Have a listen as David & Helen sing a few tunes and talk about how to play the spoons on WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show

by Ed Cray, originally featured on PBS: American Masters

He was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, on July 14, 1912, 12 days after the Democrats nominated his namesake for the presidency of the United States.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie — “Woody” almost immediately — was Charley Guthrie’s son and like his father ever the optimist. He was Nora’s son too, hers the gift of old songs, and a dreadful fear he would inherit her madness.

Together they raised Woody, his two brothers and two sisters in a middle-class, foredoomed home the neighbors judged one of the finest in that farming community turned oil boom town.

Life in Okemah might have been comfortable, with cotton prices up and beef down, but for the fires.

Fire was to dog Woody, boy and man. A kerosene lamp shattered – the OKEMAH LEDGER reported it as an accident, while folks in town whispered otherwise – and flames consumed his beloved older sister Clara, the one who called him “Woodblock,” when the boy was just months shy of his seventh birthday.

Another blaze leveled the family home, sending the Guthries to live in the weathered London house, high on the weedy hillside overlooking the Fort Smith and Western depot at the foot of Columbia Street.

There were other fires, unexplained. Woody was not yet 15 when his mother hurled a kerosene lamp at a dozing Charley, searing his chest from neck to navel. Members of Charley’s Masonic Lodge arranged to send Nora to the state asylum in Norman.

Years later, and half a continent distant, a short circuit in a newly repaired radio sent flames racing through the child’s bedding, and took the life of Woody’s charming daughter Cathy Ann, “Stackabones,” the youngster who inspired so many of her father’s magical songs for children.

And near the end of his wanderings, Woody splashed gasoline on a Florida campfire; it flared and severely burned his right arm. The puckered scars would leave him unable play guitar. He was left mute, the once restless youth turned rebel now a man resigned to his mother’s fate.

Guthrie was just 42 when he entered the hospital for the last time in 1954. His period of true creativity had spanned no more than eight or nine years, though in that time, he had traveled far, seen wonders and known defeats, and written as many as 1,400 songs. He had traveled Route 66, he boasted, enough to run it up to 6,666, back and forth, across the county as whim and winds took him.

All the while, he never seemed to find what he was looking for.

Marjorie, his second wife, came closest to replacing the mother Woody had lost when Nora was committed to the asylum. But Marjorie put their children first.

Woody sought, needed, so desperately a cause to believe in. Advocating a program of social and economic justice, the Communist Party, USA, offered that and more, but party apparatchiks never asked him to be a member.

Woody reached out to acquaintances – he who knew almost everyone – but could allow close only a bare handful of those he had called upon. There was Huddie Ledbetter, the huge black man pardoned from Louisiana’s dreaded Parchman Farm, and Huddie’s wife, Martha, who opened their Greenwich Village flat to Guthrie. There was Pete Seeger, who would later make Guthrie’s songs so well known; and actor Will Geer, Guthrie’s tutor in Marxist orthodoxy; Jim Longhi, a merchant marine buddy and future lawyer; and Gilbert Houston, stalwart, handsome, the would-be movie star they all called “Cisco.” Those few Woody let in, and damned few others, including the succession of women who sought to mother him and ended up in his bed.

Despite the rich legacy of his songs, still sung four decades after his death from Huntington’s disease, Guthrie was at best an indifferent guitar player, his efforts at Mother Maybelle Carter’s “lick” haphazard.

At the same time, he was a sterling musician. He played harmonica well, if backwards, with the bass notes on the right rather than the left. At other times he played bass fiddle, washboard, spoons, bones, straws, whatever came to hand, rhythmically underpinning other, better players. It bothered him not at all.

He might have been a middling fiddle or mandolin player had he practiced, but he knew he would never be as good as his boyhood friend Matt Jennings. Over the years Matt the butcher would master as many as 600 fiddle tunes. Woody probably never used more than 30 or 40, mostly borrowed melodies, for his 400-plus-recorded songs. Good enough was good enough for Woody Guthrie.

Come spring, an itch came over him, a need to see beyond the next hill, beyond the county line to the next town and the next. He hated riding the rails, fearing railroad bulls and mutilation if he fell beneath a freight car. He preferred instead to travel by thumb, with a handful of paintbrushes shoved in a back pocket. If a song or two didn’t earn a meal in a café or a drink in a bar, he could always paint a few signs or a storefront for 50 cents – enough to last him for a day or two if he didn’t share it with the other hobos camped along a siding just out of town. Mostly he shared it, if he didn’t plain give it away.

He was, like Walt Whitman, whose “swimmy” poetry he disdained, a tangle of unresolved contradictions. And like Whitman, he embraced multitudes.

He was a faithful correspondent, writing, pouring on the page word pictures of startling beauty, letters so compelling that friends kept them for years to read and reread.

He was an unfaithful husband, flitting from lover to lover as easily and as often as he pawned his Sears Roebuck guitar.

He fathered eight children by three wives, and perhaps a ninth, unacknowledged. He left the raising of the first three to his first wife, doted on the next four with Marjorie, and, lost in illness, ignored the last of the children by a third wife. Yet he had such regard for his “manly seed” that he refused to pay for a hotel-room abortion when one of his on-again lovers discovered herself pregnant. His singing companion Cisco Houston secretly gave the frightened girl the $500.

Unconcerned about money, he was generous – to a fault. Guthrie would give away his day’s wages to a migrant family when his own children had to rely on an aunt for dinner. He was just as likely to give his jacket to a shivering fruit picker, his meal to a gaunt mother, or his last pennies to a grimy kid who had never eaten a Tootsie Roll, or drunk a Delaware Punch.

A radio-wise professional by the time he landed in New York City, he played the country boy just off the turnip truck. Well read – particularly in psychology and Eastern religions – he drawled terse comments and aphorisms seemingly sprung from the wind-whipped soil of the Dust Bowl, but more often his own droll wordplay.

Guthrie walked out on a weekly CBS radio show — and its lavish salary — because a sponsor wanted to tell him what to sing on the air. Yet he would meekly accept Communist Party censorship of his unpaid articles for THE DAILY WORKER.

He knew drifters and movie stars, migrant workers and Skid Row barflies, Martha Graham dancers and dance hall floozies, abstract expressionists Jackson Pollack and Robert Motherwell, as well as their wives, girl-friends, and lovers.

And he wrote about them all – in diaries, on random sheets of wrapping paper, on paper bags laid open to catch his torrent of words, his cascade of images, metaphors, allusions, and illusions. He put his name to his autobiography, but shared his royalties with the editor who transformed his bulky manuscript into a rambling narrative. The book was largely fiction – an “autobiographical novel,” Guthrie called it – while his unpublished fiction was real, the stuff of his own life and times.

He was Woody in all his contradictions and complexities – the man you see and hear in Peter Frumkin’s sterling documentary.

A professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, Ed Cray is the author of Ramblin’ Man: The Life & Times of Woody Guthrie.

Originally Published in Rolling Stone

Daughter Nora Guthrie explains the story behind the song, shares her favorite story about her father’s time in the city

By Jonathan Bernstein
July 14, 2014

Although he’s most commonly associated with the plains of Oklahoma, Woody Guthrie spent the last 27 of his life in country’s biggest urban area. “Nobody seems to know Woody ever lived in New York,” says Nora Guthrie of her father. “As I was working on the archives, I was totally surprised at how many songs he had written in the city. I figured if I didn’t know much about it, not a lot of other people did either.”

Come September 23rd, many of those songs will be released in My Name Is New York, a three-disc compilation that pairs tracks Guthrie wrote about his adopted hometown with informal interviews featuring Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Nora and Arlo Guthrie. Below listen to an exclusive stream of the title track, a previously unreleased demo, and read our conversation with Nora, which includes more info about the forthcoming LP and her father’s time in NYC.

When did you come across this recording of “My Name Is New York”? Are there many more unheard demos like it, or is it rare to unearth a previously unheard Woody recording these days?

Believe it or not, it wasn’t until I was in my forties that I first became aware of this song. That’s when I was unpacking all these boxes of his things and creating the archives. It blew my mind. Woody’s publisher, TRO, sent me copies of all the tapes of songs he had sent them. A lot of them he had never recorded. So, yes, there are more, but these are publisher’s demos. Woody would put them down on tape at home as he was working on them. You can almost hear the pages turning as he goes through the lyric, and the sound of the pencil scribbling revisions.

I doubt if he ever meant for anyone to hear his recording of “My Name Is New York,” but I felt that the lyrics were so stunning, I decided to release it publicly. I remember that after September 11th, I had wished we’d had a cover of the song because it’s so anthemic for the city.

The song really gives you the impression that the city was very important to Woody. What do you think he loved about New York?
His natural timing was slow, very easy going, Western plains styled. NYC kicked him into a higher gear. The people he met here – Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, my mother Marjorie – made sure things got done, not just talked or dreamed or sung about.

Songwriting became his job, a description he was as proud of using as any songwriter in the Brill Building might have been. Only differences being, he was choosing what he wanted to write about and he wasn’t getting paid to do it. My mother would get really pissed at him if he didn’t apply himself and write three to five songs a day. She’d say, “Suppose the guy who builds the bridge decides ‘Nah, I don’t feel like building that bridge today.'” He had to be like everyone else in the city – every secretary, every construction worker, every fruit-stand seller – get up early, brush your teeth and get to work.

If Woody had been healthy during the Sixties folk revival in New York, what role do you think he would have played?

My first impulse is to say that he would have played a role similar to Pete Seeger’s. But then again, they were so different. Pete didn’t smoke, curse, drink or womanize, a perfect role model for all the young folkies at the summer camps and universities in the Sixties. Woody did all of the above, even getting arrested a few times for it.

During the Sixties, I’m sure they would have joined together at all the marches for racial equality, voter’s rights, Vietnam War protests, worker’s rights and things like that. But I think Woody might have actually left the scene, preferring to be out on the road alone, writing songs about what was going on in the towns and cities he landed in.

In all of your research for this project and personal memories and stories you’ve collected over the years, do you have a favorite New York-related anecdote or story about your father?
One of my favorite stories, from my mother, happened when we were living out in Coney Island. My dad left a note on the table that said “Went out to get cigarettes.” He came home two weeks later. Turns out he had met someone at the corner store who told him about something that was going on in the city, so he went there to find out what was happening. There he ran into someone else, who told him there was something going on in Jersey, so he went there to find out what was going on in Jersey. There, he ran into someone who told him something was going on in Philly, so he went to Philly to see what was going on.

He finally came home two weeks later, without any cigarettes. So he went back out to get some cigarettes.

One of the most repeated lines in the song “My Name Is New York” is the phrase about “rich folks, bums, mansions and slums.” What do you think Woody would think of New York City in 2014?

It’s still rich folks, bums, mansions and slums, but the ratio has changed. Now, it’s rich folks, rich folks, rich folks, bums, mansions, mansions, mansions, slums. I think he’d have left town by now.

Originally published in the New York Times
By LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES APRIL 3, 2017

“So I turn up at Sloane Square, around the corner from the Royal Court, this beautiful house,” he said. “This very beautiful girl opens the door, very tall, dark hair. She says, ‘Hi, I’m Rebecca.’”

It was Rebecca Hall, and the house, lined with drama books, was her father’s. If Mr. Abili had ever heard of him, the renowned director Peter Hall, that might have been intimidating, but theater was brand-new to him. And the others in the little group — including Ms. Hall, Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Khalid Abdalla and, making occasional appearances, Benedict Cumberbatch — were all just starting out.

The group’s leader, Mr. Abdalla (“The Kite Runner”), told Mr. Abili that he should go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, so he did.

For Mr. Abili, who performed last season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Ivo van Hove’s “Antigone,” starring Juliette Binoche, it is easy to remember his lost young self. That may be one source of his humility, a quality that made Mr. O’Reilly swear as he mentioned it with gruff affection. “Emperor” has a cast of seven, and he wanted Mr. Abili to make a solo entrance at the end for a separate bow.

“He absolutely, categorically refused,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “I had to have a cast intervention for him to even accept where he steps forward for a second and does it. The cast all said, ‘If you don’t step forward, we’re going to step back.’”

After “Emperor,” Mr. Abili has some work waiting for him back in Britain (Dawn French’s television series “Delicious”), but mostly he would like to stick around. He would like, in fact, to become an American — in which case Mr. Jackson’s criticism of casting British actors wouldn’t technically apply.

Mr. Abili said he had met Mr. Jackson once, very briefly, when he was a drama student, and Mr. Jackson was promoting a film in London. “He was very nice to me, really cool guy,” Mr. Abili recalled. “And he said to me,” he added, slipping into a dead-on impression of Mr. Jackson’s baritone, “‘Next time I see you, you better have a job.’”

Mr. Abili laughed, and then, in his own voice, issued what sounded like an invitation: “So if I see him, if he wants to come, I’ve got a job.