Chapter 4 - NEW YORK:

IN THE EARLY 1940's New York was the scene of political and artistic ferment. Though the worst of the Depression was over, there were violent strikes and demonstrations for relief and jobs. The fight for social security, social justice, and racial equality involved not only those directly affected, but many professional people and artists as well. The war in Europe was threatening to engulf America and anti-war demonstrations and meetings were held everywhere.

Activities of all kinds flourished. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) art projects, supported by the federal government since the early Depression years, had generated a new vitality. There was experimentation with new ideas and forms in theater, music, dance, fine arts, and literature. Professional artists were reaching out beyond narrow traditional confines. Conservatory-trained musicians were listening to and even trying to emulate the "hot jazz" of that time. At the many fund-raising parties for political and social causes, at the famous rent parties held to help friends in need, musicians reared in the classics got a second education from "black-butt" boogie-woogie pianists. White and black gathered uptown at the Harlem night spots-at the famous Savoy to watch the dancers and, if you had the money, at the Cotton Club to hear Cab Calloway.

Onto this scene came another kind of music: folk music, the sound of rural America. City youth listened enthusiastically to country singers coming in from the trouble spots of the nation. There was Aunt Molly Jackson, her sister Sarah Ogan, and her half brother Jim Garland, all strike leaders from Harlan County, Kentucky, where coal miners had been fighting since the 1920's to organize an honest union. Huddie Ledbetter ("Leadbelly"), the complete black musician, played his twelve-string guitar and sang gut-bucket blues, spirituals, sukey-jump tunes, and work songs from the Deep South. Their voices and country-singing style seemed crude by big-city standards, but audiences were turned on by the raw sound and the ring of truth in their songs. They sang of life, not as idealized in slick Tin-Pan Alley songs, but as it really was, in all its stark reality.

The times called for a new kind of popular music, one which would echo and inspire the rebellious upsurge, the new ideas crying out for expression. Songs were needed also to voice the sense of common purpose which had been steadily emerging since the early Depression years. The hardships of that period had drawn people together, stirring up a feeling of kinship among millions across the nation.

Woody Guthrie was to lead the way in the creation of a new significant popular music, rooted in the rural past and refurbished for the needs of the urban present. He took traditional American backwoods tunes, molded them to his purpose, and wrote new words. He had learned them from his ballad-singing mother, his blues-singing father, Uncle Jeff, Cousin Jack Guthrie, and other relatives. He picked up songs from the string bands he had traveled with, and from the recordings. The "yodeling brakeman," Jimmy Rodgers, who introduced the blues to country music, and the Carter Family, who recorded more than three hundred songs between 1927 and 1940, made a lasting impression on country musicians. Woody used to play their disks (and many others) until the grooves were worn out, learning guitar style and harmony for use in his own work.

Those were prolific years of writing and performing, of meeting people, of intellectual challenge. The recordings of the Dust Bowl Songs and the Bonneville Dam Songs and the publication of his autobiography Bound For Glory in 1943, were products of this period.

Woody came to New York for the first time in 1940, at Will Geer's invitation. Despite his reputation as a singer and song writer, despite his popularity with the labor movement, he was unable to earn a decent living by doing what he wanted to do in California. Five dollars or three dollars earned at meetings and demonstrations-if he received anything at all- barely covered the expenses of traveling, let alone food and rent for the family. It was the old story.

One day Woody, Mary, and the three children, Sue, Teeny and Bill, took off from Los Angeles in their ancient, beatup car for Pampa, Texas, where Mary's folks lived. Once again, Mary and the children stayed behind in Pampa, while Woody went on alone to Konawa, Oklahoma, to see his brother Roy. The thirty-five dollars he borrowed from Roy paid for the rest of his trip eastward to New York City.

In February Woody made his first major appearance in New York, singing at Mecca Temple for the Spanish Refugees Relief Fund to help victims of the fascist Franco regime. But more important was a midnight concert given at a Broadway theater in March to raise money for the California migrant workers. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's powerful indictment of the Okies' plight, had been published a year before, and the cause of the Dust Bowl people had become the cause of the progressives. Will Geer, at whose house Woody was then staying, was the Show's MC. It was on this occasion that Woody first met and shared the stage with some of the leading folk singers-the young Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, blues-man Josh White, and singer-actor Burl Ives. Woody was, Seeger recalls, "a little short fellow with a western hat and boots, in blue jeans and needing a shave, spinning out stories and singing songs that he had made up himself. His manner was laconic, offhand, as though he didn't much care if the audience was listening or not. I became a friend of his, and he became a big piece of my education."

Woody wandered the streets of New York, rode the subways, gaped at the skyscrapers and wrote his impressions in a column for The Daily Worker.

I'm still a-ramblin' 'round old New York trying to find me a job of work. I been here for about three weeks a-walkin' around these old cold streets. Sometimes up and sometimes down, sometimes lost in a hole in the ground.
One runs east, two go west, and I wonder how to catch the best. Six go south, and nine run north, and you dang sure get your nickels worth.

You put a nickel in the slot and grab you a train that's good and hot, sail out down a hole in the ground and ride that train across this town.

People push and people jam, the jammedest jam I mean what am. You walk, you nudge and squirm and fall, and get up against that cement wall, and ooze and duck and spar and strain and they shove you into the wrong dam train ...

I believe there is more of New York underground than on top. New York is funny. The streets are half a block long and three blocks wide. And the town is half a town wide, and three towns high.

The human ravages of the Depression were already visible down on the Bowery in New York's lower East Side.

The Skiddiest Row I ever seen is the Bowery in New York City. I didn't know human beings could get so broke, hungry, and so dirty and ragged, and still remain alive. The wine they drink must come out through the pores of their skin and get the disease germs so drunk they can't organize. . . . Guys passed out drunk on the cement steps of the stores and banks. Draped around the light posts, slumped over the fire plugs, and sleeping around up against the bronze statues in the parks-and any one of them statues cost enough to feed a man a solid year. If you happen to have the notion in your head that there aint no work to be done except to spend all of your money on bombs-I suggest that you take a look at Skid Row and invest your money in making men out of bums.

Woody met many people during the New York years. In the small, but closely knit folk-song world, he found his most intimate friends. He wrote about them with tender affection:

Aunt Molly Jackson and her relatives from Harlan County, Kentucky all come to Leadbelly's house almost every day. She would sing us an hour or two of Bloody Harlan County songs, of organizing the coal miners to beat the thugs of old Sheriff Blair. Molly told tales from her life as a mountaineer midwife, sung us the songs that she used to make the sweethearts lose their bashfulness and the older ones to be in body and action as quick, as funny, as limber and as wise as the younguns coming up. Molly is the woman Leadbelly. She is in her cotton apron what Leadbelly is in his bathrobe. She talks to him exactly as to her reflection in her mirror. He speaks back to her like the swamplands to the uplands, the same as his river would talk to her highest cliffrim. She loves him in the same half-jealous way that he loves her, because he sees and feels in Aunt Molly the woman who has found in her own voice the same power on earth as he has found.

I am a union woman
Just as brave as I can be.
I do not like the bosses
And the bosses don't like me.

Join the CIO
Come join the C.I.O.

Earl Robinson is the boy that wrote the songs Joe Hill, Abe Lincoln, Ballad for Americans, and a raft of others. I heard 'em sung from coast to coast. ...

If our gossipers up in the capital would learn to sing Earl's songs, and to make some laws like 'em, the war and the hard times would both end. Here's to more guys like old Earl! And less cops.

Will Geer, who had come to New York to play the leading role in the play, Tobacco Road, had remained one of Woody's oldest and closest friends. Woody wrote a thumbnail sketch of him:

Tobacco Road is closing in N.Y. after breaking all endurance records for hungry farmers and lady preachers. Will Geer is a farmer at heart. Studied plant husbandry in college. He's got him a big garden out here in the country. Pretty good at it, too. He's the only man I know of that knows these vegetables by their maiden names. He sticks his head out of the window and hollers about two dollars worth of Latin, and you know, them vegetables just come a running and jump in the stew pot. So if Will can't make a farm pay on Tobacco Road, the average dirt farmer ain't got a chance.

But Woody admired few people in the whole wide world as much as Huddie Ledbetter. He lived with him, "studied," and worked with him. The period he lived in Leadbelly's small apartment in downtown New York was one of the great privileges and pleasures of his life. In October, 1940, I received a letter from Woody asking me to keep Leadbelly on the air on WNYC.

      October 3, 1940
      Howdy Mrs. 'Chenko-
You might be interested to know that Leadbelly and me have been working on a lot of things together and we'd like to have you hear them and arrange some programs in Adventures in Music-because I honestly believe that of all the living folk singers I've ever seen that Leadbelly is ahead of them all. I'm sure that lots of folks believe just the same way I do. There are others as great I reckon but I've never had the good luck to run onto them. There is Blind Lemon Jefferson, who to my notion put out the best blues in anybody's Blues Book when he made his One Dime Blues, and you can ask Alan Lomax and he will say that Blind Lemons One Dimes Blues is first on his list too. Huddie had the good fortune to study and travel with Blind Lemon and now I am lucky enough to study under Huddie which is to me one of New York's greatest pleasures. I argue that it is a mistake for the people in the radio world to leave Leadbelly out of the picture, its like leaving the alcohol out of the wine or leaving the spring out of the clock. You are one of the only persons that knows folk music good enough to realize what place Huddie holds and you know that it is wrong for the people of the air waves not to hear Huddie. I have been working with him now for several months and we have pretty well got the hang of how we ought to work together and I think that he will tell you that what really comes out of him mostly depends on who is working with him or enjoying it with him. Some radio experts will say that Huddie is too rough and so pass him up but I say that he is just too good and so they can't see it. Life hasn't been so smooth with Huddie and what makes him so good is that he simply wants to sing and tell how it has treated him, and what he has learned from it, and he wants to be honest about it, without any pretty put on. Huddie plays a little old $4 accordion and you can actually hear the sad note of his people ringing in the swamps and jungles and echoing in the Louisiana moss. And when you hear it you almost know that it's the sad and lonesome music of a people that can't even vote. But what they have been beat out of by votes they've tried to win back with notes and to my way of thinking they've won it and will keep on winning it. Leadbelly ought to be kept on the radio regularly so that people would hear his name and then he could get more jobs and bookings and I know that he loves to work and needs it. I want to pat you on the back Henrietta for the help you've already been to Huddie and what you can keep on doing. Take it easy but take it.

   Woody Guthrie
    10-3-1940
   N.Y.N.YNYC. N.Y.n.y.ny

We gave Leadbelly a weekly fifteen-minute spot, and his program, Folk Songs of America, became one of the station's most popular features.

Through the efforts of the folklorist Alan Lomax, Woody received a contract to record his Dust Bowl Songs for RCA Victor. The only one written especially for the album was his long ballad, Tom Joad, set to the tune of John Hardy, a badman's song. All the others were earlier songs. At the same time, he continued to work on his column. Woody Sez, turning movie reviewer for one night after he had seen the film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, based on the Steinbeck novel.

Seen the pitcher last night. Grapes of Wrath, best cussed pitcher I ever seen. The Grapes of Wrath you know is about us a pullin' out of Oklahoma and Arkansas, and down south and out, and a driftin' around over the State of California, busted, disgusted, down and out, and a lookin' for work.

Shows you how come us to be that way. Shows the damn bankers, men that broke us and the dust that choked us, and comes right out in plain old English, and says what to do about it.

It says you got to get together and have some meetins, and stick together and raise old billy hell till you get your job, and get your farm back, and your house and your chickens, and your groceries and your clothes, and your money back.

Go to see 'Grapes of Wrath' pardner, go to see it and don't miss. You was the star in that picture. Go and see your own self, and hear your own words and your own songs.

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