Daughter Nora Guthrie talks about the life and legacy of music icon Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie’s stupendous creative output was tangible and real. While travelling throughout the American landscape during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, his unflinching eyes captured the plight of refugees, the homeless and the jobless, the workers and the disenfranchised. “My eyes have been my camera, taking pictures of the world, and my songs have been messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls,” he wrote in his memoir Bound For Glory.

The legendary American singer-songwriter, who was born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma, wrote over 3,000 songs that count timeless masterpieces, such as America’s folk national anthem This Land Is Your Land, Pasture of Plenty, Do Re Mi, Hard Travelling, Hobo’s Lullaby, 1913 Massacre, and many others. Those poignant folk ballads created the modern folk tradition.

What the footloose folk poet witnessed and felt during his first-hand look at the tough American reality of the time changed American popular music forever. His work and life helped shape musicians driven to express the human realm, such as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg. Guthrie’s vision continues to shine on a new generation of songwriters and interpreters.

Since 1992, his daughter Nora Guthrie has committed to preserving her father’s vast creative legacy. The Woody Guthrie Archives consists of over 10,000 items: typed song lyrics, scribbled notes, recordings, photos and sketches. The Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa houses them. The public museum devoted to Woody just celebrated its tenth anniversary with concerts, the Woodie Guthrie Prize awarded this year to the punk band Pussy Riot and the show Woody Guthrie: People Are the Song curated in collaboration with The Morgan Library & Museum, Woody Guthrie Publications, and music historian Bob Santelli.

But what a cruel twist of fate that he lost his mind too soon. His career was tragically cut short at 42 by the onset of Huntington’s Disease, a genetic illness that affects the brain. He spent most of his last 13 years in mental institutions. The disease was not understood at the time, nor were there treatments. Huntington’s chorea ravaged his body and mind until he died in 1967 in New York.

“My father continued to write up until the early 1960s when he could no longer hold a pen,” Nora tells wknd. “Even then, we have pages of notes written that are illegible, which only he knows what he is on paper. I’ve tried to decipher many of them and was able to publish some of them in the book Wardy Forty: Greystone Park State Hospital Revisited, which is a retrospective of his life with Huntington’s Disease and his years in the hospital.”

Woody was a giant: a master of realism, a symbol of independent-minded social consciousness, and a committed activist who lived by humanist principles. There was something profound about him. He was a sociological force, a folk hero whose creations occurred on street corners, trains and subways. To him, imagining was experiencing. The founding father of protest music wanted to be absolutely there, in the harsh reality of the country he loved, among the migrant workers, the farmers, the voiceless, the aching ones and the union organisers. His songs express the humanising power of music and the bone-deep connection we all have to certain themes. We landed an exclusive interview with his daughter Nora Guthrie, who is 73.

Edited excerpts from an interview:

Your father’s life was never a bed of roses. How did his early years in Oklahoma, where he experienced a series of tragic personal losses — the death of his sister Clara, his father’s financial ruin and his mother’s institutionalisation — mould his outlook on life?

He developed empathy for others early on. As a child, the events and people around you create the foundational emotions that stay with you for life. Having his family broken by illness, fire, and death, affected him greatly. They made him the man he was. You hear this in all of his songs — songs about tragic circumstances, like the dust bowl ballads, loss of family members, inequities and injustices — because he himself experienced so much and was surrounded by others who were also going through so many tragedies – from environmental disasters to World Wars to Depression, and homelessness and pennilessness, and so many struggles. He had to struggle to keep hoping, which is why he wrote so much about hope. He needed to constantly keep that reaffirmation alive. I think that’s one of the attractions he had for my mother — the world’s best hoper!

Among the themes he explored, which are more relevant today?

Remember the old saying — in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. Woody added a few more to the list of things that never seem to change. This Land is Your Land addresses citizenship at its very core and democracy as the tool to ensure people have choices. Today, voting rights are being not just seriously threatened but also literally destroyed in so many ways. Deportee addresses the faceless, nameless invisibility of immigrants who are often the first line of workers who cultivate our nation’s food supplies as well as so many other bedrock jobs in healthcare, transportation, mom-and-pop shops, and so much more. I Ain’t Got No Home reiterates the constant ongoing refugee cycles that are occurring around the world. Dust Bowl Ballads depicts the dangers of climate change and abuse of the land by big agra. Pretty Boy Floyd warns us that “some rob you with a six gun, and some with a fountain pen,” shining the light on white-collar crime, which is also exploding around the world.

He was a political analyst through his writing. In his own words, “Left-wing, right-wing, chicken wing, it don’t make no difference to me”. Why was he erroneously associated with the communists?

The 1920s, ’30s and ’40s were a wild time in politics! The ideas coming from Europe regarding the unionisation of workers were particularly timely in the USA. Ideas of class warfare ignited by the Russian Revolution were also a fascinating option to many Americans. All these ideas, entering a country just grown up enough, must have been fascinating options to explore. Whether it was communist, socialist, populist, democratic, or republican, they were all out there vying for people’s attention and support. The movements changed and evolved frequently, as did their followers. Everyone, at some point, even in Oklahoma, was interested in socialism, which, at one point, had the largest number of socialist parties in the country. Everyone in the cities was interested in what the communists had to say about working conditions in manufacturing. The suffragette and civil rights movement were in the petri dish of the first half of the century. Most people supported pieces of all of these movements that were eventually incorporated into two major parties, whether it was the eight-hour working day, public education, social security, etc. So, he was erroneously associated solely with the Communist Party. But he preferred to call himself a “commonist”.

You said his poverty was an opportunity “to go deeper within yourself and say that it’s about who I am looking at in the mirror. It’s not about my house or my car or whatever. It’s about who I am”. Did Woody find freedom in possessing nothing?

wknd@khaleejtimes.com