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| This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen Magazine #100 (June/July 2002). the magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription. |
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Cover Story
Three Generations of Guthries
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Music has always been handed down through families, with fathers and mothers singing and playing for sons and daughters, passing songs, tunes, and dances from generation to generation. In the world of American folk music, the Guthries are one noteworthy example of this universal experience.
In the 1930s and 40s, Woody Guthrie wrote thousands of songs and poems, two autobiographical novels, and numerous newspaper columns, and he covered nearly every piece of paper in reach with cartoons and sketches. He invented the singer/songwriter genre, writing and singing highly personal songs about the world he saw around him at a time when American popular music was ruled by the song factories of Tin Pan Alley. His best-known song, "This Land is Your Land," has become an unofficial national anthem, while many others, like "Pastures of Plenty," "So Long It's Been Good to Know You," and "Roll on Columbia," have become an integral part of American musical tradition.
After Guthrie's career was cut short by illness, his son Arlo Guthrie took up the performing role, making a high-profile debut in the late 1960s and still going strong today, an enduring and very popular figure in American folk music who shares both his father's sense of humor and optimism and his heartfelt social concern. Woody's daughter Nora Guthrie runs the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, gathering and preserving her father's work and making it available to new audiences through books and new collaborative recordings of his music. From the next generation, Arlo's children Abe Guthrie and Sarah Lee Guthrie have taken up musical careers of their own, Abe in a contemporary rock band and Sarah Lee as an eclectic singer/songwriter.
What seems to run through the Guthries is a sense of roots and place, an inspirational hopefulness, an enthusiasm for all kinds of music, and a love of people. Here are short looks at five members of this American musical family.
Woody Guthrie
Guthrie's life was filled with family tragedies. When he was a teenager, his mother began acting erratically, sometimes violently, the first symptoms of Huntington's disease, the hereditary, degenerative neurological disease that would take both her life and his. She spent her last years uncommunicative in a state mental hospital. His father, whose business failed during the Depression, became an alcoholic, leaving his children to fend for themselves. Guthrie saw a sister (and later, a daughter) burn to death in shocking household accidents. He saw the worst of poverty in Depression-era America, in the ruined towns of the Dust Bowl and the hobo jungles and migrant camps of the west, saw men dying in torpedoed ships during World War II, and saw corporate powers squeezing the life out of workers. Yet throughout his life he was an unflagging optimist who always believed that people had the power to make the world a better place.
In an often-quoted statement of his musical philosophy, Guthrie said in 1944: "I hate a song that makes you think you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose.... Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun of you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling.... I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down nor rolled over you, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you."
