, some with a fountain pen

  In the late 1930s he produced his trove of Dust Bowl Ballads, tales of migrants fleeing poverty and ecological disaster, seeking work and self-respect and suffering persecution. In their evocation of uprooted-ness and displacement, of a collective destiny experienced as personal isolation, these songs foretell the twenty-first-century experience of globalized capital, with its vast army of migrant labor trekking from continent to continent. Later, he penned the hauntingly eloquent ‘Deportees’: “Some of us are illegal and others not wanted./ Our work contract’s out and we have to move on. . . . They chase us like rustlers, like outlaws, like thieves . . .”

  Guthrie was hailed by the Left as a true folk poet, a people’s Steinbeck, a socialist Will Rogers. He was authentic because he came from and sang of and for the oppressed. He fulfilled the Left’s dreams of an indigenous radicalism, Marxist politics couched in the language of the people. Guthrie certainly had the popular touch, but he was also intellectually acute and politically sophisticated. And his artistry was always more than the sum of his public commitments. He wrote playful songs for children and unsentimental odes about VD (Dylan showed a keen interest in bothd). Alongside the naturalism and political idealism there was a streak of wild fantasy and morbid wit. Here’s a Dylanesque verse from “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You,” Guthrie’s macabre vision of an all-engulfing Midwest dust storm:Now, the telephone rang, an’ it jumped off the wall,

  That was the preacher, a-makin’ his call.

  He said, “Kind friend, this may be the end;

  An’ you got your last chance of salvation of sin!”

  So long it’s been good to know you . . .

  Guthrie’s songs could be scabrous and profane, or reflectively melancholy. He was a master in the concise use of concrete detail and could deploy a deceptively simple phrase to open up vistas of injustice and hypocrisy. And he was a champion of the language of the people, however coarse:The honest and hungry prophets raving and snorting and ripping into the bellies of the rich and powerful rulers and lying priests who beat their people into slavery and dope them with superstitions and false ceremonies and dictate to them what to do, where to go, what to read, who to love, what to eat, what to drink, what to wear, when to work, when to rest and where to bring your money. . . . [They] cussed and they raved plenty. Because they was out there in the hills and hollers yelling and echoing the real voice of the real people, the poor working class and the farmers and the down and out.14

  In Guthrie, the economic migrant blended with the bohemian wanderer. He was painfully aware that his own personality was more complex than the legend that grew up around it: “There ain’t no one little certain self that is you. I’m not some certain self. I’m a lot of selfs. A lot of minds and changes of minds. Moods by the wagon loads and changes of moods.” His indifference to hierarchy of any kind troubled some of his Communist Party allies, and it’s said that when he applied for party membership in 1943 he was rejected because of what was seen as his personal unreliability.15 Irwin Silber recalled that “the puritanical, near-sighted left . . . didn’t quite know what to make of this strange, bemused poet who drank and bummed and chased after women and spoke in syllables dreadful strange . . . they never really accepted the man himself.”16 In the late forties Guthrie jotted in a notebook:Lenin: Where three balalaika players meet, the

  fourth one ought to be a communist.

  Me: Where three communists meet, the fourth

  one ought to be a guitar player.

  Dylan took more from Woody than an image and an accent. In Guthrie’s work, Dylan found a creative fusion of humor and rage, a wanderlust that was both individualist and populist, and, most important, an alternative to the conventions of the entertainment industry, a folksinging model of honesty and commitment. Guthrie offered an identity that was more genuinely Dylan’s own than the one his society had saddled him with. Ultimately, however, neither the model nor the identity were to prove unproblematic.

  Soon after his arrival in New York, Dylan made a pilgrimage to Guthrie’s bedside at state mental hospital in New Jersey, a place he recalled as “an asylum with no spiritual hope of any kind. Wailing could be heard in the hallways . . . the experience was sobering and psychologically draining.” How much communication actually transpired between the severely disabled older man and his young acolyte is a matter of debate. The importance of the meeting for Dylan is not. Within months, he made Guthrie the subject of his first serious effort at songwriting, “Song to Woody”:Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song

  ’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along,

  Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn,

  It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ never been born.

  In launching his career with a tribute to a stricken forebear, Dylan evinces a telling awareness of being a latecomer to a venerable tradition, of walking in others’ tracks. In the final verse, the apprentice songwriter speaks tentatively. He seems uneasy comparing his limited experience to the older generation’s.

  I’m a-leaving’ tomorrow, but I could leave today,

  Somewhere down the road someday.

  The very last thing that I’d want to do

  Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too.

  For Dylan, the New York folk scene was a living connection with the left-wing luminaries of the “first folk revival.” He met a number of Guthrie’s old comrades—notably his one-time singing partner Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, who had made Guthrie’s first studio recordings. (Lomax’s secretary was Carla Rotolo, the sister of Dylan’s girlfriend Suze—the woman on the Freewheelin’ cover.) In 1940, Lomax had published Guthrie’s songs in his anthology, Our Singing Country, where he praised “the dust bowl balladeer” as “familiar with microphones and typewriters, familiar too with jails and freight trains.” Lomax placed Guthrie chief among the new school of folk artists:The people have begun to examine their problems self-consciously and comment on them with an objective vigor and irony that reach deeper than a Robert Frost and are more honest and succinct than a T.S. Eliot.17

  As a teenager in the early thirties, Lomax had assisted his father, John (who published one of the first collections of cowboy ballads), on field trips through the rural South to the hidden sanctuaries of American folk music. On one of these, they encountered Huddie Ledbetter—better known as Leadbelly—in a Lousiana state prison. The Lomaxes brought him to the North, where he sang for left-wing intellectuals and union benefits.

  The early folk music collectors were antiquarians, searching for specimens of a lost or dying way of life. In contrast, Alan Lomax saw folk music as a living organism, dynamic and diverse—stretching from work songs and spirituals to protest ballads and commercial hillbilly and race recordings. He believed recorded music had transformed our access to authentic folk song. “A piece of folklore is a living, growing and changing thing, and a folk song printed, words and tune, only symbolizes in very static fashion a myriad-voiced reality of individual songs.” What we could now hear were “the songs as they actually exist on the lips of the folk singers.”18

  As the decade wore on, the energetic folklorist acquired a deepen
ing political commitment. In 1937, at the age of twenty-one, he was appointed director of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. In Washington he forged connections across the New Deal administration, stretching even into the White House. He also worked closely with the leftists Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Both were classically trained composers and musicologists; like other intellectuals shaped by the modernist movement, they had abandoned the avant-garde for the study of folk music under the impact of the economic disaster of the thirties. It was through Lomax that Charles’s son, Pete, was later to meet Guthrie and accompany him on the road.

  Even as he promoted folk as an ever-evolving genre, Lomax insisted at the same time on the goal of authenticity. In performance style, that meant the painstaking mastery of the skills displayed by the little-known geniuses on his Library of Congress recordings. But it also implied a level of commitment, an emotional investment. He liked to quote Leadbelly: “It take a man that have the blues to sing the blues.” For Lomax, the blues remained “a negro music, and no one else can sing it with the same authority. It is a direct reaction to the harsh experiences of their lives.”

  Where previous explorers of America’s folk heritage had seen in it a spirit of fatalistic passivity, Lomax discerned an unfinished narrative of “tragedy and protest.” These were the songs of a democracy struggling with and seeking to transform a hostile environment. Their proper fate was not to be preserved in museum-like isolation, but to become part of something larger. “The folklorist’s job,” Lomax believed, was “to link the people who were voiceless and who had no way to tell their story with the big mainstream of world culture.”19 For all his scrupulous concern for the authentic, Lomax was also a tireless and adventurous popularizer. Through radio, recordings, books, articles, and concerts—not least his own sweat-drenched performance at the White House—he proselytized for the living reality of folk music and for his own vision of the American democratic heritage.

  Folk as Dylan received it in the early sixties had been shaped by this earlier political moment. His work starts from the cultural residue of the popular front, launched in the mid-thirties. During this period, the dominant organization on the American Left, the Communist Party, had courted allies to its right, played down its revolutionary rhetoric, and sought to establish itself as a homegrown people’s movement for social justice, not a sect of a European proletarian revolution. The slogan of the era was “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.”

  All this was in keeping with the prevailing winds from Moscow, but it was much more. In emphasizing their national credentials, the Communists were part of a wider movement. The New Deal encouraged interest in American history and culture and a new regionalism in the arts. It sponsored large-scale narrative paintings in public spaces and a wide array of folkloric activities. At a time of severe social crisis and potential political polarization, various forces sought to mobilize American identity for various purposes, sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting. What was at stake was national self-definition, a powerful political asset. The popular front bid for this asset found its epitome in “This Land Is Your Land.”

  Guthrie wrote the song on February 23, 1940, in response, he said, to Kate Smith’s bellicose rendition of “God Bless America,” which was then blasting the airwaves. The song combines a sense of longing with a sense of belonging, and has been cursed with the soubriquet of “the alternative national anthem.” But in its original form—written during the Hitler-Stalin pact—there are two verses that give the song a different cast, and which were dropped from the version popularized in the fifties and sixties. One described “a big high wall there that tried to stop me / A sign was painted said: Private Property.” The other distinctly qualified the confidence of the reclamation declared throughout the song.

  One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple

  By the Relief office I saw my people—

  As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if

  This land was made for you and me.20

  With or without the class-struggle verses, “This Land Is Your Land” remains a concise and stirring expression of the popular front’s claim on the nation. But that claim was always problematic. Some of its limitations were starkly exposed in John Lee Hooker’s sixties riposte, “This Land is Nobody’s Land”:This land, this land is no man’s land

  This land is your buryin’ ground

  I wonder why you’re fightin’ over this land.21

  Even during his heyday as a performer, Woody was being turned into an American exemplar: “He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people,” said John Steinbeck. Guthrie himself saw his mission, partly, as a preservation of the true national culture: “The union hall is the salvation of real honest-to-god American culture.” 22 And he celebrated the Grand Coulee Dam as a national triumph: “Now the world holds seven wonders that the travelers always tell / Some gardens and some towers, I guess you know them well / But now the greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam’s fair land / It’s the big Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam.”

  Across Europe, the recovery of folk tradition had been part of secular nation-building, and for both conservatives and radicals, the music of the folk was the authentic music of the nation. Lomax was aware of the reactionary uses to which folk could be put—he could see them in Nazi Germany. But he believed that there was a democratic pulse at the heart of American folk music that could be harnessed by the Left:The idea implicit in this great rhymed history of the American pioneer worker can be summed up in the key lines of one of the noblest of the songs: “John Henry told his captain, A man ain’t nothing but a man.”23

  The desire to “Americanize” a seemingly alien movement (Marxism, socialism) was one of the missions of the popular front. Like Dylan in the early sixties, the old leftists fretted that their ethnic roots were showing, and these roots betrayed a heritage that was less than authentically American. That’s one reason they had so heartily welcomed Seeger, scion of a Yankee academic, Guthrie, the dust bowl migrant, and Ledbetter, the southern black ex-con. But in adopting the rhetoric of Americanism, the Left conceded dangerous ground, not so much to backward-looking nativism as to the American empire that would spread its wings after World War II. Lomax invites his readers to admire a tall tale from the old frontier:“The boundaries of the United States, sir?” replied the Kentuckian. “Why sir, on the north we are bounded by the aurora borealis, on the east by the rising sun, on the south by the procession of the equinoxes and on the west by the day of judgment.”24

  In 1940, Lomax supported Seeger, Guthrie, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, and others in forming the Almanac Singers, the first urban ensemble to mix traditional and topical songs and take the package out of the concert hall. It was an inauspicious moment for the venture. With the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, the broad alliance of the popular front had come under severe strain. The antifascist emphasis of the previous years was replaced by a renewed antimilitarism and a stronger dose of class politics. The Almanacs’ first LP, Songs for John Doe, was ferociously anti-FDR and antiwar (“It wouldn’t be much thrill / to die for Dupont in Brazil”).25

  The Almanac Singers were a collective of some dozen performers, most of whom lived communally in a succession of downtown Manhattan apartments. They wore denim and jeans and their performance demeanor was casual in the extreme. What drew them together was a love of folk music and a commitment to turning that music to political ends. Lee Hays explained the group’s name: “If you want to know what the weather is going to be, you have to look in your almanac. . . .”26 (A quarter of a century later, Dylan repudiated that nostrum in “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”) The Almanacs flourished, initially, because they were taken up by the Left. They played union benefits and fund-raisers. It was during this time that Seeger introduced the word hootenanny—a long-forgotten specimen of American slang meaning something like thingamajig—as a label for informal (but publicly promoted) f
olksinging get-togethers. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, new opportunities opened up for the Almanac Singers. They were now urging on the working class in the crusade against Germany and Japan. It was at this moment that the audition at the Rainbow Room took place—only in reality it was an audition not for Woody alone but for the Almanac Singers as a group.

  Despite the claims of red-hunters and some Dylan fans, the Almanacs were not part of a conspiracy to subjugate the variegated American folk tradition to a program dictated by the Communist Party. Some of the Almanacs and their coterie were members of the party. Most were sympathizers. Very few were active in or had contact with party structures, and the party itself evinced little interest in the musicians or the music. These people did follow the changing party line—from the people’s front through the Hitler-Stalin pact through the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union through Pearl Harbor and after—but they did not do so simply because they were told to. They were all strong-willed, independent-minded people; they followed the party line because, on balance and in context, it made sense to them. “Which side are you on?” the old song had asked, and under the circumstances of the day, they thought the answer was clear. They were not without a degree of ironic self-awareness. When the wartime “no strike” pledge rendered a great deal of the Almanac Singers’ repertoire redundant, Guthrie improvised a verse:I started out to sing a song