American Music Review
Vol. XLI, No. 2, Spring 2012
By Tiffany Colannino & Nora Guthrie, Woody Guthrie Archives
14 July 2012 marks Woodrow Wilson Guthrie's 100th birthday. Woody's legacy is alive and thriving today, thanks in part to the thousands of documents he created during his lifetime that have been preserved in the Woody Guthrie Archives.
The Woody Guthrie Archives is a small research repository located in Mount Kisco, New York. Open to researchers since 1996, the Archives preserves and promotes the social, political, and cultural values that Woody contributed to society through his life and music. In addition to supporting research and scholarship, the Archives also curates thematic exhibits for museums worldwide, supports educators by providing free access to online curricula, delivers public educational multimedia presentations, supports an annual Fellowship, and has piloted an International Archives Exchange Program.
It is nearly impossible for any one individual to truly grasp all of the information Woody has left us in the Archives. The collection includes lyrics, artwork, notebooks, scrapbooks, photographs, correspondence, manuscripts, periodicals, books, media, concert flyers, postcards, and personal papers that reflect all facets of Woody's life. There are over one hundred bound diaries and journals that Woody meticulously filled with stream-of-consciousness writings, poignant and insightful musings on current affairs and historical events, and his hopes for the future. Throughout these notebooks one finds pages decorated with ink or watercolor drawings, cartoons, or personal annotations. In some cases, botanicals, leaves, or flowers are glued into his notebooks creating a fascinating blend of texture and color. In addition to notebooks, he left us with over 5000 pages of loose-leaf writings that include plays, short stories, and articles.
The amount of artwork organized in the Archives reminds us that Woody actually started out as a visual artist, painting small oils and commercial signs in Pampa, Texas in the 1930s. The Archives holds over 600 pieces of artwork created throughout the late 1930s through the early 1950s. During the later period, most of Woody's art supplies came from the local corner store, and consisted of inexpensive charcoal, watercolor, pen and ink, pencil, pastels, children's crayons, construction paper, and artists' tablets. Over time, many of these pieces have become very fragile. Among the sturdier pieces, the collection includes all the drafts as well as final versions of the illustrations he created for his autobiography Bound For Glory. His early cartoon works, created in the 1930s for his newspaper column, "Woody Sez," come from yet another part of the collection. Additional political cartoon notebooks penned during his stay in Los Angeles highlight some of the "hot" topics of the day. His visual artworks reflect scenes he encountered in his daily life, as well as later abstracts created in the 1940s in New York City.
Woody moved to New York City in 1940, where he met Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company who would become his second wife. In the 1970s, Marjorie transferred boxes of Woody's creative works from the family home in Queens to Guthrie's business manager Harold Leventhal's offices in Manhattan. These documents, housed in filing cabinets for over thirty years, were used sparingly until the mid-1990s, when Woody and Marjorie's daughter Nora Guthrie revived her mother's vision. Together with Leventhal and archivist Jorge Arevalo, she created a research archives that would ensure the longterm preservation of her father's legacy and provide scholars with access to these valuable resources. In addition to Woody's life and creative legacy, researchers have used the collection to study a multitude of topics including politics, modernity, feminism, race relations, war, arts, culture, and spirituality. Much of this research has resulted in new book publications, scholarly articles, documentary films, and of course, music.
There are over 3000 lyrics in the Archives, dating from 1934 through 1957, and this number keeps growing as new songs are discovered tucked away throughout the collection. Among them are the original drafts of "This Land Is Your Land," "Jesus Christ," "Pretty Boy Floyd," "Deportee," "Union Maid," "Vigilante Man," and "Tom Joad." Woody compiled several hundred of these lyrics into chronological and topical songbooks, which he used for various radio and live performances. Thousands more remain as sheets of loose-leaf paper, arranged alphabetically. Woody never learned to write musical notation, focusing his attention on the words and message of his songs rather than on their melodies. As a result, most of the unrecorded lyrics in the Archives have no accompanying music other than the occasional remark regarding the key, tempo, or traditional tune he had in mind while composing the lyric.
Woody wrote songs about almost any topic imaginable: his first hand experiences of the migration out of the Dust Bowl in "Dust Bowl Refugee" and "Do Re Mi"; the Second World War in "Round and Round Hitler's Grave" and "All You Fascists Bound To Lose"; historical events such as "1913 Massacre," the Italian Hall disaster that killed seventy-three striking copper miners' children and their families in Calumet, Michigan, and "The Sinking of the Reuben James," the first US Navy ship sunk by deliberate enemy action during World War II. For music historians, however, the little-known, previously unrecorded lyrics are the most surprising. These include lyrics for children's songs as well as topics ranging from flying saucers to baseball heroes, love obsessions, dishwashing and daily routines, New York City subways and street life, and odes to musicians, friends, and political and cultural figures. For Woody, virtually anything could be worthy of a lyric.
Since 1996, many contemporary musicians have been given access to these lyrics. To date, over nine complete albums of previously unrecorded song lyrics with newly-composed melodies have been issued, while other artists have set music to single tracks. The first to record Woody's lyrics with new melodies were English punk rocker Billy Bragg and Americana band Wilco. Mermaid Avenue Vol. I and Vol. II are widely recognized by critics and scholars as the breakthrough records that began the resurgence of Woody's legacy. Berlin composer Wenzel, the Klezmatics, Jonatha Brooke, Rob Wasserman with guests Lou Reed, Madeleine Peyroux, Nellie McKay, Ani Difranco, Pete Seeger, Tony Trischka, and Michael Franti, are among the most notable artists to work with Guthrie's lyrics. Woody's lyrics seem to easily transmutate from what was originally written as "folk" music to many different contemporary genres, from folk to punk, klezmer, cabaret, Americana, jazz, and even folk-bop. These projects highlight Woody's prowess as lyricist and poet in addition to his talents as a performer and public figure.
It is usually the visiting musicians who, unwittingly, show us this chameleon aspect of Woody's oeuvre. When musicians are invited in to "browse" the lyrics, they are given a lot of room, and a lot of privacy. The most important thing is to allow them to discover something unique that might have previously gone unnoticed. They are usually there without a research project per se, therefore they tend to have a broad vision that is simply based on an element of curiosity. In a sense, they are looking for something to draw them into a story, rather than for confirmation of a narrative they already have in mind. It usually turns out that their personal discovery ripples out to become a larger scholarly one. One can argue that the musicians often turn out to be our best, and most surprising, researchers.
Boston punk band Dropkick Murphys made personal connections with lyrics that mentioned their hometown, and ended up composing music to "Shipping Up To Boston," which was featured in Martin Scorcese's film The Departed, as well as becoming the iconic Boston Red Sox 2007 World Series anthem. Jonatha Brooke's The Works focused on lyrics about loves won and lost, emotions at times gentlemanly or raw. "All You Gotta Do Is Touch Me" reveals a sensual side to Guthrie that would have been culturally taboo in the 1940s, with its graphic lyrics ("All you gotta do is touch me all day / All you gotta do is kiss me all night"). And it was through the Klezmatic's research for Wonder Wheel and Happy Joyous Hanukah that the world learned about Woody's "Jewish" lyrics with topics ranging from the history of Hanukah and Jewish holidays to Yiddish-speaking characters, blintzes, humuntoshen, the Jewish prayer book, and more. The album was so convincingly rich in Jewish culture that it caused one person to write, "I never knew Woody was Jewish!" Of course, he wasn't. But his celebration of his in-laws' religion reveals the depth of content, empathy, history, and humor that Woody familiarized himself with as he began this particular song cycle.
The process the musicians go through in researching lyrics to work with is both structured and improvisatory. The first stage is to complete a listing of all their discoveries, questions, and requests. We review the list to consider if the lyrics have already been recorded, are under a previous agreement with a different artist, or are ineligible for various other reasons. Interestingly, we have discovered that Woody often kept lyrics, and even poems, written by others in his notebooks. There have been one or two cases where lyrics were misidentified as Woody's and corrections had to be made. Jonatha Brooke discovered a typed lyric, titled "Madonna On The Curb." After setting the lyric to music and recording it, it was brought to our attention that it was actually a poem written by Christopher Morley in the early 1920s. Thankfully, we were able to contact the Morley estate, and they graciously allowed the song's life to continue with the corrected author. But, it was interesting to discover that Woody Guthrie was a fan of Christopher Morley!
Creating music to these lyrics must always, first and foremost, remain a creative process. That means that the musicians are given a great deal of leeway in how the lyrics will eventually be recorded. These are not historic documents set to music. They are lyrics that are meant to be sung, and therefore, have to be "singable." We work together with musicians to find a balance between what works as a song and what pays due respect to the original structure and intent of the lyric. Additionally, many of Woody's lyrics are, by today's standards, quite long. Some range up to (and beyond) eighty verses. Woody was a fast writer, and most often did little to no editing. For the sake of the song, sometimes words are rearranged, edited down, with choruses or bridges created. This is the improvisatory aspect of the process. Each collaboration has its own individual way of creating and one has to give the artists some wiggle room. There are no rules. There is only the intention of revealing more and more of what Woody's life was like and what his lyrics speak to. Ultimately, the point of the whole exercise is to do, as Woody would say, "A good job of work."
