Postscript:

WOODY GUTHRIE, PETE SEEGER, CISCO HOUSTON, and many other folk singers returned from World War II, expecting a new era of social justice backed by militant unionism and an active radicalism.

A new organization. People's Songs, was launched, and Woody was passionately involved in its activities. Its publication, the People's Song Bulletin, lasted three years, and printed more than 300 songs. The People's Artist Bureau was set up to book folk song concerts. In general its policies stemmed from the ideas of the old Almanac days.

However, the scene changed rapidly in a way no one had expected. The labor unions which had inspired and been inspired by Woody and his friends, having won many of their demands, were no longer discontented or militant.

Then came the end of the 40's, bringing the McCarthy Era. Songs of social criticism were still heard but the forbidding cloud of mistrust and conformity tended to stifle their creation and performance. After so many years of Depression and strain, most people were content.

The persecution of leftists and liberals spread like a blight. Even the entertainment world had its blacklist. The Weavers, formed in 1949, were among those barred from television and other communications media.

Despite the blacklist, the Weavers remained the most popular folk song group for over a decade. On the surface they were quite different from the old Almanac Singers; their musical style was polished, their repertory international. They appeared not in the jeans and plaid shirts of the Depression, but in evening clothes. They were heard not in union halls or on picket lines, but in concert halls and night clubs. Nevertheless, their ideals had not changed and their choice of songs proved it.

By the end of the 1950's folk music became big-time entertainment. The Kingston Trio set the style and many groups followed. For the first time, millions of people were listening to American folk songs. True, the arrangements were slick, but many young people would never have become interested in folk music had it not been for the Kingston Trio.

Ever since the end of the Second World War and through the Korean War, a group of young people devoted to grassroots folk music had made its headquarters at the big fountain in New York's Washington Square Park, the center of Greenwich Village. Sunday mornings banjo pickers and guitar strummers, among them Roger Sprung, John Cohen, Oscar Brand, Jack Elliott, Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul, and Mary), congregated there. They were the heirs of the old Hootenannies, but it was a nonpolitical, song-swapping movement.

From time to time Woody would appear in the Square but his sympathies were not entirely with the newcomers: he found their disassociation from the world around them foreign to him. At a party Woody was asked not to sing political songs. "There are no nonpolitical songs," he replied sharply, and went on to sing the old union songs.

Significant as it was, the grass-roots movement had its limits; it did not relate to contemporary life. In a way, it offered a perfect escape for those who found it easier to live in the dead past than in the clamorous present.

It was the civil rights struggle in the South that ushered in a new era, bringing with it the reappearance of the topical song. Once more folk songs played an important role in the fight for freedom. Many folk singers actively participated, singing on marches, in churches and on picket lines.

A new crop of folk song composers, both black and white, many from comfortable middle class homes, began to write of their direct experiences in the social issues of the time. The new voices included Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Eric Anderson, Len Chandler, Mark Spolestra, and Bob Dylan.

It was Woody who most influenced the new topical song writers. Tom Paxton wrote: "The most important thing Woody gave us was courage, the courage to stand up and say the things we believe."

Inspired by Woody's travels, and a desire to escape their own sheltered existence, many performers retraced his footsteps across the country.

The folk singer who could boast of hitchhiking and riding the rails, of sleeping in bedbug-ridden flophouses, of enduring encounters with tobacco-chewing Southern sheriffs and time in flea-bag jails was well on his way to "success." These young people were looking for heroes who acted on their principles, as they had in Woody's time.

The person most responsible for the rise and fall of the Topical Song Era was Minnesota-born Bob Dylan, the most important singer-poet since Woody, a voice and conscience for his generation as Woody had been for his own. Who does not know his Blowin' In The Wind and With God On Our Side?

In the summer of 1964, Dylan created a furor by appearing at the Newport Folk Festival backed by a rock and roll band. The new music, simultaneously booed and applauded by the audience, was called folk-rock, a combination of rock and roll and folk song. Tom Paxton called it "folk-rot" but it started a whole new trend in big-city music; it was musically exciting, and relevant to the mood and temper of the times.

By 1964, the topical song movement had out-sung, out-written and out-protested itself.

Dylan's later songs-Ballad of a Thin Man, Tambourine Man, and Pity the Poor Immigrant-deal with drugs, the lack of communication between people, the horror of violence, and the need for faith in one's self, much as Woody's songs had done for issues of his own generation.

The world is in ferment, and youth everywhere is searching for a more meaningful life. Woody Guthrie's legacy of love, compassion, brotherhood, and the joy of life, has inspired Dylan and countless others,

"Song to Woody" | Bob Dylan

I'm out here a thousand miles from my home
Walkin' a road of the men who've gone down
I see a new world of people and things
Peter paupers and peasants and princes and kings
Hey, Hey Woody Guthrie! I wrote you a song
About a funny old world that's a comin' along
Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn
It looks like it's a dyin' and it's hardly been bom
Hey, Hey Woody Guthrie but I know that you know
All the things that I'm sayin' and many times more
I'm a singin' you this song but I can't sing enough
'Cause there's not many men who've done the things that you've done
Here's to Cisco and to Sonny and to Leadbelly too
And to all the good people that traveled with you
Here's to the hearts and hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind
I'm leavin' tomorrow but I could leave today
Somewheres down the road someday
The very last thing that I'd want to do
Is to say I been hitting some hard travelin' too.