Woody Finds His Footsteps - Text aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Notes a Home

Bill Dorris

© 2009

Since the 1960s “This Land is Your Land” has been recorded by everyone from Bing Crosby to Harry Belafonte, from Tex Ritter to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and of course by Springsteen.(1) The song -- minus its long buried political verses – is known by generations of American school children, has been used as “an advertising jingle by (the likes of) United Airlines and the Ford Motor Company” and has “often been mentioned as a possible replacement for “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a national anthem”. It is also perfectly evocative of the life and spirit of its author, who in the late 1950s – still only in his 40s -- was dying in a greystone New Jersey mental hospital, virtually unknown to the wider American public.

At the same time there were shiftings afoot in the pop charts. First the Kingston Trio, then the Limeliters and other "folk trios and quartets were popping up all over the place", especially on university campuses; and most of them had a "handful of Woody Guthrie songs in their repertoire". On these same campuses the "practical, G.I. bill generation" of the postwar years was gone, replaced by kids who had missed the War and “didn’t remember the Great Depression”; replaced by a generation which was “beginning to wonder about the frantic, unquestioning materialism of their parents”, a generation whose young musicians started “shifting their interest from “rock-and-roll to folk music”, a music which “seemed freer, more artsy… and more rebellious than rock”, a generation that would soon be taking part in the civil rights struggles, the “rebirth of political activism” of the 1960s.

It was a generation that mystified Lee Hays as he walked around Washington Square in Greenwich Village “watching the young folk singers who were becoming a horde now” - young folk singers who couldn’t have read Bound for Glory which was long “out of print”, couldn’t have heard Woody’s “records which had never sold”. Hordes of young singers “affecting a certified Guthrie slouch, ratty old clothes, facial stubble, and aroma… whanging away at their guitars, singing ‘Goin’ down the road feelin’ bad…’”, singers who would “listen politely to the elder statesman’s stories about the Weavers and the Almanac Singers and political struggles gone by, but really just wanted to hear about his friendship with Woody Guthrie”.

Hays puzzled over this. He “thought of all the talented people he’d known in his life – some of them every bit as charismatic and colorful as Woody -- and how easily most had been forgotten. He thought of Pete Seeger . .the finest musician he’d ever known, far superior to Guthrie... but it was Woody, not Pete, who was becoming part of the national mythology.”

Finally “irritated” at one young man who “kept pestering him” for stories, Hays “demanded, ‘Why are you so dammed interested in Woody Guthrie? The man’s been out of commission for years. Why is he so important to you?’”

His answer: “Most kids reach a point where they really want their freedom. You hate school, your parents – anything that stands in the way. All you can think about is getting out. You want to hitch a ride, hop a freight, go wherever you want. Woody, I guess, represents that kind of freedom for me”.

A few years later the most famous of “Woody’s children” put it this way on his first album for Columbia :

“Hey, Hey Woody Guthrie I know that you know

All the things that I’m sayin’ and many times more

I’m a singin’ you this song but I can’t sing enough

‘Cause there’s not many men who’ve done the things that you’ve done”

What had he done? (2)What was this life, this freedom, they were all dreaming about -- the life behind the "Guthrie spirit" that was suddenly "fueling the wild resurgence of folk music" across America in the early ‘60s? And more to the point in terms of our analysis, what key characteristics did it take for Woody to live this life?

Here's a few excerpts from that life, the first straight from Woody himself – more or less -- in the late '30s:

"Switch engines were trotting loose cars up and down" the rail yard, "trains limbering up their big whistles, a long string of cars raring to step." All of us dripping in the “blistering” sun.

"Ketchin 'er out?"

"Yeah, I'm switchin' ovah pretty fas'. Jes' got in. Didn't even have no time to hustle me up a feed.”

"His pale khaki work clothes were soaked with salty sweat, loose coal soot, oil smoke, and colored dust smeared all over him." He bellied down next to a "clear puddle of water and sucked up all he could hold", pulling off a "bandana handkerchief dirty as the railroad itself. He soaked it, wiped his face and tied it around his forehead, with a hard knot on the back of his head. An old hobo trick".

"Keeps th' sweat from runnin' down so bad"

The "train started jarring the cars a few feet. Flop hats, caps, bareheaded". . .all of us up and heading "down the cinders, looking at the new train, spotting a reefer car to crawl into". I swung the gitbox over my shoulder and knocked off a few ties. It was an "easy rider", picking up pace. A boxcar rattled past, a reefer. I jumped, my free mitt grabbing on

"C'mon up!"

It was Bandana, leaning off the top, giving me a hoist.

And few years later, back East. (3)

A "little, wiry-haired man ambles out onto the stage of the Forrest Theatre". The “Grapes of Wrath” benefit concert – the first major folk music event ever held in New York City . Virtually unknown, he ambles out before a “large, mainstream audience”, looking like he’d ‘just blowed in’, straight out of Steinbeck’s novel. Standing “alone, fixed by a spotlight slanting down from the balcony”, Woody “scratches his head with a guitar pick and squints up at the cheap seats”.

“Howdy”

It's like "he’d wondered in by accident, but didn’t mind hanging around and singing a few songs as long as he was there”. He “tilts up his chin, and leans into his guitar”:

“I’m a blowin’ down this old dusty road…”

The “Dust Bowl Ballads”, those songs RCA would be recording in a few months time, those songs that would become “one of the most influential American recordings of the twentieth century”.

And a year or so later. (4)

Back in L.A. In the spring of '41, Woody met Gunther Von Fritsch, who'd recently made a documentary film about "the building of the first of a series of dams across the Columbia River " for the New Deal's Bonneville Power Administration. He was thinking about making another, and had this "vague notion of centering it around a homespun, folksy character who'd explain all the benefits of public power". Von Fritsch was considering Woody as "one of several possibilities", but that was bout it. By late April, even "the funding for the film wasn't set".

No matter. Restless, itchy, and with "no other offers that were even tentative".

Woody "decided to force the issue". So he piled his wife and kids in the car and "set out for Portland … showing up in a battered car with broken windows, stained cushions, his blonde wife and children spilling out". "He had a two-weeks growth of beard, and was chewing on an apple. To those with sensitive noses it was obvious that he was badly in need of a bath, but he was free and easy in his conversation, completely uninhibited, and diamond sharp".

"Even though it seemed increasingly unlikely the movie would ever be made", Von Fritsch and his superior sent Woody around to the office of their boss, the Director of the BPA, Dr. Paul J. Raver, to see if there was any way "they could put him on the payroll for a while" . Woody "strolled into the office with his guitar and emerged an hour later", contract in hand. And for the next month, as Woody later put it:

"I pulled my shoes on and walked out of every one of those Pacific Northwest mountain towns drawing pictures in my mind and listening to poems and songs and words faster to come and dance in my ears than I could ever get them wrote down".

He'd "meet with the working people on the dams, the docks, and the roads and in the bars". He'd take his guitar and sit along the banks of the Columbia, the Hood, sitting there in the “misty crystal glitter of the wild and windward spray”, “scribbling madly in his notebooks " bout the “triphammers flying, air hoses suckin’, muckers muckin”; bout the “clinkers, powder monkeys, hardrock men, drilling holes, fillin’ fills, tamping fuses down tight”; bout watching em “push that handle down, and raise the country ten miles high”.

And then he’d “refine his ideas at home each night”.

The “finance company caught up with him and repossessed the Pontiac . He didn’t care”. Mary “began stepping out, bar-hopping with one of the other young women.. leaving him to baby-sit… even tempting fate by having men bring her home”, just to see if he’d notice. Never did. “Lost in his work, numb to his family, and the rest of the world” , Woody’d be turning the day’s scribblings into “Jackhammer John” and “Hard Travelin’”, into “Grand Coulee Dam” and “Talkin’ Columbia”; into dreaming bout it “raining electric powers down”, dreaming bout it raining from the Bonneville, the Grand Coulee, “makin’ ever’thing from sewing machines to fertiliser…Atomic bedrooms!… Plastic! Ever'thing's gonna be made out of plastic!" Then wrapping up with "Don't like dictators not much myself, but I think the whole country ought to be run by…. E-LEC-TI-CI-TY!"

Aside from the two obvious key characteristics it took for Woody to write his songs, ie his abilities as a wordslinger and a flat picker, what else did it take to write these songs, or more to the point to live the life that wrote them? (5) Of the 1000, 1200, who know how many, songs Woody wrote, his best and lasting ones -- "This Land", the “Dust Bowl Ballads", "The Columbia River Songs" , the 'Songs to Grow On" he wrote with his own kids -- all of them were written the same way. Just like "JackHammer John" and "Talking Columbia", they were written in the heat of the experience – following those intense, fleeting encounters with hobos and Okies ridin’ the rods, with "clinkers and powder monkeys, hardrock men" working the "five mile chute", with his own kids "marching through the house reciting, "Ubangi, Ubanger, Youbangie, You… You bang Teeny and Billy bangs Sue…". They were written after intense engagement with those he identified as his own, with those who shared his life and troubles, his struggles.. those who were where he'd too often been -- at the bottom of the heap -- those whose lives his songs engaged and lifted, in Fanon's words with "The Wretched of the Earth", who in Woody's case started with the wretched of his earth, the Okies of the 1930's Dust Bowl. So we'll use that label for the third key characteristic essential to Woody's life and work -- his totalidentification with the Okies of the world.

And beyond this his songwriting required something else, something much less visible but equally essential. Woody’s songs weren’t about feelings, they were about doing, about “blowin’ down that old dusty road”, about “hammerin’ on the river from sun to sun". Of course his songs evoke powerful feelings, but these are not the kind of feelings typically associated with folksongs – feelings of loss, hurt, pain, remorse, sorrow… or for that matter of love, desire, arousal. Woody wasn’t writing about “Tom Dooley” or “Barbara Allen”, about “The Long Black Veil” or “The Dreary Black Hills”. In his own words he was “out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world, that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it’s run you down and rolled you over… I am out to sing songs that make your take pride in yourself and in your work”. And those were exactly the sort of songs he wrote, songs to make you feel like “this land was made for you and me”.

This brings us to Woody’s fourth key characteristic, one which insured that he was ever engaged in intensive, transient relationships, the kind of relationships that were central to his 1000s of fleeting encounters with the Okies and Arkies and the powder monkeys at the heart of his song writing; a characteristic that ever pulled Woody to relationships in which there was never any risk of vulnerability, of hurt or rejection; never any danger, or even possibility, of deep commitment. And even with his own kids, from both his first and second families, whatever depth of contact he had with them – unlike adults – never offered any risk of rejection. In the process this characteristic likewise insured that the focus of his song writing was never on personal relationships – his own or anyone else’s – but always on the “hard travelin’’’, no matter if it was with migrant families “squatted in the shade of the big signboards, out across the flat, hard crusted gravelly desert…”, or sitting on the porch with his kids making up songs that would "have them sticking their fingers in the air, then on their noses, then on their chins…" – making up songs his kids reacted to just the same as the "Okies in the boxcars, hanging on his every word".

Woody’s fourth essential key characteristic -- his intense hunger for and terror of intimacy.

Finally whatever about the psychological aspects of his engagement in the chaotic lives of the Dust Bowl refugees, or piling his young family in a car and flying off for Portland, Woody had to not only survive under these conditions, he had to thrive on them. He had to operate like nothing out of the ordinary was challenging him in getting on with what really mattered, ie, his music, stories and songs. He had to be able to pull into Portland with a broken car and family, "chewing on an apple, free and easy in his conversation, completely uninhibited, and diamond sharp". He had to be the Woody who "ambled" onto that stage in New York, "squinted up at the cheap seats" and "leaned into his guitar"…well into Herta Geer's guitar, her Martin, the one he lifted off her a couple weeks earlier when she finally booted him out of her apartment. He had to have Woody's fifth essential key characteristic, his years of expertise as a seasoned street hustler.

So how’d Woody pick up these five key characteristics?

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Unlike Hitch, Woody was definitely born an “easy child” - given half a chance he mightta kissed a couple coyotes or splashed a flash flood. (6) As it was he settled for being born while “The frog went a courtin’” with “Gypsy Davy”; being born to “hearing” his “mother singing to his brother Roy and his sister Clara”, to running down the road when Papa’s “hooves” come a “clomping”, to ‘woooop’ and being scooped, right up to daddy’s lap, and “How did y’r saddle horse do today?” “He et all my oats, an he et my hay…” And that’s not a bad start. (7) Still it doesn’t quite add up to the “unbridled optimist” who could turn thumbing his way through a thousand miles of freezing “wind and snow”, “rotgut whiskey”, and “foggy bottom“ Appalachian roads, into “I roamed and rambled and followed my footsteps, to the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts. . .“, into “this land was made for you and me”.

Still it was a good start. From day one Woody was definitely “getting along all right”. After all he didn’t need any scales or arpeggios or “civilized music”. What Woody needed was mama “chording on the piano” and singing her “maudlin, old-time country ballads over and over” in her “high-pitched nasal twang”, and “then all over again”, “til it sounded like a nice ripe and a juicey strawberry in her mouth”.

And he didn’t need to be an only child, the child who got all of Nora Belle’s attention, good and sad. What he needed was to be the youngest, six years the youngest, so he got mama’s best hours while Clara and Lee Roy were gone, off down the “muddy” little “wagon road” to their clapboard school. What he needed was day after day, and month after month, up on the “grassy hill” with the “cedar and pecan and blackjack trees”, with mama in the “warmth and security” of Gramma Tanner’s “brand new house”, with its “window seats and paneled walls” and endless “nooks and crannies”; with mama singing at her “Price and Deeple upright”, with play porches all around.

What he needed was a “free spirit of a big sister, dancing her way to school and singing her way back home”, “bending” and laughing and “whirling around with her golden curls swinging in the wind, brushing his face, as she wrestled him across the floor”. What he needed was a brother too old to be in competition, too “reserved” to get much attention, and plenty ready to “biff any tough kids on the noodle” if they messed too much with little Woody. (8)

He didn’t need his old man to be in Okemah’s “upper crust”, at the “supper club” with doctors and lawyers and bowtie chins. The father he needed was pulling a crowd “every morning” down at “Parsons’ drugs”, ‘round ten - “just to hear him talking over coffee” - a crowd that would “invite him home to dinner”, just to hear him talk again. The father he needed was a man of “vast enthusiasms”, with “his punching bag” rap-tap-tapping off of one hand, and “all the classics” flip-flip-flying through the other; a father, “wild and young as the country” itself, who went from local politics to land speculation to riding the “Wartime boom” right through Okfuskee County - “swapping and trading, buying and selling, getting bigger, spreading out, and making more money” - money that was mama’s, and Clara’s, and Roy’s “just for signing their name”, money that made you “proud”, proud to be a Guthrie. The father Woody needed “doted on his children”, celebrating his “big land deals” with “arms full of toys” and “wagons and bikes” and whatever “other wheeled contraptions” he could carry home. He spent “lavishly” because he knew “no possibility of failure” - “prize cattle, hogs, and bulls”, and “pedigreed bird dogs” with “their family trees hanging all over the house”; a “hundred-dollar saddle” for mama’s “black mare”, just so “they could prance through town on Sunday afternoons”. (9)

The father Woody needed had “hung up his deviled strings” but he “never gave up singing” - singing “apart and together” with mama on “hymns, spiritual songs, and songs about how to save your lost and homeless soul and self”, songs that were “lots better” cos he’d “put in a little of the wild running fighting sounds and monkey shines that made your ears stand away out and wiggle for more”. (10)

And that’s the father Woody got - “One-Punch” Charley, announcing in the Okemah Ledger that he was “as happy as a lobster” in mid-July of 1912, cos he had a brand new “inhabitant of lapland”, a “morning caller, a noonday crawler, and a midnight bawler” - a little “rag doll” of a “curly headed” crawler, who’d soon be “hopping around the house, making up snatches of rhyme and trying to sing them just like his mama”; a crawler who touched and tasted and “became whatever he saw”; a crawler who never stopped hopping and rhyming and living without trying, over and over, and then over again, the very first years of his lives; a crawler who “remained forever six years old”, forever the “child inside of him”; a crawler who remained “forever young”. (11)

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And by six it was definitely time for Woody to start getting ready, ready for his thousands of miles of freezing “wind and snow”, and “foggy bottom roads”; for “pulling out” of “the wheat fields” and “Dust Bowl”, out “across the flat, hard-crust, gravelly desert”, to hit the “boweries and jungle camps and skid rows”; it was time to be “pulling his shoes on” and getting ready for “the mineral mountains and rough run canyons”, for riding the rods and the thumb, for “followin’ his footsteps”, wherever they might be taking him. (12)

By six it was time for Woody to start getting ready for a life he had no hope of living; no hope as long as his papa was a “popular figure” in Okemah, a “justice of the peace” advising lawyers on their “more interesting” criminal cases, a “land speculator” running a booming business out of his office on Main Street, a politician who was becoming a “formidible force” in the county; no hope with his mother riding through town on her “regal black horse” and its “hundred dollar saddle”; no hope with an older sister he “idolized”; an older sister who “always knew her lessons”, who was “never late, never tardy, and never absent”; an older sister who was “unquestionably” the “star of the show”. And no hope is exactly what Woody had going into 1918. And if his family didn’t act quick, it was gonna stay that way. He’d never get to “roamin and ramblin”, to “hittin some hard travelin”; he’d never reach “that highway. . . that road that has no end”.

Fortunately for Woody by 1917 mama was already taking action. She was already “becoming forgetful” and having “little dizzy spells”. Already “jest sittin with a book in ‘er lap”, “jest sittin’ an’ lookin’ out across the whole room, an whole house an’ ever’wheres”. She was already showing those early signs of Huntington ’s (13) - already giving little Woody all the room he needed to start moving out on his own, to start finding “new ways to spend his days”, to start “sneaking into the cellars of every house up and down the street”; “one cellar after another with one kid after another”, sneaking into cellars “full of jars”, jars of “pickled beets, long green cucumbers, and big round slices of onions and peaches as big as your hat”. Peaches that were just askin’ to go “over behind the barn”, to the “clawhammer and a two-gallon feedbucket”, a bucket to catch the “whole big goo of oozy juice, and loose peaches”; the “thousand slivers of glass”, the “little sharp chips” that’d “shine like diamonds” as Woody “fingered” them off in “the warm sun”.

And by 1919, just as Woody needed to start moving from the cellars to the tree tops - from peaches to punchups - his big sister joined in. “Beautiful”, “intelligent”, and “head strong”, Clara was now “fourteen and beginning to bloom”; beginning to bloom just as Nora was losing her balance, her memory, and herself; just as Nora, now with four kids, was feeling “ugly and disheveled”, and “increasingly withdrawing from the world” - a world Clara “hungered more and more to become a part of”. The “subtle tension” that had always been there had now turned to “rivalry”, a rivalry that was escalating by shouts and roars, til “one day in late May” when Clara, “half crazy with anger”, decided to “scare her mother” and suddenly put an end to one of their “continual fights” - by “dousing her dress with coal oil” and “touching a match to it”.

And that pretty well cinched it for Woody. It was the “breaking point for his mother”. With “all of Okemah” at the funeral, Nora “felt the weight of every eye in town upon her. She knew what they were saying. . . and she agreed.” For days, weeks, months on end she “twisted the events over and over in her mind, and nothin could wrench her free from them”. “Two or three times a day she would have bad spells of epileptics, arguing at every stick of furniture in the room. . . shrieking for hours at the top of her voice.” At night Woody would escape “into his sleep”, into his dreams where his mama “was just like anybody else’s”, only to wake up and find the house was “still all wrong, all helter-skelter, let go, twisted out of shape, the cooking skipped, the dishes not washed.”

‘Course he and Roy “tried”. They “took spells of working the house over”. But the trouble was more than mama and her twisted house. The trouble was Okemah. It was all wrong. You see, Nora wasn’t the only Guthrie they were “eyeing” up and down Main Street . She wasn’t the only Guthrie who was getting Woody ready for his “hard travellin’”. Charley was “no longer the dashing young man. He was stooped and beginning to look old”. His hands, “busted up” from years of fighting, were now becoming “swollen and crippled with arthritis”; and his business was even worse. Back in 1918 with his real estate deals booming, his office over the Bank, and a personal grudge to settle, “One Punch” had finally stepped over the line - he had taken on the local Democratic machine in a “wild election campaign”, and won. At the polls that is. With the fix in on the recount, Charley lost more than his seat, he lost it all. “No longer of any account” in Okemah, and rapidly “losing every cent he had”, Charley - still fighting “desperately to regain control of his life and business” - was just another sitting duck when the big boys rolled into town with the Oklahoma oil boom of 1920.

With his sister dead, his mother raging, and his father going under; with his gramma tending more and more to her infant grandson and her dying daughter, the door finally swung wide open for Woody. And he “drifted” out - out into “running and laughing”, punching and scraping, “fishing, swimming and playing hooky”; out into anything “just to try to forget for a minute that a cyclone had hit his home, to forget how it was ripping and tearing away his family, and scattering it to the wind”. (14) He drifted out the door and straight into the “hot black fever”, into the oil boom that had just “blowed her top” and was “whirling, swirling, and swelling” her way right through the streets of Okemah; into the oil boom that couldn’t have come at a better time; into the oil boom that was just waiting for Woody.

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With “oil derricks jumping up like new groves of tall timber - thick and black and flying with steam”; with Seminole going “from 700 to 30,000” in a few weeks, and Okemah “quintupling overnight”; with the “sleepy little villages” of Okfuskee County “exploding”, the little 8 year old suddenly had himself a whole new schoolhouse. (15) And it wasn’t about flagpoles or desk rows or chalkboards; about spelling or marbles or baseball mits. It was about “boomchasing” and “hard travelin’”, and it was about music, the kindda music you could taste and feel and see. (16)

Woody’s schooling was about “rig builders and cement men, carpenters and teamskinners”; about going “from derrick to derrick” watching the “bull wheels spin and the cable unroll as they dropped mud buckets down into the hole”; watching the “boiler shoot steam and dance on its foundations; the derrick shake and tremble and strain every nail and joint”; watching til the “driller or tool dresser shouted” him outta there. His schooling was about roaring out each morning, wide-eyed and eared and going to be a “skinner, tong bucker, and rig jumper”. It was about learning how to “rave and cuss” til the “double pulley took ‘er home”; how to “grit, stretch, heave and sweat” til “some day” he’d be the “man wanted” for the job, til someday he’d be up and “grown”. It was about three years of “seeing, sighting, hearing, and tasting it all” -the “bull wheels spinning, the hooker men grinning: ‘Grab a root ‘an growl’”. (17)

Woody’s schooling was three straight years of scrambling round, from sun up and down; from “oil derricks to peddler, preacher, and punchup the street, girly house pool hall and brawl”. Three years of Bill Baileys and The Yellow Dog, of standing around “five or six little oil cloth tables”, watching “five or six mulers, hustlers, and lead men standing around winking and making signs in back of ‘bout five or six more hard-working onlookers, all laughing and watching five or six of the boys with a new paysack get the screws and trimmings put to them”. It was three years of “hanging around the jail” and the courthouse, “seeing the same old bootleg stills” being busted up and “chopped full of holes” by the preachers and soul savers and the rest of Okemah’s “better sorts”; three years of hanging around the “shacktowns” and the “auctioneers”, seeing the same old stills getting patched up and run back under the gavel, so the “yeast cakes and malt and hops” could get loaded back in there, til they were “a foaming and a jumping like a whole pond full of frogs”; the kind of frogs a man could get over or under the counter just about anywheres or time he wanted. At least until the next time, the next time the sheriff decided to “clean up the county”.

Woody’s schooling was about three years of “seeing it, sighting it, sucking it down”; three years of “edging his head through flying fists of all sorts and sizes”, of “oozing down on a load of pipe” with his “feet up past the stars” - his ears still “babbling, yelping, swushing along the streets”; his head spinning, “full of more pictures” than a 12 reeler - three years with the “whole air just sort of a roar and a buzz and a feeling that runs up and down your back, tingling” and poppin and lit up like a nite full of “old batty electric” lamps.

Woody’s schooling was three years of “trick bow fiddlers” and “railroad blues”, of “cripples rattling old tin cups”; three years of “war vets blowing mouth organs through shrapnel holes in their throats”. Three years of “hearing it, seeing it, sighting, walking, talkin it”, pounding it; three years of bobbing up and down in the whole “flood of gypsy wagons, stray musicians, street singers, and cement men”; in the “wild tribes of bootleggers, horse traders, rollers, rousters, and pimps”. Three years of “jumping right in the big middle”, of “elbowing down the stream” with Matt and Nick and little Jimmy Whitt: ‘Ridin with ya’, ‘Got yer grab’, ‘Take it back, Tong bucker!’, ‘Take it back!’, ‘Gimme slack!!’”.

It was three years of “leaning back against the bank window”, leaning back and “listening”. Three years of stretching out a few choice bits for later, for the kids still bricked up in school - under the thumb, under the rule; the kids starched up and pressed and “dressed clean as the morning sky”, still strung up “tighter than a fiddle string” - a few choice bits for the kids who’d wanna know bout all the places they’d never seen, couldn’t go - the Yellow Dog and poker halls, the girly houses, the “flabbery ass whores”; the “men whipped up to a fever pitch, jumpy, jittery, wild and reckless”; the pictures hanging off the walls, with “breasts like a feather pillow”, with their “little red cherry nipples”.

Woody’s schooling was about three years of taking it home in fast and furious scribbles, in little cartoons and bouncing buckboards full; three years of letting his fingers rattle and jump like a preacher’s cup, and lash the page like a “skinner’s reins”, with “twenty feet of leather”; three years of leaving a sheet or ten or two, any little bit to tell his mama all the things he couldn’t say, the things she already knew - a few quick sketches, jaggy lines; maybe pull a little hint of a smile or something, anything; maybe slow her “twitches”, maybe stop her cryin. (18)

Woody’s schooling was about “booming”, about three straight years of street schooling - bout missing all those days and nights of “yes, mam” and yard chores, of “shoes shined?” and clean ears; of pressed shirts and wooden pews, of “Don’t be late!” and Sunday after Sunday school. Three straight years of seeing it, hearing it, tasting it; of taking it, working it, playing it; three straight years of turning it all into a walking, talking, scribbly bobbing, rolling, flowing music. (19) Three straight years behind the bar, the badge, and the brothel; three years of learning all about civic duties, all about law & order, and rights & wrongs & responsibilities; three years of watching and working the fiddles, of making his own rules: three years of chasing his ears and hustlin’ the dime; of “followin’ his footsteps”, pretty much wherever they were going, pretty much all of the time. (20)

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Three straight years and still by summer of 1924 Woody was almost completely dead-ended. “Stone-cold broke” and “smelling failure”, Charley had “packed the family into an old Model T” and “moved to Oklahoma City in July of 1923”. And it almost worked. (21) Within a year he was all lined up to “run the business end” of Uncle Leonard’s brand new motorcycle dealership. The rising star of the Southwest stunt circuit had just handed Charley a nice, fat, “two hundred dollars a month” contract - a contract that couldda sidelined Woody for good - when little Leo took out a Ford sedan on a quiet Sunday in downtown Chickasha . Took out the Ford, his four stroke cycle, and himself. So with Leonard dead and Charley’s job buried, the Guthries “limped back to Okemah”. And once again Woody’s family had come through for him just in a nick - by his 12th birthday he was right back where he started, only better.

The oil boom over, Woody was back in a small, safe, and familiar town. ‘Course his father “had lost all his money” and his mother was “nuts”, and they were living in a little “shotgun shack” way off the wrong end of town. Still there were those who remembered other times, when Charley was “full of vinegar and a real force” in the community, when Nora was young and “alive” and could ride the West wind; those who remembered the “sheer animal force of the boom”, a boom that had hit them all; who remembered that the “waters had indeed been treacherous”, and might have taken others in the “carnage”. And there were those who “felt sorry” for Charley’s boy, who saw beyond his “nappy hair” and muddy pants and “missing buttons”, who saw his “beautiful, intelligent brown eyes”, and behind them, a “brain that was cranking away”. “Not many” but “a few”; and a few was enough, enough to touch 1 or 2 hearts down at Okemah High, enough to open 2 or 3 back doors - the ones he might need to find right ‘round dinner time. A few was enough to get Woody by, to let him work “the periphery of Okemah”, to let him go from student to “alley rat” and back; a few was enough to let him take exactly what he needed - the best of both worlds, the school and the street. (22)

With his dad bent and “gristled” - scraping by on little more than pride and white lightning - with his mom already “dumping the icebox, dropping cups, dishes and matches, and throwing all the furniture out into the yard”, there wasn’t much keeping Woody off the streets. He went right back to the Okemah he’d left behind; right back to chasing his ears and hustling the dime, to following his footsteps all round the depot, the market, and the shantytown; following ‘em to the “leftovers from a wilder time - to the cowboys, the boom flotsam, the down-and-outers, fogies and misfits and Indians who dated back to the frontier days”. He went over to “old lady Atkins’ tumbledown tin shack”, to watch her “parade her silks and satins”, to hear all the stories about her “fancy days” in Kansas City . He went over to Gantz’s place and listened to the “oil-field worker, sitting out in the doorway of his shack, playing a guitar and singing” about the likes of “Stewball” and “Stagolee”.

Chawing down the market, round the barbershop, sitting in the front door of some crumpled tin shack - Woody never missed a class. He soaked up “all the old stories” and all the new ones. Billy the Kid and Belle Starr, and that beardy old geezer the sheriff pulled in. . . “same bullet holes as Jesse James”. Swear it. and Pretty Boy Floyd, who was “just by” for a trim. Yeah, left a “five-dollar tip”. He went all over the East End, “scavenging” the edges of town with his “burlap sack”, collecting whatever bits and pieces he could find - “lead and scrap iron, and zinc and rubber inner tubes, brass faucets, copper wire” and maybe an old harmonica or two - carting them all over to Mark’s Junk Yard for “buffalo nichels”, for pennies and dimes. And he’d come across whole families along the road - “chickens arguing with the turkeys and ducks”; “grasshoppers, butterflies, and birds - whistling up in the mulberry trees, sneaking a few kisses before dark”. And he’d get to thinking bout their mothers and sisters and uncles and brothers, and how they might be doing, and how Mrs Chowning might wanna meet them and hear all their stories. And he’d head out the other end, to the “nice and shady streets”, to the banker’s wife with her handy “back door screen”; to where he could trade the day’s squirrels and roosters and sunrise - a few sketches and stories - for a quick “sandwich and milk”, for a pair of warm eyes. (23)

And there was Woody’s favorite teacher, the “colored shoeshine boy”, blowing his French harp so high, “sad and lonesome” you could almost feel some “distant” freight come rumbling through; a black man who showed the little white boy everything he knew “over and over”, and then over some more, ‘til Woody was out there riding the rods himself, chugging and blowing from dusk or dawn - a “regular fixture on the bench near the produce market”, sucking and sawing his harmonica, hour after hour, playing and pushing and dancing the sounds around. (24) And a regular on “Saturday afternoons” when the Indians rolled in to shop, with their wagons and blankets and women holding “solemn little children on their laps” - just asking for Woody and his French harp, for a few more bars, another jig step.

And a year or two later, when old lady Atkins suddenly “left town”, and left her “tin shack empty”, Woody had a “hideout” all his own - a hideout and a “gang house”. A gang house for him and Colonel Martin and Tubba Moore - a gang house for Woody’s gang; for him and his two “devoted” friends; for the three of them and all the other “boomer’s kids”, the outcasts who “hung out” with Woody in his “little Eeny House”; with Woody and the “oil can stove” they could “stoke up” and sit around, sorting through their “junk sacks”, and downing the baker’s “fresh, hot” scraps with a few quarts they’d just pinched off “the milk wagon”. An Eeny House, a gang house, a world all his own - where everyone was some kind of a “nappy”, little, “nigger-haired”, “runt” of a loser’s son whose mom was “nuts”. Where noone could put him down. (25)

And sometimes he’d go to the other school and find a seat right next to Blanche Giles. And while Matt and Nick and all his old friends - all the scrubbed up kids who “wouldn’t talk to trash like him” - were stuck in Latin or English or maybe flunking algebra again, he’d be galloping across her books and smiles, leaving “pointy knees and elbows, little lined faces and top hats, shaded and shiny” - all kinds of funny little fellows that Blanche and her mother and “a few others”, like Mrs. Chowning, knew were more than “wonderful”. And then there was typing where Woody really was pulling A’s, ‘cos the teacher somehow saw past his missing, muddy buttons and gave him pretty much a free run of the keys. Where he could write about the “wild rush of wind” that “whined for a minute like a puppy under a box and then roared down the alley, squealing like a hundred mad elephants”. About the “phone wires whistling” and “the rain burning hot”, the “bales of hay” flying up and “splitting apart, and blowing through the sky like popcorn sacks”. ‘Bout the cyclone that “stole Billy Bear’s best work horse while he was plowing the field”, that left Woody’s house with a “nice large sky for a roof”. The typing class where Woody “could write about anything he wanted” while the “rest of the class” was drilling their big and little fingers on “Mr. Z. X. Qpewphbones’ quaintly quiet Zaragozan xylophone”. Where Woody was eyes and ears and feet across the keys, talking, breathing, laughing the 1000 lives he’d already heard and seen. The typing class where the teacher kept inviting him “to use his imagination”, to mix and taste his words and sounds, and chase every scent. The class where Woody was putting in hour after hour just tuning and playing and typing away on his “favorite instrument”.

And once he got his French harp polished up to form, Woody’d be out in the school yard turning it into his own little depot; blowing fast and hard and “dancing a jig”; dodging the sharp eyes and “whispers”, burying them under a high balling, chugging, steaming roaring string of flat wheelers and reefers. And the next day, maybe burying them again. And then, who knows, some morning, maybe another few months gone, Okemah High’d suddenly be jammed, packed and full, way before first class or any tardy bells. Kids pointing, gawking, laughing; voices rattling, shrill; “huge murals” of teachers and bootlicks, and kids who thought they were clever - all chalked, bouncing, plastered, and stretched ‘cross rooms full of blackboards, ‘cross one of Woody’s little fits of “academic vigor”.

And so by the summer of ‘26, when Charley had shipped the “younger children” off to Texas, off to Aunt Maude’s for safe keeping; when his mother was “walking the streets in a slip”, “stabbing the bacon and frying the shells with the eggs”; when she was “attacking Charley with her fists or anything else that was handy”, Woody was “out like a shot in the morning” and just as likely out all night - “cadging dinners with his French harp” at some “downtown cafe”, then “sleeping on a bench somewhere”, anywhere “rather than go home to face that day’s particular horror”.

And by the time the junior class needed a sure fundraiser for the prom, or Woody just wanted a late bite to eat, he’d be up the tailend of a flatbed truck “strutting his stuff” for the whole town, right down on Main Street, or working some alley behind a cafe door, "blowing his harp and dancing rings, playing the bones - or some pencils, or bottles, or comb” - pretty much “making music out of anything”.

And so it was that Woody was ready a year later. (26) Ready when Nora finally torched Charley “with a kerosine lamp”, torched him so bad that it was “several weeks” before they could even load him “on a stretcher” down at the depot; on a stretcher and on a train, a train that was pulling out down the track to little George and Mary Jo, to Aunt Maude’s farm way out in the Texas panhandle. Left “alone on the platform”, Woody was pretty much “his own man now”. But he didn’t mind; he could “take care of himself” . And by the fall of ‘27 Woody had “taken up permanent residence” in “old lady Atkins’ shack”. Barely 15 and he was ready.

Ready, thanks to mom and dad and Clara, and Leonard; thanks to their quick, slow and sudden, perfectly synched and timed, deaths, declines and endings; ready, thanks to a leftover little town full of burlap sacks, tin shacks, and handy backdoors ‘round dinnertime beginnings. Pinched and cushioned by Okemah - by his folks, their lives and the oil boom; by the “boomers” and “skinners” and “down & outs”, by all the kids who could just smell a “runt”; by a few open hearts and doors, by a “banker’s wife” and a typing teacher, and a “shoeshine boy” no doubt - Woody’s rhymes and scribbles and tunes were more than up and grown; by 15 he had a dancing, sketching, talking, typing, rolling, blowing, breathing music all his own. (27) He didn’t have to take the lumps at school, or fit into somebody’s rules. He “didn’t have to steal to eat. All he had to do was go downtown, set out his cap”, start blowing his harp and “dancing a jig. Not only did he make good money”, there was something about watching “the crowd gathering”, about “the feet tapping”, and then the clapping. There was something that was almost like bouncing, like bouncing up on momma’s knee.

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And that’s the other reason Woody was ready. (28) By 16 he had a hunger. . . and a terror. A hunger he could taste and feel and see; a hunger that had plagued him for years, that kept rattlin’ through his dreams; a hunger he could never get around, put behind him; a hunger deep inside him. (29) He had a hunger that went back, straight back - 15,16 years, to when he was momma’s “newest, hardest-headed youngin’”, when she was bathing him up and scrubbing him down, putting new “unnies” on him, fixing him milk; back to when she was “pulling the covers up round his neck and tucking him down in the bed good”; to when momma knew “every little thing that was taking place in that little old curly head of his”; when momma and her “little feller” were talking “all bout married rings”; back to when little Woody knew exactly who he “wuz gonna marry”, if he ever did.

And Woody had a terror, a terror that went back 10 years; back to when momma started getting “awful bad sick”; to when papa’s “little angel” was suddenly scorched and burnt and dying; back to when Woody started “standing around the house for hours, lost in silence”, in “mortal fear that something he’d do or say would trigger” that “low grumbling voice” and start her “face to twitch and snarl”, would get her arms “up at her sides, behind her back”, and “swinging in all kinds of curves”; would start his momma shrieking, raging, crying. Woody had a terror that went on and on, from worse to worse, til he was laying in a midnight “puddle of cold late-summer sweat”, his “body cramped in knots”, his eyes and face “salty and wet”, fighting “crazy dreams that floated in across the night wind”; with his papa now torched and broken flat; with his momma gone, rolling off down some long and lonesome, final track.

Woody had a hunger, a terror, that went right back to yesterday, to the late fall of ‘28; to the trip Nonie had promised him, the trip he’d been asking bout for near a year now - ever since he moved in with the Moore’s - a trip that’d been troubling and plaguing him through “long and deep silences”, a trip west out through 60 miles of barren prairie, to that haunted, Gothic brick building in the “middle of nowhere”, through those “corridors and locked doors”, that “great wash” of “ravers and screamers”, of “crumpled and smelly humanity”, into that back room with a doctor telling him about “something called Huntington’s”, about “other things” Woody never could hear; to a woman, “shaking and fidgeting” in her “formless” gown; to a woman, a “haze” he “stumbled” through, “his lip trembling”, “biting it”; stumbling, collapsing on the front bumper, sobbing hard and deep”, “wrapped and cradled” in “Nonie’s arms all the way back to Okemah”. A hunger, a terror, a woman. . . a momma he “wuz gonna marry” - a mother, “his own mother”, his own mother who “didn’t even recognize him “. (30)

A hunger, a terror, that had tried and twisted him for years; that had pulled him to Blanche Giles and Mrs Chowning and now Nonie Moore, that had drove him, told him, where he could get fed; that had brought him to the kitchens and back doors for the milk and sandwiches, for smiles and sing songs and stories; that brought him so far, so far, but no more. A hunger, a terror, that told him, showed him, as he moved farther and wider with his cartoons and sketches, his cap and French harp and jig steps; showed him there were many doors - maybe endless doors - there were kitchens and cafes and rolling boxcars; there were flatbeds all along Main Street; told him and showed him that he could always come in, just long enough to feel the fire - for a tune, a bite, and a drink - that he could come in and stay just long enough, and be gone, long gone, before he ever felt the heat.

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Seven years later and Woody still had his hunger, his terror. Seven years later and he was still ready. Ready for “following his footsteps”; ready for “seeing it, sighting it, sucking it down”; ready for turning it all into a living, talking, breathing music. 1935 and Woody was ready; hungry and ready and going nowhere - nowhere becos he had no direction, no idea what he was ready for. In fact if the Dust Bowl hadn’t finally blown him “down that old dusty road” to California, Woody probably never would have found out where he was going.(31) He’d probably still be out in Pampa or Kilgore or Kowana or Fort Smith, or wherever the Guthrie’s had scattered. He’d probably still be stringing along with family and friends - with Charley and his “mail-order bride”, Bettie Jean, with Roy and his wife; with the Moores, or Matt Jennings family, with Uncle Jeff and Arlene - stringing along with friends and family - ever driven by his hunger, his terror - “wandering” from one to the other, never too close, and never much more than a fleebag hotel or two inbetween. Woody’d probably still be “blowin’ down that highway”, chasing all his roads to nowhere, staying just long enough to be there, then gone faster than the wind.

Woody’s probably still be down in Pampa, in “Little Juarez”, sketching the prostitutes at his dad’s “cot house”, bootlegging “Jamaica ginger” over at Shorty Harris’s “drugstore”; playing barn dances & house parties with Matt Jennings and Cluster. He’d probably still be sending off “steamy love stories” to “true confessions” magazines in New York, painting up “entire storefronts” with “vast murals” of “chubby pink cupids, and turkeys, Cudahy Bacon, Santas, and bottles of Listerine”; talking “phrenology, palmistry, tarot, tea leaves & the 19 points of Rosicrucianism” with Bettie Jean. 1935 and Woody was as ready as he’d ever been - “lying back on the couch, rolling cigarettes”, and talking about ”building whole cities out of adobe”, talking and dreaming of “nothing else” for days on end; ready for “staging boxing exhibitions” and for “total immersion”, for painting and hawking oils of Jesus, “The Blue Boy”, and Abraham Lincoln. 1935 and Woody was ready - a “guy who had the talent to do virtually anything” - still “pulling jake down at Shortys”; a “23 year old soda jerk”, with “no ambitions”, no rudder - still chasing all his roads to nowhere, going full throttle with no direction. (32)

That’s not to say Woody hadn’t grown in the 8 years since his mom was carted off to the state asylum. He had. He’d soaked up and walloped down every bit and morsel that came his way. And luckily for Woody, what came his way was pretty much whatever came with the Guthrie’s. And the one thing that always came with the Guthrie’s was music - family or friends, stringing along meant singing along. (33) Singing along for nearly a year with Tom Moore’s family in Okemah - sleeping 3 in a bed with Tubba and Red, with the sons of his papa’s old boozing cronie, after each night after night of harmonizing hours on those “old Tennessee church songs”, popping out “funny new verses” right as they were singing along. Then on to papa in Pampa and that “beat up” old gitbox sitting in the back of Shorty’s store, and Matt in need of tuning and Woody in need of chords and Uncle Jeff, the “finest country fiddler on the Texas panhandle”, “relishing any audience no matter how small” . On to day after day of “hammering and sawing away like a pair of carpenters on their instruments” while Jeff, with his dreams all set on “getting into show business”, was “fluttering and breezing” right “off into the clouds on his”. Day after day til Matt’s fiddle was “gaining speed” and Woody’d become a “clamper fiend”, “bluffing his way along” on the likes of A & D & G; til he’d just bout “set his first boot toe inside of the high gates of fiddle and string”; til the boys were in tune, in synch, and “testing new riffs”, and getting Cluster Baker - who really could play guitar - to make it three of them.

And with the best of reasons ever on their minds - the likes of Pauline and Mary and Kittie Clyde - the boys were soon playing “house parties and barn dances and local radio” and finally landing a weekend gig in some “rowdy southside joint” called “the Tokyo ”. And sure enough - with all his hunger & “timing”, his wordslinging, jig steps, “inflection” & rhyming - soon as Woody saw a mic or a light or a pair of bright eyes, he was the “center of attention”, off & flying - “telling jokes, mugging, dancing”; words “rolling and flowing so easily you just had to sit back and find out where he was going”. And soon enough Woody was reworking momma’s old tunes, throwing out - and typing up - bits of doggerel bout “unfaithful women” and the Corncob Trio, bout “warshing at th’ waterhole”, 'bout “cars chugging past” his “mad dash” with “sweet Melinda Lou”. Soon enough he was throwing out “Alonzo M. Zilch’s” very own, first little “songbook”. (34)

And when he wasn’t fronting the Corncobs locally, Woody was backing or hamming out front, working up his own “cornpone” vaudevillians, and generally learning all bout musicians travellin’, with Uncle Jeff and his wife and fiddle, and magic tricks and Carlotta and whoever else made each trip - chasing his uncle’s “show business fame” in and out and roundbout all the “tuxedos and gray wigs and greasepainted Spanish tangos” and cattle tents out ‘cross the West Texas plains.

And it wasn’t just family and friends who were keeping Woody’s music on track. It was the Peacock Fiddle Band on WBAP, starting way back in ‘23, triggering a whole “wave of barn dances”, like WSM’s Grand Ole Opry - beaming out cross half the nation; it was the likes of Polk Brockman and Ralph Peer spotting big bucks hanging off them hillbilly ears; the likes of Okeh, and Columbia, and Victor “rushing” Uncle Dave Macon and Fiddlin John Carson, rushing Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers right off the farm; it was the air waves, and wax discs, and old 78s winging The Carter Family right outta Maces Springs; right outta Scott County, Virginia, and straight to that “much abused” phonograph in Matt Jennings’ front room; straight to Woody’s fingers and frets - giving him way more than a pile of tunes; giving him Maybelle and her brothers - those bass runs, that driving, melodic rhythm - giving him the famous “Carter lick”; giving him the kick in all his greatest compositions. (35)

1935 and Woody was ready. He’d had his full of Pampa . He’d “read all the books in the library, painted all the windows, played all the barn dances and radio stations, heard everyone’s life story half a dozen times”. He had his guitar, his paint brushes and Carter lick and “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You” was booming bitter off long after midnight ’s drunken lips - meaning that the “dusty old dust” had finally hit, and Woody’s songwriting was just about ready for kicking up another step.

Meaning that Pampa was “curling up and dying”; that Woody was ready for “rattlin down that highway” to brother Roy in Konawa, to the Moores out in East Texas, to papa further on in Fort Smith. Meaning that Woody was ready for ever more “painting jobs and soda jerking”, “serenading for chili”, and revival singing; ready for entertaining family gatherings with a few quick throwaways, the kind that “white folks” would all appreciate - bout the talking “Nigger Blues” and “Rastus Brown”, bout ”The Chinese and the Japs”, bout all “dem coons going plum wile. . . “

Meaning that it was now 1936 and Woody was ready as he was ever gonna get. Meaning he was still going full throttle, still chasing all his roads to nowhere - still chasing the wind. Meaning that Woody still had no rudder, no direction.

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A direction that finally caught him somewhere out past Kilgore, or Kalamazoo, or Jericho; that finally caught him, hit him, trapped and thumped him down the road; a direction that showed up, blowed in, just when he needed it most - driven, fired by the Depression, lashing coast to coast - a direction even Woody couldn’t duck, slough off, play for a joke; a direction blowing thick and black, and never thinning - ‘35, ‘36, ‘37 - hittin’ hard and fast, straight off the dust, straight outta Woody’s very own beginnings. (36) A direction that was walking and “squatting” the length of 66 - a road littered with homeless men, with broken jalopies, and families, and Model Ts; with migrants and “their little piles of belongings in the shade of the big sign boards, out across the flat, hard-crust, gravelly desert”; with “whole swarms of hitch-hikers”, so many Woody often had no choice but to ride the rails - the red balls, high rollers and dead enders. Texas to Arkansas to California , from “Raton to Dodge City ”, to the “boweries, back streets, and Skid Rows”, the city jails and jungle camps, the “flea-bit rim of the garbage dump”. With a “guitar slung over his shoulder”, a “cap on his head”, stubbed and scruffed worse than a “lost dog in a hard rain”, Woody sung his way through many a day and long nights of “thin watery stew” and damm few bites, of passing applejack and watching the “coffee boil up in the can”; of “John Hardy” and “The Boll Weevil” and the “Columbus Stockade”, of singing bout “them hard, hard. . . hard, ole hard times”. Of words and tunes spun round and changed from orange crate to tar papered shack, of songs that always stayed the same - the songs and “whiney old ballads his mother had taught him” way back. From Lubbock to Clovis to San Bernardino; from Michigan, Mississip’ and Ohio - everybody wanted the same songs becos everybody was the same - no home, no job, no hope of work; tractored out by the dust and the drought, and the ‘cats; tractored out by the bank, “owing more than they could ever rake or scrape”. This wasn’t the Corncob Trio playing the Tokyo . Woody wasn’t just picking and singing around campfires and boxcars and corrugated shacks. He was “performing the past”. The songs were “all that was left of the land”, all that was left of people’s lives.

And in the intense, “almost reverent” looks; in a quiet “so still it almost crackled in the air”; in the “misty eyes” of hard grown men, Woody saw something he’d never seen before - something he’d never miss again. He saw his father riding high up in the saddle, his eyes alive with songs and toys and rhymes, with punching bags and hogs and pedigreed hunting dogs, and cattle. He saw his father stooped, broken, wrinkled, “shriveled like bacon in a skillet”; beaten down to the skid row, to nothing more than his “old, soiled tie”, and a “frayed white collar”. He saw his momma with “every eye in town on her”; he saw the kids and heard the “whispers”; he felt his old friends “duck their heads” and turn away. And in the jails and orchards and jungle camps, as he “listened to the stories” and “felt the anger and pain”; as he swung off a rollin reefer car with his “hands froze stiff” as “fine ice chips”; as the railroad bulls ran him drenched and dripping outta town; as he wrapped himself up for the night and huddled down, soaking, rolled in paper, a “little pile of shivering meat and bones”. . . as he went thumbing, walking out along that “ribbon of highway”, an “odd thought began to percolate”, to settle in on him - “these were his people”; he was one of them, he was no longer alone. Boll weeviled, mortgaged, dustbowled and busted, a broken Model T - everybody was the same, “everybody was an Okie”, and so was he.

And as he “roamed and rambled” past orchards brighter to taste and smell in their blazing orange, and red and greens; fruit hanging ripe and down and full, ready to “feed every hungry mouth” he’d ever seen; as he sighted and calibrated the gun thugs, deputy sheriffs, axe-handled vigilantes, the signs writ clear and mean: “Fruit, See It, Don’t Eat It”; “Fruit, Beat It”; as he thought back to last night and then some, to “two days, no eats”, to “oh I’d like to, son”, ministerially speaking, “for God’s love of your soul”, but you know “charity never saved a one”; as he dreamt of strapping on a couple pearl handled 44s, and filling up some 12 gauge with a load of “rocksalt and nails”. . . Woody felt it strong and slow and gradual, like a jackhammer spitting gravel. And by the time he’d seen every town from Salisaw to Jericho, every place Tom Joad’d been; by the time he starved his way through those “80 cent fields”, hit California and “blown down that highway, that road that had no end”; by then he knew it good - he had a family and a home; he was down and out, and bellied up - an Okie if ever there was one. And more than that, the way Woody figured, from now on, he could “sleep mighty comfortable with just that one name on his tombstone”. (37)

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And that was it. After nearly a decade of being ready - ready but just chasing the wind - Woody finally ran up against the Dust Bowl - the broken Okies, jalopies, and children - ran up against the mean harness bulls, and deputy thugs - up against the sharp end, up against the Depression. (38) After nearly a decade of being ready and going nowhere, Woody suddenly got himself blindsided - flat out, hard and straight - by a purpose, a meaning, an identity - a direction.

And that wasn’t all. With the Depression came the Wobblies and the commies, all sorts and shades of Bolshies, reds, and CPs. In the boxcars and migrant camps, organizing, battered and bloody, up and down the San Joaquin ; out in LA, right over the air, the same station as Woody - on KFVD. He ran into The Little Red Songbook, cut just right to fit a man’s pocket, just right “to fan the flames of discontent” - into Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, and Haywire Mac, all singing bout “Pie in the Sky”, “Solidarity”, and “Dumping the Bosses off Your Back”. (39) And that was the last of “sweet Melinda Lou” and “Rastus Brown”; of tarot cards, tea leaves, Jesus, and Kahlil Gibran; the last of “The Blue Boy”s, the storefronts, and cheap signs - Woody just dropped his brushes and laid his oils down. They couldn’t carry half the anger he was carting ‘round. And the old tunes and ballads started turning funny, sideways in his head. There was something about those songs - about Jimmy Rodgers yodeling his way out to California, “where the water tastes like cherry wine” - and the new ones were even worse - Kate Smith’s God “blessing” America, and Bing Crosby “dreaming his troubles away” - there was something that kept twisting over in his mind, like a pebble burning up to a slow rage in his shoe; something about The Carter Family - “Oh Lord you know I have no friend like you. . . This world’s not my home, I’m just a-passing through. . .” something about telling starving folks “not to worry”, “God was in the driver’s seat”, and besides their “treasures and hopes” were “all out beyond the blue”. Something that boiled up and over, standing The Carters and Jimmy on their heads, over and over again. (40)

"I been a farmin on the shares and always I was poor

my crops I laid into the banker’s store

my wife took down and died upon the cabin floor

now I ain’t got no home in this world anymore"

"Now there ought to be some yodeling in this song

there ought to be some yodeling in this song

but I can’t yodel

for the rattling in my lung"

"We got out to the West Coast broke

so dad gum hungry I thought I’d croak

and I bummed up a spud or two

and my wife fixed up a tater stew

we poured the kids full of it. mighty thin stew though;

you could read a magazine right through it.

Now I always have thought, and I always have figured

if that stew’d been jusssstt a little bit thinner,

some of these here pollli-TISH-uns couldda seen through it"

And out at KFVD the cards and letters kept rolling in - over 1500 in November of '37 alone. And Woody just kept rolling on - a man who “became whatever he saw”, who’d been “following his footsteps” and making his own rules since way back around six; forever “seeing it, sighting it, sucking it down”; turning it all into a “living, talking, breathing music”; a man whose hunger “had no end”, who would ever find his family in the camps & boxcars & bars & brawls & union halls - dancing down the airwaves, blowin in “with the dust and gone with the wind” - a man The ‘30s was just aching for - a man who finally stumbled across the Dust Bowl, the Depression, the broken lives and Model Ts; who finally found a purpose, a direction, an identity - something that tied him altogether, that kept him burning hotter than high octane.

And before long, Woody became “just Woody, just a voice and a guitar”, “singing the songs of a people” . . . and with the West Coast and East Coast liberals and radicals and New Dealers all hungering and looking for that voice, that “Shakespeare in overalls” - “harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim” - it wasn’t long before he became “that people” (41)

-----------------*****-----------------

And ‘course it wasn’t long ‘til the 60’s, and some 19 year old from Hibbing running out in the snow shouting, “Woody, where are you?” And writing his friends half hysterical from an old East Coast greystone mental hospital: “I know him and met him and saw him and sang to him. I know Woody - Goddamn”. (42)

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