Foreword:

I FIRST MET WOODY GUTHRIE one evening in 1940 at the studio of WNYC, New York City's radio station, where I was a producer of special music events. We had just finished a broadcast of folk songs from Kentucky. The telephones were ringing-people calling us from every part of the city, telling us what a good show it had been.

The performers were traditional singers, born and bred Kentuckians, who knew the very smell of the earth and the exact shade of blue of the sky under which they and their British ancestors had lived for generations. That night they had sung about their own troubled Harlan County, of the years-long coal miners' strike, of the fight to organize a union. The words they spoke and the songs they sang recalled poignantly, and with some bitterness, the violence of company thugs, the starvation, and the determination to win a better life. Aunt Molly Jackson, her sister Sarah Ogan, and her half brother Jim Garland, all of them militant strike leaders, were in the studio. And there were others, come to help out.

There was much hubbub in Studio D, guests and performers talking among themselves. Someone touched me on the shoulder. "See that little guy over there, in Levis and a plaid shirt, the one with the wiry-looking hair? That's Woody Guthrie." I looked around. I had heard about the Oklahoma singer, but had never met him.

"Ask him to sing Tom Joad-it's a ballad he just finished. It's based on the Grapes of Wrath." (Everybody in New York was talking about Steinbeck's novel and the movie Hollywood had made of it.)

I walked over to the thin little man and introduced myself. We exchanged a few words, and then I asked, "About that song you've just written: would you mind singing it for us?"

"Don't mind if I do."

Woody pushed a chair into the center of the room. He put his foot on the seat, swung the guitar from his back to playing position, tuned up and strummed for a moment or two. All eyes were instantly on him. The hubbub died down quickly and everyone found a chair. The strumming began again.

Tom Joad got out of the old McAlester Pen.
There he got his parole.
After four long years on a man-killing charge
Tom Joad came a-walking down the road, poor boy,
Tom Joad came a-walking down the road.
Tom Joad walked down to the neighbors farm, Found his family.
They took Preacher Casey and loaded in a car
And his mother said: "We got to git away."
His mother said: "We got to git away."

Woody sang the long ballad from beginning to end. The silence in the room deepened, and as he sang the sad tale of the dispossessed people of the Dust Bowl, we all knew that Woody was singing the truth, telling the story of his people exactly as it happened.

We also sensed that he had the quality of greatness. Hence forth he would speak not only for the people of Oklahoma and Texas, and for the migrant workers of the peach and grape fields of California, but for all of us who lived through those troubled times.

Woody came to the station often in those days. Sometimes we turned the program over to him to sing what he liked: prison songs and British and homemade-American ballads. He loved the stories of the American bad men, of the outlaw heroes who took the law into their own hands. He sang of man-made disasters and natural disasters. But we loved most of all hearing him sing his own songs.

The man who wrote This Land is Your Land and So Long, Ifs Been Good to Know You was the great balladeer of the American Depression. He told the unvarnished truth exactly as he saw and experienced it in his wanderings along the highways and byways of the nation. Woody Guthrie, born in the small town of Okemah, Oklahoma, was the unofficial chronicler of his generation. The legacy he left was not an academic history, but a human document made up of a thousand songs and a large body of writings of every kind.

Woody was the poet of his people, just as Robert Burns of Scotland and Federico Garcia Lorca of Spain were of theirs. Like them and like countless epic poets and medieval minstrels, he created works that are universal and will be remembered long after the events and issues that inspired them have been forgotten. Like them, he sang the old songs of his people, revamped them to fit the times, and infused them with new life. He was an authentic American genius, a common man with uncommon gifts. In his songs and writings he combined country wit, pioneer traditions, and colorful and unhackneyed country language with a skilled writer's art. He represents, better than anyone else, the human unity of rural and urban America.

A survivor of some of America's hardest years, he transcended his personal trials without ever losing his great zest and love of life. He had more love, and more compassion for ordinary people, than anyone I have ever known.

His sense of humor was prodigious and, like every great humorist, he could stand off and laugh at himself:

I am five feet and some inches in my brother's socks feet. My hair is wavy when I'm two haircuts behind, and plumb curly when I'm four. I ain't got any bad habits except my own, and never take a drink unless I am by myself or with somebody.

He used words with uncanny skill:

A man's ambition is little of him, that'll always run to the boss and tell, a woman's love is often little and it's a libel that they tattle, I started to say "tittle" to rime with "little"-but switched to "tattle" to rime with "prattle," 'cause tit for tit and tat for tat, a scabbers heart beats awful flat. . . . Poet and rarin to show it.

It has been my aim in writing this book to tell the story of Woody Guthrie exactly as it happened. Some of my information has come from his published works: his autobiography, Bound for Glory (1943); American Folksong (1947); and his newspaper column, Woody Sez (1939-41).

Much documentation, however, came from Woody's unpublished writings, presented here for the first time. He wrote copiously about himself and fortunately kept everything. Through the generosity of Mrs. Marjorie Guthrie, I was able to consult such important works as Boomchasers, an earlier version of Bound for Glory; Silver Mine, a novel of his years in Texas; and Siackabones, written for the first-born child of his marriage to Marjorie.

I have also extracted data from the wealth of other material placed at my disposal by Marjorie Guthrie and the Guthrie Children's Trust Fund: from Woody's numerous letters, from notes he wrote in book margins and on record albums, and from countless ruled notebooks filled in his own handwriting with commentary on his songs, his private life, and the world around him.

Woody was a man of many talents and interests, but he literally lived his music. His feelings went beyond what most people call a "love of music"; for Woody, music was a basic need, as necessary as eating, drinking, breathing. Wherever he went, his guitar went too, and he played it everywhere-in the migrant camps of California, the war-ravaged towns of Sicily, and the New York subways.

Throughout the book I have quoted Woody's own words as much as possible so that he could speak for himself-tell his story as he saw and lived it. For the same reason I have presented my interviews with Mrs. Guthrie as they happened. I saw no reason to rewrite what she had so vividly described in her own words. Many pages in the latter part of the book are given over to her reminiscences. No one knew Woody better or longer, and no one is as qualified to tell the true story of the last twenty-five years of his life.

Finally, I sifted material from the writings of others: from the recollections of Woody's friends and from the 1940 interviews with folklorist Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress. The reader will find many gaps in the narrative: lack of data on his brothers and sisters, his first wife and their three children. These lapses are not oversights but are due to the unavailability of information on these earlier years.

A generation has passed since Woody sang his first songs. We are again at war; there is poverty in the midst of plenty, and hate among our people where love should be. Again, as in Guthrie's time, society is in ferment. Again, the conscience of youth has been stirred to action, as young people become aware of the threat to the individual in the faceless-ness of our mechanized world.

In a recent letter to the Guthrie Children's Trust Fund a young admirer of Woody and his son Arlo wrote:

I am sixteen years old, and I don't really dig the older generation. All I can say is if there were more people like Woody still alive I don't think there would be anything like the "generation gap." I envy anyone who was a friend of Woody's and I really wished I'd known him. He's changed my whole idea of music and opened my eyes. Thank God our generation has Arlo. Yours truly. M.S.

So long Woody -- it's been good to know you ...
HY NYC 1969

PROCEED TO CHAPTER 1: OKLAHOMA