Bound for Glory, Woody Guthrie 1912-1967

Posted by Ray Schaufeld on Tue, 29 Jul 2014

The man's life is his own ballad.Woody, named after the President Woodrow Wilson was born in Okemah in Oklahoma, a town that experienced the crazy short-term prosperity and subsequent slow death and ecological devastion of the oil boom. His father sold real-estate, an occupation that led to physical battles and broken hands. Everyone craved work and jumped trains to seek it. This was extremely hazardous, a person could freeze to death in in ice-car, or hang on by their freezing fingertips and get beaten and run out of town by the cops who were paid to move on impoverished new arrivals.

He learned guitar from an uncle, soon began songwriting and played in bars. 'This is land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York Island', that was is life and his belief. He died far too young of Huntingdon's Chorea, a truly horrible genetically transmitted disease which also killed his mother.

Miraculous then to discover an autobiography that fizzes with life and energy. Written in the 'country' voice that was his mother tongue he gives us the fighting, joking, and desperate downhome will to survive and thrive that is unique and also universal. Bob Dylan wrote 'Song for Woody Guthrie', I have tried too, there's room for multitudes more.

Comments

Submitted by celticman on

you got it Elsie, look at the towns in Steinbeck's classic The Grapes of Wrath and the way they treated economic migrants (Okies). Guthrie believed in equality for all. God bless him. 

 

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

It was an era when 'strangers in town' often got battered. Staying at home in a town mined for oil after all the work was completed and all the fish in the river were dead was not an option either. The song 'go to sleep you weary Hobo' was written by Goebel Reeves and immortalised by Woody. His son Arlo Guthrie and Emmylou Harris have also done good covers.

I like Grapes of Wrath too, CM, also Cannery Row. We had Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men at school. It's a book that cries out for the 'second storyteller' rewrite from the perspective of Curly's wife or someone who knows her from start to finish. Jean Rhys did it for Bertha Mason, the mad wife in the attic in Jane Eyre when she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea.

Submitted by celticman on

go for it Elsie, write from Curly's wife's perspective.

 

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

CM, I have piles of writing ideas that I have started and not yet completed. If anyone on Abc wants to adopt this one that's fine by me.      Elsie