This land is yur land: A legacy of Gunthrie

This Land is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Guthrie, The Museum of the City of New York 1220 Fifth Ave. (103rd St.), New York NY.

NEWYORK-School children in the United states are often taught the song "This Land is Your Land" as a patriotic hymn, a more singable national anthem. They are usually not taught this verse, however:

"As I was walking, that ribbon of highway

I saw a sign which said 'Private Property.'

But on the other side, it didn't say nothing.

That side was made for you and me."

Nor are they taught about the man who wrote the song, Woody Guthrie.

Woody was one of the most influential figures in the musical culture of the United States. His songs about ordinary people, their lives and struggles inspired the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s and out of that revival came the numerous rock 'n rollers, singer-songwriters and traditional musicians of today.

Woody Guthrie was born in 1912 and wrote many of his songs during the 1930s as he observed the effects of the Great Depression on displaced farmers and workers. Arriving in New York in 1941, he hooked up with musicians such as Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Cisco Houston and others who make up the first generation of the folk revival. Woody lived in NYC for most of the rest of his life except for a period during WW II when he shipped out with the Merchant Marine.

Rambling out of the Oklahoma "dust bowl" to California during the 1930s, Woody began to write about the people he knew. He wrote songs dealing with Okie farmers being pushed off their land by drought and bankers. He wrote about how poor people from Oklahoma and Mexico traveled to California in search of a better life, and how hard it was to find it. He sang about and for miners and seamen, and wrote about the taming of the rivers and the Grand Coulee Dam.

But he didn't just describe the hardships faced by working people. He wrote about the struggles to organize, to create unions, to fight fascism and to resist the power of the wealthy.

The exhibit, "This Land is Your Land" at the Museum of the City of New York through April 23 shows Woody as he really was, and he was, perhaps, more than we ever expected. It is a wonderfully designed exhibit combining artifacts, blown-up samples of Woody's writing and photographs taken at different points in his life. It shows him as a participant in the great struggles of the 1930s and 1940s. The exhibit foregrounds Woody as a political radical as well as a musician. Upon arriving in California in the 1930s, he was introduced to the Communist Party by actor Will Geer("The Waltons"), and began to write a column for the west-coast People's World. When he got to New York. he fell in with radicals and Communists involved in the Almanac Singers, and later People's Songs. These musicians sang and wrote songs for the progressive movements of the time: the struggle against fascism, for unions, against racism and for economic justice.

The exhibit shows how important Woody's radicalism was to him. I don't think this is quibbling, but while the exhibit is straightforward about Woody's support for the policies of the CPUSA, it claims he never joined. However, Gordon Friesen, a founder of Broadside Magazine and a friend of Woody's, wrote in 1987 that he knew Woody to be a member.

Woody Guthrie presented himself as an "ordinary" person, writing simple songs about other ordinary people. This, as the exhibit points out, was not entirely the case. His family was educated and there were always books in his house. He absorbed a range of cultural influences from the traditional Scotch-Irish ballads his mother sang, to the blues of Black musicians who played the saloons in the oil boom towns, to more traditional literature and poetry. These influences found their way to his songs and music.

One of the fascinating aspects of the new appreciation of Woody today is the project initiated by his daughter Nora and the English political rock musician, Billy Bragg. Bragg has been writing music to some of the more than 2000 songs Woody wrote while in N.Y. and which he left without recording or writing music for them. Billy Brag and the group Wilco has recorded these songs on an album Mermaid Avenue (named after where he and his family lived in Coney Island).

The exhibit seems inspired by the new view of Woody Guthrie which emerges from Mermaid Avenue. He is a more flawed human being and a greater artist. His artistry, as it expanded from the themes of the depression became more personal, yet the depth of his radicalism is more apparent.

Attend this exhibit, take your friends, take your children. You'll go home singing.

- Lou Shipman