The Book in Many Sentences

A tremendous, well written work that succeeds in the goal of every biography – the reader should have no unanswered questions after completing the book. In fact, this biography answered every question I had, raised some more questions and answered those too. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in American folk music or American political sentiment in the 20th century.

I’d read the Joe Klein biography sometime in the early 2000s and thought it did a good job of puncturing the Guthrie mystique, but after reading the Cray book I find the Klein book nearly a hagiography. No punches were pulled and both the good and the bad of Guthrie was unveiled. The good was mostly public and publicized, but the bad was hidden and much weirder than I anticipated.

Surprising Insights

1. The bits about “Prairie Socialism” of the early 20th century was quite insightful. I had no idea about much of that. The teaching of American history does not lend itself to gradual increases and decreases. Guthrie makes much more sense in that light
2. For all his talk of working people, Guthrie himself never held much in the way of a regular job. I knew this already, but this book came close to quantifying it. In my reading, outside of his late in the war military service, and “Let’s avoid the military” merchant marine service you could measure his working a steady job in days.
3. At no point in his life did he care about money, or what money could bring. The marginal value of money over bare subsistence (for him and family) was essentially zero.
4. His father was much more of a political insider than I would have thought. Very much a local apparatchik.
5. Guthrie was much more of an alcoholic that I previously thought.
6. His ability to attract people he could endlessly sponge off of, and steal from (including guitars!) was immense.
7. He was definitely a CPUSA stooge
8. Songs for John Doe! Which I knew about, but should be an eternal reminder that people are loyal to political parties, not political principles
9. The Communist Party USA’s slogan “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” is a great slogan and I wander why no one has used that in modern times.
10. Guthrie’s mom was much more violent than I would have thought.
11. He spent far, far more time in New York and Los Angeles talking about ‘ramblin’ than I would have thought, and far less time actually ‘ramblin’ from place to place.
12. I actually have a lot more thoughts than this, but will have to wait for another blog post

Highlights

Once prickly proud and fiercely independent, a figure larger than life, now he seemed shrunken, even emaciated, his wiry hair graying at forty-four, his face weathered by wind, sun, and tragedy. The voice was all but mute. Fire had seared his right arm, the angry skin drawn red and taut, the elbow cocked so he no longer could play an instrument or lift a pen.

They saw their father on weekends, sometimes visiting him at the state mental hospital in Montclair, New Jersey, occasionally taking him home to Brooklyn.

People across the country were singing the song now—at hoots and sing-a-longs and, better still, in public schools. Often the kids didn’t know who wrote it, didn’t care even. No matter, the skinny man in the oversized sport jacket sitting in the box at stage right had never bothered to copyright his thousand or more songs.

Restless Jerry P. had moved his family, including then-eighteen-year-old Charley, from the cattle and cotton country of Bell County north across the state to Indian Territory in 1897. The federal government was awarding land grants as large as 160 acres to anyone with Indian blood; Jerry P.’s second wife, Charley’s stepmother, was one-eighth Creek. It was enough to qualify.

They were Scots-Irish, MacGuthries in a distant past, more recently settled in Tennessee. The Guthries had migrated to Texas in covered wagons after the War Between the States, fervent Confederates still. It was no accident that Charley had a younger half-brother named Jefferson Davis Guthrie.

With statehood in the offing, Charley Guthrie, a solid Democrat, ran for election as district court clerk and won on September 18, 1907—after 395 votes from all-Negro and heavily Republican precincts were arbitrarily thrown out on the pretext that their ballot boxes had been stuffed.

The new district court clerk moved five miles from Castle to Okemah, a town “partly western in its optimism and quick acceptance of outsiders, and partly southern, in the soft accents of its inhabitants, its prejudice against blacks, and its tolerance of booze, sidewalk fights, and public drunkenness.”

More galling still, once-independent farmers found themselves renting back from speculators and banks the very acreage they had owned the year before.

His children as young as three might be drafted to pick cotton, and still it was never enough.

Their home was completed at a cost of $800, and the Guthries moved in during the fall of 1909.

There were, in fact, two forms of socialism. One was the orthodox dogma imported from Europe, atheist, rigidly Marxist in its demand that the land and engines of production be held in common. The other was a peculiarly American hybrid, one that blended the apocalyptic Protestant beliefs of small-town America with the Marxist principle of shared wealth.

The Socialist vote had steadily grown until Oklahoma had the largest membership of any state in the union. In Okfuskee County, the socialists had skimmed off 15 percent of the votes in the 1908 presidential election.

On July 2, 1912, after forty-six ballots, the Democrats nominated the governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, to be their presidential nominee. When, twelve days later, Nora delivered her third child and second son, Charley insisted the eight-pound boy be named after the Democratic candidate.

Nora favored the moralistic parlor ballads so popular in the last decades of the nineteenth century, “The Dream of a Miner’s Child,” “A Picture from Life’s Other Side,” and “A Story I Know Too Well”:

By World War I, Oklahoma was the nation’s largest oil-producing state. The huge Midcontinent field—with Okfuskee County sucking up its share—sprouted thirty thousand wooden derricks pumping easily refined “sweet” crude.

Mounting anger and the frustration of the state’s small farmers erupted in the wartime summer of 1917. Members of a small, radical tenant farmers’ organization, the Working Class Union, began an implausible, even absurd march to Washington. Once there, they intended to protest “Big Slick” Woodrow Wilson’s war and the newly adopted draft act. This was a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” and they wanted none of it.

Meanwhile, World War I doomed the Socialist Party. As patriotic fervor rose, buoyed by higher farm prices, the Socialist vote fell. From a peak in 1914 when some rural areas in Oklahoma delivered half of the vote to the Socialists, the party’s tally steadily dropped. Okfuskee County, which had given 31 percent of the vote to the Socialists in 1912, mustered a scant 3 percent six years later.

Real estate and insurance agent, Charley Guthrie was counted a successful businessman, holding as many as thirty pieces of rental property.

At least some of the neighbors thought the Guthries were too generous. Charley was easy with a dollar while Nora was sometimes so lost in her own thoughts she did not pay attention to the children. “The children always had expensive toys,” one sniffed, “but necessities were scarce.”

Return Barry to the state legislature, Charley thundered, and “he will want to amend that certain one of the Ten Commandments which says ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ so as to read ‘Thou shalt not steal on a small scale.’”

The election behind him, Charley had other things to worry about, in particular, his wife’s odd behavior. More and more she was acting like her older brother Jess, giving silly orders, behaving strangely or not paying attention, then finally just slipping off into a private world.

Woody found his own comfort. He would ever after deny that Clara had deliberately set herself on fire.

In the aftermath of the Great War, the solid citizens of Oklahoma had transformed militant patriotism into fervent self-righteousness. Once the Tulsa World had urged citizens to “Get Out the Hemp,” and “strangle the I.W.W.’s. Kill ’em just as you would kill any other snake.” Now American Legionnaires and a newly revived Ku Klux Klan, nothing less than “an extralegal arm of the business community,” took up vigilante enforcement of public morality. The Klan, particularly in boomtowns like Okemah, rallied support for Jim Crow and Prohibition, while decrying the new sexual freedom and those it deemed radicals, particularly union organizers.*

Crazy indeed. Even to an eight-, nine-, ten-year-old boy, who noted that before the oil boom, poor Indians could marry blacks but not whites, while after the boom, oil-rich Indians could marry whites but not blacks.*

But each tenant’s default compounded Charley’s mounting debt to the bank, and eventually he failed. “I’m the only man in this world that’s lost a farm a day for thirty days,” he groaned. In all, he tearfully told his sons, he had lost fifty thousand dollars.*

He was forty-three, a man scraping by while others skimmed the quick riches any boom proffered. For the first time he felt like an old man. Arthritis gripped his hands. Too many fistfights had broken too many bones.

The Cain house was on Okemah’s east end, where folks were “too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash.”

Nora alternated unpredictably between forgetfulness and blinding anger. She would stand in the yard, oblivious of the rain, staring at distant horizons. She failed to heat water for a bath, but forced George to bathe in the chilled tub anyway. Another time, she chased George around the house with a butcher knife, he later told his younger sister.

In a last gesture to preserve memories of the free-spirited girl he had courted, Charley hid the truth of just what happened on Saturday afternoon, June 25, 1927. He dismissed it as merely “an accident.” According to one account, he lay dozing, startled awake by the kerosene splashed across his chest, his shirt on fire and his wife standing over him, numbly watching the flames.* Charley dashed from the house, slapping at the flames and rolling on the ground. A neighbor helped to smother the fire, but too late. Charley had been severely burned, his torso a welter of blackened, peeling flesh from his collarbone to his navel.

Word quickly circulated around Okemah that Nora, seized by a fit of rage, had thrown a kerosene lamp at her husband. Even if the story was not true, she was plainly unhinged, Charley’s Masonic brothers decided. With the permission of Grandma Tanner and Nora’s half-brother Warren, they arranged for her immediate commitment to the Central State Hospital for the Insane in Norman on Monday, June 27.

the four of them drove the hard-packed roads of central Oklahoma to Norman and Central State Hospital for the Insane. There Nora sat in a locked ward, her limbs jerking spasmodically, a shrunken hulk who stared blankly at her visitors. Woody sought to talk to her, but she did not respond. Only at the end, as they were leaving, did she dredge a name from her memory. “You’re Woody, aren’t you?” she asked vaguely. She had markedly deteriorated in the past year, doctors told the young man. They held out little hope for either a recovery or her return home.

The young man effectively became a ward of Okemah’s more prosperous families. Because he was a burden to the Smiths, he shifted to the E. L. Price family home on Sixth Street. The

If he excelled in anything, it was ninth-grade typing; not only did he earn an A, but he became an accomplished typist in the process.

The vast sweep of the Staked Plain rose forty-seven hundred feet above sea level, so high that the cold winds blowing down the Great Plains from Canada had blasted the land bare of trees.

The young man stood a wiry five feet five inches tall, perhaps an inch shorter than his father, but at 120 pounds, stronger than the badly scarred and arthritic Charley.

If there was a problem with Guthrie, Harris said, it was that the young man “didn’t care if he had ten cents or ten dollars in his pocket.” Nor was he dependable.

He characteristically made light of the long hours he spent woodshedding, listening to others and copying what he heard played. “After a while, I was rattling around with [Jeff], playing my way at the ranch and farm house dances. We worked our way up to playing inside of the city limits.” In fact, he was to work at it harder than anything else he had taken up in his young life. Certainly harder than at school.

Meanwhile Woody was practicing guitar, Jennings said, trying to master “the Carter Family lick” shaped by Maybelle Carter on a series of RCA Victor shellac records. Because “he wanted to do all the runs,” Jennings explained, Guthrie listened to the records repeatedly in Shorty Harris’s drugstore, imitating what he heard. He listened, he imitated, he listened again, he imitated once more, learning by rote.

He read constantly, Matt Jennings recalled. “We’d go to the library together and check out two or three books, and he’d recap them for me before I got through one book.” Guthrie systematically worked his way through the shelves, concentrating on psychology, Western religions, and Eastern philosophies, what Jennings called “yogi stuff.” Guthrie read and reread the newly published mystical parables of Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet. “He just wanted to know something about everything in the world,” Matt explained.

In time, young Guthrie felt confident enough to write in his tight longhand a book about the fundamentals of psychology, then to stuff his notebook pages inside a salvaged cover from another book, and donate the volume to the library. Mrs. Todd catalogued the manuscript under “Guthrie, Woodrow Wilson,” and put it on the shelves.*

“Had a letter last week that my mother’s dead.” Charley had gathered his three children together and read them the official notification; Nora Guthrie had died three months before in the state hospital at Norman.†

Woody’s prospects as either innkeeper or bartender hardly improved when Texas Rangers swept down on the town in July 1930, declared martial law, and rounded up those they deemed undesirable. Hundreds found themselves escorted to the edge of town, then summarily ordered to move on. The Rangers returned to the jail, arrested Sheriff E. S. Graves, and padlocked the cribs, jake joints, and remaining cothouses along South Cuyler that Graves had protected. For three days Pampa was quiet, until the Rangers left; the gamblers, bootleggers, and prostitutes crept back, more discreet now, but still offering the same pleasures.

In his music as well, Woody sought to simplify. Instead of learning the more difficult fingering that would allow him to play in all the keys, Guthrie became “a clamper fiend.” He used a capo, a spring-loaded clamp that enabled him to shorten the length of the strings, and thus raise the pitch, fret by fret, half-step by half-step.

With Jeff and Allene, Woody made his first unpaid radio broadcasts, on WDAG in Amarillo, then early in 1936 on tiny KPDN on the second floor of the Culbertson Building in Pampa. While the appearances on WDAG were sporadic, “two-by-four” KPDN offered Guthrie and the Corncob Trio more regular fifteen-minute bookings on “The Breakfast Club.”

People who knew the Guthries, particularly the men who performed with Woody, came to think the young man a “born natural” musician. “Give him a French harp and he was an artist on it,” Shorty Harris said of his on-again, off-again employee. Sooner or later Guthrie learned to play virtually anything with strings—guitar, mandolin, violin—anything

Some of Mary’s attraction for Woody came with his desire for a family life. Mary embodied that, and a stable, loving family. As his uncle noted, “The Jennings were fine people, very up-and-up nice people, all of them.”

Furthermore, Guthrie was virtually unemployed, with no prospects to speak of. How was he going to support a wife, a girl barely sixteen at that? And what about children? Despite their opposition, Mary was determined to follow her heart. Eventually she prevailed upon her mother to sign a consent form allowing the underage girl to be wed.

Sharecroppers, who only rented the land they farmed, received nothing; the effect was to drive them from their farms as landowners put their acreage into the land bank.

They—and tens of thousands of other sharecroppers throughout the South—raised cotton and lived off a vegetable garden and the hog they slaughtered. Each year they mortgaged their mule to buy seed and start over, always hoping for better weather, a bigger crop, and higher prices. But the good times never came.

By the end of the decade, only 35 percent of farm families owned their own homes; most farmers rented the land they worked.

A half-million farm families were turned from the land, to become itinerant “honk-honk hoboes” in the 1920s. Hundreds of thousands more followed as the Great Depression set in.

Mary was undemanding, “a good, easy girl,” Guthrie wrote in a notebook of random thoughts he began to keep. “She’s about the only person in circulation that knows just exactly how to handle me.” Handling Guthrie meant leaving him free to do whatever he wanted when whim overtook him. “She very seldom ever complained, and she worked hard all of the time. She could straighten up a house almost as fast as I could litter it up with scrap paper.”

Even with the birth of his daughter Gwendolyn in November 1935, Guthrie was an indifferent husband, “the least adapted to marriage of anyone who ever took the vow,” said Matt. Guthrie, who came and went as he pleased, seemed to think his daughter no more important than anyone else’s kids, Matt said. Guthrie played with Gwen, but left the hard task of child rearing to Mary.

Three years of drought had brought down upon the Panhandle two- and three-hour windstorms, furies that sucked fertile topsoil high into the air to sift down in a fine grit two or three inches deep on road and roof. If the winds were from the Southwest deserts, the dust was tan or gray; if they blew off the rich farmlands of Kansas to the north, the dust clouds were black. And all the while, the biggest storms flattened hundred-mile fronts.

The dust storm heaved up without warning late in the afternoon of Palm Sunday. From Amarillo on the southwest across a seventy-mile front to tiny Miami, Texas, on the northeast, it suddenly loomed, towering three, four, five thousand feet into the sky, rolling steadily onward. The sky turned black, black as night, so black, Pampans remembered, “you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.” Nothing was more frightening than that first half hour of darkness. The cloud rolled in from the north, tumbling black earth swept up from the rich Kansas topsoil and the lighter red dust of the Texas Panhandle, “like the Red Sea closing in on the Israel children,” Woody Guthrie wrote later. He and Mary stuffed wet newspapers around doors and windows, then hunkered down in their shotgun shack on South Russell. They struggled to catch a good breath as the fine dust filtered through cracks until the naked electric light hanging on a cord from the ceiling glowed no brighter than a lighted cigarette.

John Gikas, hunting rabbits north of town, raced the black cloud to Pampa at sixty miles per hour. Overtaken by the storm, his car shorted out by static electricity, and Gikas groped his way the last block to home.

By 1935 he was copying portraits in oils; Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ were repeated subjects. His sister-in-law Ann remembered too copies of “Whistler’s Mother” and “A Boy and His Dog” (“Blue Boy”) in the house on South Russell.

In fact, his involvement in the superstition business was more deliberate, and Woody less passive than he later portrayed. In the first issue of “News Expose,” a mimeographed “newspaper” he wrote and edited for friends at the end of 1935, Guthrie announced “ALONZO M. ZILCH BECOMES PSYCHOLOGICAL READER.” Zilch, Guthrie’s alter ego, had “turned to a strange field of endeavor, that of psychology, philosophy, and things of the mental realm.” The white house on South Russell Street was now “The Guthrie Institute for Psychical [sic] Research.”

Guthrie spent some seven months in Pampa as a fortune-teller and sometime faith healer. In that time, he scraped out a precarious living for a man with a wife and a year-old daughter; too many of his visitors could pay him only in gratitude.

In the evenings, Guthrie often disappeared to stomp the railroad tracks, to swap songs with the men huddled in hobo jungles or listen to stories about a fearsome railroad detective known as East Texas Red.

Steady work made Pampa all the more confining and less attractive to Guthrie. Life with Mary, as much as he admired her, was stifling. Beyond frolicking with his daughter, he had little to do with Gwen.

The more Betty Jean contributed financially to their income, the more demanding she became. Once an accommodating stepmother, she now insisted that the children—George, Mary Jo, and the boy born Lee Roy Buzbee, now dubbed Fritz Guthrie—call her “mother.” When they refused, she whipped them.

As a boy in Okemah, he had occasionally attended the First Methodist Sunday school. In Pampa, he had gone along to tent revivals when those touring attractions came to town, but no one in his immediate family regularly attended church

Woody would also vote for Roosevelt; what else could he do in Pampa, where, as Matt Jennings put it, “Republicans were just about as powerful as the Vegetarians”?

Sometime in late February or early March 1937, Matt’s older brother Fred drove Guthrie in Jennings’s beer delivery truck the twenty-five miles to the federal highway south of Pampa. Just outside Groom, Texas, Guthrie climbed down from the cab, stuffed his paint brushes in a hip pocket, slung his guitar over his shoulder, and put up his thumb. Out there, at the end of Route 66, lay California and opportunity.

He kept moving, singing in honky-tonks for a beer and a sandwich, thumbing rides on the side of the highway by day, by night looking for a dead-headed freight or asking police to let him sleep in their warm jails if the boxcars rumbled through town without slowing. He was in a hurry. “You hate to just sleep all night and not get anywhere,” Guthrie wrote later.

A second housewife down the line packed four “great big juicy sandwiches” in a bag for him; he shared them with three other hoboes in the freight yard. “I felt like I had learnt the secret of all religion. To give away all of the stuff you can’t use. All other baloney is bull.”

“There is a stage of hard luck that turns into fun, and a stage of poverty that turns into pride, and a place in laughing that turns into fight,” Guthrie had discovered.

Turlock was a thriving town of more than 4,000, surrounded by hundreds of small farms. Nurtured by a sprawling irrigation system that siphoned the glacier-fed Merced River, the rich alluvial loam produced alfalfa, watermelons, row crops, peaches, and apricots nine months of the year.

The federal government was going to build a huge dam, the first step in a vast irrigation plan to water the central valley; there were said to be jobs for laborers there.

Guthrie was a few months shy of twenty-five, the father of one child, his wife pregnant with another. He sent occasional, small money orders to Mary, who depended on her concerned parents most of the time. “I know it upset my dad a lot—my mother too,” she said. “Woody wasn’t doing the manly thing.”

Most important, Jack Guthrie was as ambitious as his cousin Woody was directionless. And he had a suggestion. Why not team up and see if they could make a go of it in Los Angeles? The big city would offer lots of opportunities the small towns of the central valley lacked.

Publicity was everything; furthermore, the program would give them enough prestige to ask for a two-dollar guarantee for six hours of singing in saloons.

As editor of the air, Burke was caught up in the welter of California’s unusual politics. A leader in the state’s newly reborn Democratic Party, he presided over a clangorous array of retirees seeking twenty-five- or thirty-dollars-a-week pensions, old-line socialists grubbing for a utopian community in the desert, technocrats and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California advocates with their rival schemes to end the hegemony of big business, the open shop, and the unchallenged sway of the Los Angeles Times in southern California.

Burke offered them a daily, fifteen-minute slot at 8:00 A.M. They could do the program and still make it to a construction site early enough to pick up at least a half-day’s work. They could begin next Monday.

BEFORE 8:00 on the morning of July 19, 1937, Woody Guthrie and his cousin Jack stepped up to the microphone in the cramped studio on the third floor of radio station KFVD. As the engineer’s finger snapped in their direction, they began singing the theme song of the first Oklahoma and Woody Show.

From the earliest days of silent films, former cowboys like Bronco Billy Anderson had turned out one—, two—, then four-reel flickers. Over the years, particularly after the invention of the talkie, the heroic cowboy of a legendary West gave way to singing cowboys in a West that existed only on Hollywood’s back lots.

By the time Woody Guthrie reached Los Angeles in 1937, the “horse operas” of Maynard and Gene Autry were Saturday matinee favorites.

Even in such urban areas as Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles, country or western music filled large blocks of airtime. The NBC network broadcast two country programs weekly, National Barn Dance from Chicago and Grand Ole Opry from Nashville.

Not only was the music popular with listeners, it was inexpensive. Station managers and program directors had no trouble finding musicians like the Guthrie cousins willing to perform for free in the hope of building a following.

Woody and Maxine were different from the cowboy singers who favored artificial “buckaroo ballads.” Rather than sing of a West that never was, Woody preferred to re-create in song a West that had vanished, with ballads like the gritty “Sam Bass,” learned in Pampa from his Uncle Jeff, or the hardbitten “Corinna, Corinna,” picked up somewhere between Pampa and California.

Just twenty-five, Woody’s singing style was evolving. The unusual two-part harmony with Maxine Crissman stemmed from the century-old church tradition of shape-note hymn books, with the male voice providing the tenor harmony above the alto carrying the melody. At the same time, he forsook the traditional, nasal, pinched-throat voice of the southern mountains; he sang with a harsh head tone, more of the West, a rasping voice at once old and new.

Despite his affable radio demeanor, Guthrie was still stiff with the prejudices of Okemah and Pampa. He casually referred to African-Americans as “niggers,” and once after an unpleasant clash with blacks on the beach at Santa Monica Bay,

His racism was unconscious and unexamined, a by-product of a boyhood spent not far from that part of Oklahoma known as “Little Dixie.” (Both Matt Jennings and Woody’s Uncle Jeff later remarked how they had to take pains not to use the word “nigger,” though Matt, practicing Catholic that he was, ignored racial differences.)

Guthrie was shaken. He apologized on the air, declined to play the harmonica showpiece again—under that title—and from then on spoke of “colored men.”

Maxine came to understand at least one source of the pressure. She and Woody were spending a considerable amount of time together, usually alone. While it was all innocent, whispers of a romance, a dalliance, something, got back to Mary in Pampa.

They were not only broadcasting locally, but because of the peculiarities of the frequency, KFVD’s signal reached far beyond California. When atmospheric conditions were right, the nighttime program bounced off the cooling ionosphere as far as Hawaii to the west, and well into the Great Plains to the east. In Pampa, at 1:00 A.M., Mary Guthrie tuned to 1000 kilocycles on the dial to listen for the code words of love Woody had promised in his letters.

Sponsors meant they had taken the first step to fame, if not fortune. Sponsors did not care how good you were, Crissman said. Instead, they asked, “How much mail do you get?”

(Woody had already worked out deals whereby he would periodically mention nearby Henry’s Service station in exchange for free repairs on Roy Crissman’s weary automobile, and Polly Gasoline for a full tank. Guthrie also received complimentary tickets when he plugged a touring rodeo.)

That evening, Guthrie called Mary in Pampa and asked her to bring their two daughters and join him in Glendale. He suggested that Matt drive them to California; Woody would send the ten-dollar gas money.

Woody was less pleased with the living arrangement. With Mary’s arrival, his plan to “sail the seas and walk foreign lands” was overtaken by her dream of owning a ceramic shop; she would run the business, and Woody would paint.

Such domesticity was beyond Woody. “He just wasn’t a nine-to-five man,” Maxine said. He liked to work through the night, do their morning show, then return home to sleep during the day. With five children running through the house, that schedule was difficult to keep. He loved his two daughters and Mary, Maxine concluded, “but he just wanted to get away from them.”

The oldest of the stations, XER, built its transmitter and antenna in Villa Acuña, Coahuila, in 1930, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. Free of the wattage limitations imposed by the Yankees’ Federal Communications Commission, the signal of XER and its successor, XERA, blanketed the entire American Midwest well into Canada.

Broadcasting from Mexico also freed promoters from Federal Trade Commission restrictions. Consequently, patent medicine and snake oil salesmen prospered on these “border blasters,” selling cure-alls for feminine ailments and unlikely concoctions like J. R. Brinkly’s goat-gland extract for sexual impotence.

But not for long. Apparently at Horton’s instigation, a squad of six armed soldiers marched into the XELO building and ordered Guthrie and his friends from the country. An army officer informed them in English that their visas did not have the necessary work permits to continue broadcasting. They would be arrested if they returned to work in the morning.

After three weeks, the Mexican adventure was over. Horton ducked out without paying the group’s last two weeks’ salary. The tantalizing WLS offer also mysteriously vanished.*

Burke responded to the listeners’ mail—eventually, Maxine would estimate, they received ten thousand pieces in a ten-month period—by moving the Woody and Lefty Lou program

A foot of rain in the first week of March 1938 brought widespread flooding throughout Southern California. Streets became raging spillways, intersections flooded to cover wheel hubs. More than 130 people died in the floods; many of them were literally washed out to sea, their bodies never recovered.

Guthrie was paying more attention to the newspapers, and from them acquiring a broader vision of the world. On his copy of “Chinese-Japs” he jotted a reminder, “Rewrite with better slant on the chinamen.”

On Saturday, June 18, 1938, some ten months after they first went on the air together, Woody and Lefty Lou from Old Mizzou broadcast together for the last time.

On that last broadcast, Guthrie announced he would become the Light’s roving “hobo correspondent.” First he planned to ride freights five hundred miles north to Chico, California, where hungry migrant farmworkers anxiously waited for the almonds and peaches to come in. From there, well, they could read the Light to find out.

Guthrie hitchhiked to Sacramento with the idea of getting arrested. As he told the story to Maxine—it would be elaborated in later retellings—he walked into the capitol, unslung his guitar, and started singing in the marble rotunda. A crowd of secretaries and tourists applauded his impromptu serenade, and some good-naturedly threw coins for him. After a few songs, capitol police simply escorted Guthrie from the building—but not before he swept up and pocketed the change on the floor.

In this fifth year of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, an older Woody Guthrie saw with a new understanding. These migrants were desperate amid plenty, proud folk trapped by the “crooked work and starvation going on all around.”

The constant dread of the wandering worker is to be arrested by some city officer, charged with idleness or vagrancy and sent in almost chain gang style to the bean patch to work without pay.

No hand at picking cotton himself, and not one to take another man’s job in any event, Guthrie watched from the edge of the road as the American Legion’s vigilantes in their “black sedans with hot searchlights” scattered picket lines with flailing axe handles.

The misery Guthrie saw that summer and fall struck him hard. For the first time, this man who masked his serious thoughts with deflecting humor spoke to his wife about what he had seen, “about people being hungry and not having a place to live.” The plight of the migrants, “dust bowl refugees” he now called them, was pathetic. “His main object in life from then on was to help the poor man.” Her husband still cared nothing for money for himself or his family, Mary Guthrie added with a faint tone of exasperation. He

Once again, he was not “doing the manly thing,” Mary complained. As her brother Matt put it, Guthrie loved his family, “but had this idea of equality [that] all children are equal. ‘Mine aren’t better than anyone else’s.’ ” Emotionally, the runny-nosed kids of the migrants playing in the fields were his children too.

They came, lured by handbills distributed from Oklahoma to Arizona by agricultural associations touting high wages in the Golden State. A labor surplus assured growers a supply of hungry people ready to work for a penny less than their neighbor.

The flow of migrants westward had steadily increased in inverse proportion to rainfall in the Great Plains. The drier the growing season “back home,” the poorer the crop, and the harder it became for sharecropping families to hold on. Compounding the problem was the fact that southern-grown short-staple cotton could not compete with the higher-quality long-staple imports from India and, particularly, Egypt.

Contrary to the myth, the great majority of the people on the roads were neither blown out by windstorms nor tractored out by farm mechanization. In eastern Oklahoma, untouched by the dust storms, landlords and bankers were evicting tenant farmers in order to turn patchworks of small farms into vast cattle ranges. “For every farmer who was dusted out or tractored out,” Guthrie came to understand, “another ten were chased out by bankers.”

When the seasons changed and the walnuts had been bagged, the last cotton, lettuce, and ’chokes shipped to market, the suddenly unemployable workers became “Okies.” Texan Buck Owens, later to become a major country music figure, remembered the signs, “No Okies Allowed in Store,” propped in the shop windows of his hometown Bakersfield. “Well, I knew I wasn’t from Oklahoma, but I knew who they was talking about.”

The migrants camped where they could. Guthrie ruefully joked he had relatives living under every bridge in California.

To supplement his dollar a day, Guthrie sang for tips in the bars along “The Nickel,” Los Angeles’s Fifth Street Skid Row.

A number of Ed’s friends were black, and only the Communists seemed truly concerned with the plight of the Negro in America.

Guthrie was cavalier about the fees. “If you’re afraid I wouldn’t go over in your lodge or party, you are possibly right. In such case, just mail me $15 and I won’t come. When I perform, I cut it down to $10. When for a good cause, $5. When for a better cause, I come free. If you can think of a still better one, I’ll give you my service, my guitar, my hat, and sixty-five cents cash money.”

“Woody was a great lover of humanity in the abstract, but was rough on people individually.”

He became outspoken in his opposition to international fascism, so prominent an antifascist that in May 1935, Geer was briefly kidnapped at a Hollywood theater, beaten by four Nazi sympathizers, and dumped, bruised and half-conscious, in the hills under the Hollywoodland sign.

Guthrie was to meet Burl Ives and Gilbert Houston there, the one a pudgy character actor who played a polished guitar and sang a few folk songs he had learned from his Illinois family, the other a black-browed, handsome youth whose acting career foundered on his extreme myopia.

Geer and Robbin, Guthrie also found men who shared his newborn dedication to the people of the dust bowl migration. Geer and Robbin provided an embracing, extended family while their Marxist views offered a political and social explanation for the poverty Guthrie saw all about him. Guthrie reveled in their acceptance and he borrowed what he thought useful of their politics.

Like the Socialists of pre-statehood Oklahoma, Guthrie remained a bedrock Christian, unchurched, undisciplined, but certain of his faith. “I seldom worship in or around churches, but always had a deep love for people who go there,” he explained.

For all his interest in communism, he remained his own man. When others praised the Soviet Union and the purported superiority of its economic system, Guthrie remained silent. According to brother George Guthrie, “He never did run the country down to me, or the way it was run, or anything like that.”

He also endorsed “Ham and Eggs,” a California-based pension movement that promised thirty dollars every Thursday to the poor and the elderly. The Communist Party officially sneered at the scheme.

Certainly, doctrine of any sort bored Guthrie; Ed Robbin remembered his new friend dropping off to sleep during meetings at the Robbin home as the interminable discussions of the nuances of Marxist thought ground on. Guthrie instead picked up the slogans, if not the dialectic of the Communist Party U.S.A.

For all his conviction, Guthrie did not join the Communist Party—despite his later claim that “the best thing that I did in 1936, though, was to sign up with the Communist Party.” But in 1936, Guthrie was living in Pampa, Texas. He had not yet visited Sacramento, where he claimed he purchased a copy of the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and fell under its sway. His wife Mary insisted Guthrie did not join the Communist Party. They wouldn’t have him, she added.

Ed Robbin, the first party member to take Guthrie in tow, deemed his friend a poor recruit. He was not asked to join. Will Geer agreed. “Woody never was a party member, because he was always considered too eccentric by the party apparatus. . . . But he was a convinced socialist, positive that this country had to be socialist.” Guthrie instead served as what the party called a “fellow traveler,” a nonmember who generally agreed with the Communist Party’s platform but was not subject to party discipline.

Communism, ran the freshly minted party slogan, “is Twentieth Century Americanism.”

“Naturalization” was intended to submerge Moscow’s influence on the Communist Party U.S.A.’s daily affairs and to mask the “foreign” origins of the party. (Party members, at least those with identifiably ethnic names, even went so far as to adopt American noms de politique.)

Richmond took on the column despite his skepticism about Guthrie, the folksiness of his columns, and their deliberate misspellings.

As the summer of 1939 wore on, Guthrie’s reputation among Los Angeles’s leftists grew.

Forester decided to hire this new voice to write an opinion piece for his “independent weekly.” From now on, writing would take more of Guthrie’s time and energy.

War in Europe was no concern of theirs. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were involved—the one was too far away, the other had signed a nonaggression pact with Berlin just a week before. And just as suddenly, American communists were no longer speaking of “antifascist fronts.”

Even with his wife due to deliver their third child, Guthrie abruptly drove off with Will Geer to the Imperial Valley on a Friday night in October. Mary did not bother to protest; her husband did what he wanted.

It was one thing to allow a Communist airtime on KFVD when “antifascism” was the watchword among liberals everywhere. It was quite another when the Soviet Union not only signed a nonaggression pact with Germany, but also joined Hitler in carving up hapless Poland. The Burkes did not want lame excuses or strained explanations for Moscow’s land grab, for its escalating threats on neighboring Finland. Ed Robbin, spinning apologia for the Soviet Union, would have to go.

When Mary insisted that Guthrie take a steady job, he reluctantly worked a few days for Shorty Harris in the drugstore. “I hated this worst than anything in the world,” wrote the man who had boasted he was “born working, raised working.” To Guthrie, soda-jerking once more for Shorty Harris was an acknowledgment of how little he had achieved.

Guthrie was impressed, particularly when Geer told him the rent was $150. “I thought at first that was for a whole year.”

She had loaned it to him, with “no question I would get it back.” But when she asked Guthrie to put the guitar in its case because it was raining, he refused on the ground he never used a case. “I knew then I would never see that Martin again.”

He borrowed the tune from the Carter Family’s “Little Darling, Pal of Mine,” which had itself been inspired by a southern gospel hymn, “Oh, My Loving Brother.”

A classically trained composer, a lyricist, and performer in his own right, Robinson was struck by Guthrie’s sense of timing. “Woody was a performer, a natural performer,” Robinson continued. “It was terribly understated. It didn’t look like much. But he made you look twice.”

Alan had accompanied his father on lecture tours as early as age six. Later, father and son worked together, lugging a 350-pound Presto recording machine from schoolhouse to mountain cabin, eventually to amass some ten thousand songs and ballads on three thousand aluminum discs.

And he had picked the artists to perform for the Steinbeck Committee fund-raiser—all but Will Geer’s friend from California, this bushy-haired Okie with the exaggerated drawl.

In the meantime, Guthrie fit himself into New York’s radical circles—what Maxine Crissman, left behind in California, disdained as “the wrong crowd back there.” Guthrie resumed writing his “Woody Sez” column for the People’s World, periodically sending a sheaf of columns to Al Richmond in San Francisco. The Daily Worker picked up the short commentaries—giving Guthrie a certain cachet among New York City’s sectarian Left.

Once again, Guthrie played the country boy, remaking Okemah and his early life to appear an authentic proletarian.

Woody Guthrie was deliberately reshaping himself to the fantasies of the Communist Left: a voice of the people, unlettered yet intelligent, perceptive and droll. As Al Richmond described it, Woody “put on like he was less sophisticated than he really was. . . . He was not totally unsophisticated in terms of what might be called dogma.”

(Such sentiments did not prevent Guthrie from applauding the Soviet Union’s attack and victory in the Russo-Finnish War.)

In New York, Guthrie was to remake himself as an “untutored” spokesman for the underclass and an authentic voice of social protest. In a commentary he sent to Alan Lomax, the young man who had read his way through the Okemah and Pampa public libraries wrote, “I’ve not read so many books. I doubt if I’ve read a dozen from back to back.”

Early in his stay, Guthrie went to bed still wearing his muddy boots, provoking Lomax to scold his guest. He ought to behave himself and act like an adult, Lomax barked. From then on, Guthrie slept on the floor, his heavy jacket serving as a blanket. As if he were asserting his independence, he insisted upon eating while he stood at the sink.

It was an act, “and it was very annoying actually. Everybody knew it was an act,” Bess Lomax said. “It was perfectly obvious that he was quite a literate person, and he was writing up a storm all the time.” He played the primitive when he was unsure of himself, she added. It was a test of their trust in him.

Guthrie was a prize to be treasured, the one-in-ten-thousand informant who was close to his roots yet was supremely articulate. “Take care of Woody,” Alan advised his younger sister Bess.

“My father, mysteriously, for some reason caught fire,” Guthrie asserted, adding Charley’s was a failed suicide attempt prompted by financial reverses. Charley, living still in Oklahoma City with his half-brother Claude, was to take the blame for mother Nora, dead for more than a decade.

Lomax proposed to make a preliminary selection of the songs. Guthrie would write introductions to each while a young man Lomax had hired as an intern at the Archive of American Folk Song, Peter Seeger, would serve as the music editor.

Guthrie and Seeger, who would shoulder most of the burden of editing Lomax’s book, were an unlikely pairing. The Seegers were patrician New Englanders, people of “old money” and older lineage. It was a heritage that twenty-one-year-old Peter Seeger both honored and hid. Though Seeger’s father and mother were musicians, he a composer-conductor, she a concert violinist, their third son had declined formal musical training. A ukulele, a whistle, an Autoharp, anything would do for the boy—except the violin and compulsory lessons.

Though money was tight in the Seeger household, Peter spent most of his youth at boarding schools, drawing closer to his father, Charles, and eventually taking up his pacifist, leftist views. Together they attended meetings of the Pierre Degeyter Club in New York’s Greenwich Village to hear talks about music in a world cleansed by revolution.*

In father Charles Seeger, the patrician’s noblesse oblige toward those who were neither Seegers nor Seeger friends had grown to an embracing concern for the working class.

Guthrie and Seeger got on well together. “He must have liked my banjo picking, because everything else about me must have seemed strange,” Seeger said later. “Didn’t drink. Didn’t smoke. Didn’t chase girls.” Woodrow Wilson Guthrie certainly did all three.

The two albums gained only limited distribution and scattered sales; fewer than a thousand copies were sold—and those largely among college intellectuals and members of the political Left. When Guthrie eventually asked Wetherald to reissue the two sets, he was turned down. The fuming Guthrie finally concluded that RCA refused to re-release the albums for political reasons “in order to silence him.”

The dalliances came easily, according to Will Geer. At parties or fund-raisers, “Woody was a very sexy fellow and he wrote sexy ballads, the way he would sing them in a sexual manner. . . . He got a lot of the girls with charm.

Guthrie supported himself with well-paying radio appearances, earning as much as eighty-three dollars for a sustaining show and even more if the program was sponsored. He sang “Do-Re-Mi” on Corwin’s Pursuit of Happiness and earned fifty dollars for the one song, his best pay ever.

The trip with Guthrie through the Southeast was Seeger’s first brush with poverty and with racial bigotry.

Seeger was startled by the whitewashed house on the corner of Russell and Craven, “not much better than a shack, and not much bigger than a trailer.” Here was Guthrie, devoting himself to the plight of the unemployed and dispossessed, yet his own family hardly lived any better.

Seeger was taken aback only when Mary’s mother, deciding he was trustworthy, reached up to shake him by the shoulders. “You’ve got to make that man treat my daughter right,” she earnestly insisted.

Three days in Pampa playing with his children, now five, three, and fourteen months, were seemingly enough for the restless Guthrie.

When he was not broadcasting, Woody was making music in the fifth-floor apartment of Martha and Huddie Ledbetter on East 10th Street. Despite the obvious differences of race, age, and even size, Guthrie and the burly man known as “Leadbelly” were unusually close. Guthrie “just adored Leadbelly,” Yurchenko stressed, and “Leadbelly was just crazy about him.

On January 16, 1925, in one of his last acts as governor, Neff signed a full pardon for the songmaker. His was one of just five the governor granted during his entire term. Ledbetter, having sung his way to freedom, was now draped in legend.

If there was a “star” in the nascent folk song movement, it was Leadbelly.

Furthermore, for all his being on time, being prepared with his songs, Ledbetter could not read the lines Lomax wrote for him. Ray insisted Lomax not book Ledbetter again.

Pipe Smoking Time went on the air on November 25, 1940, with Guthrie singing a theme song set to “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You”: Howdy, friend, well, it’s sure good to know you. Howdy, friend, well, it’s sure good to know you. Load up your pipe and take your life easy With Model Tobacco to light up your way. We’re glad to be with you today.

Mary chose to ignore the obvious evidence of her husband’s dalliances with young women. After all, she was responsible for three children. Besides, Texas girls knew that was a man’s way.

The array of food, the expansive bar, the expensive formal dress both attracted and angered Guthrie in his everyday work clothes. The fact that the women in their gowns had shaved under the arms intrigued Guthrie.

No matter her husband had finally found a job to support them. No matter they were left homeless. No matter three-and-a-half-year-old Sue, when Alan Lomax asked where she lived, replied, “In the car.”

Their alcohol-propelled adventure ended when Guthrie lost his car keys in the desert.

Robbin thought they would drive to Pasadena. Instead, Guthrie pried open a window in the empty house and promptly moved his family in. (Some two months later, Guthrie finally met his unsuspecting landlord, charmed her with his singing, and settled on ten-dollars-a-month rent for the dilapidated house. He would never pay it.)

Writing came easily to him, even with the three children clamoring to sit in his lap or crawling underfoot. It was nothing so much as “a conversation with yourself . . . just a quiet way of talking to yourself.” His prose was free-form, flowing and seamless, typed quickly, single-spaced and virtually without margins. “Its mighty seldom that I know what I’m a gonna . . . write till I read it back over to myself and the biggest part of the time its news to me.”

There they rented rear rooms behind a gift shop run by the state. Lacking electricity, Guthrie punched a hole in the wall separating the units, ran a drop cord through it, and bootlegged power.

Kaiser had constructed a gasoline-powered, five-mile-long beltline to move gravel to the construction site, where dozens of bulldozers and moveable cranes crawled like bugs far below their lookout point.

For two weeks he had hitchhiked his way across the country. He was still on the road on June 22, 1941, when he learned that Hitler had sent five great army columns eastward into the Soviet Union, a brazen stroke that sundered the Soviet-Axis Pact and drove the Red Armies into bloody retreat. Guthrie had a wry grin as the fifth-floor door opened and he shook Pete Seeger’s hand. “Well, I guess we’re not going to be singing any more of them peace songs,” he offered.

No group had been a more consistent foe of Franklin Roosevelt and his pro-British policies than the tenants in the fifth-floor flat. They had turned about with the Stalin-Axis agreement in August 1939; so they reversed themselves twenty-two months later.

“it became one war, instead of two, and there was some chance of beating fascism on its own ground, which everybody was for. But it sure knocked hell out of our repertoire.”

Guthrie was to have a profound influence on the Almanacs. The Oklahoman spanned the distance between rural and urban. “There was the heart of America personified in Woody. . . . And for a New York Left that was primarily Jewish, first or second generation American, and was desperately trying to get Americanized, I think a figure like Woody was of great, great importance,” said one man close to the group.

They sang folk songs Hays had learned from neighbors around Commonwealth College and hymns his father had boomed from the pulpit. They sang songs Seeger had plucked from the Library of Congress collections. But the majority of their songs were deliberately composed to protest any U.S. involvement in the threatening European war.

The Almanacs’ antiwar posture uncomfortably aligned them with the strutting fascists of the German-American Bund and the bitter Roosevelt haters gathered into America First. Bernay decided to release the three-record album as Songs for John Doe on an expedient “Almanac” label.

With the $250 fee they earned for the day’s work, Mill Lampell bought a 1932 midnight blue Buick from a New Jersey relative. Once owned by a thug nicknamed “Joey the Mouth,” the armor-plated car got seven miles a gallon and burned a quart of oil with each tank of gas. It had one advantage; it was big enough for the five of them, their instruments, and luggage.

Guthrie’s rage against the Interests could be petty, even “unpardonably rude,” as Alan Lomax’s gently reared sister Bess put it. Invited with Lampell to the expansive home of a friend of Lampell’s former girlfriend, Guthrie was uncomfortable and grew hostile. He brazenly tried to pocket a silver cigarette lighter, then silverware, and a cigarette box. Each time the hostess snatched them back. Guthrie finally went off—to the hostess’s relief—with a wedge of cheese and a bottle of brandy stuffed in his pockets.

They crossed the northern tier of states, first to Butte where they sang for mine workers, then on to Duluth and a lumber camp near the Canadian border, where fifty taciturn Scandinavian jacks listened to the men’s songs in utter silence and then asked for encores—which they also greeted with silence.

“He was so dominant because he was the authentic thing. For the rest of us, it was more or less something we adopted. For Woody, we assumed, it was authentic stuff,” Hawes added.

Behind on their rent, the electricity and gas bills unpaid, Seeger grumbled that Hays the hypochondriac was malingering. Contrary to all socialist doctrine, the Almanacs voted to ask him to leave the 10th Street house.

Their working-class background offered them an insight into Guthrie; it also left them with no illusions about the real estate agent’s son. “He pretended to be something else,” Cunningham explained years later. “He loved to have people think of him as a real working-class person and not as an intellectual. “Gordon told Woody once, when Woody was boasting about how he had gone to work with the migratory workers, ‘You never picked a grape in your life. You’re an intellectual. You’re a poet.’”

Guthrie was self-engrossed, she added. “He seemed to feel that it was perfectly all right for other people to support him, to see that he had whatever he wanted, and furthermore, he did not see why he in return should assume any responsibility towards others.”

Deferring musically only to his friend Huddie Ledbetter, Guthrie was the de facto featured performer at these hootenannies.

Guthrie, said his friend, Pete Seeger, “was really a writer more than a performer. He’d write a song, and restlessly go on to write another song, and restlessly go on to write another song, and restlessly go on to write another song.” He sang some of the songs a few times, “but more often than not, we wouldn’t even hear them. He’d write it, and go and write another.”

Assuming the pointed insults were part of their act, the booking agent laughed off the jibes at the Rockefellers and Standard Oil Corporation. With the right costumes and a few hay bales as props, these kids would be fine. He offered them a two-week engagement.

As many as 30 million people reportedly heard the Saturday-evening program broadcast over an unusual four-network hookup on February 14, 1942. No group of folk singers ever had a larger audience.

Then, as quickly as the Almanacs rocketed to national attention, they were to fall from grace. On Tuesday, February 17, the Scripps-Howard World-Telegram trumpeted “Singers on New Morale Show Also Warbled for Communists.” The article, which linked the Almanacs to the antiwar album Songs for John Doe, ignored the fact that Communist policy had changed in the year since its release. Once antiwar, the Almanacs were now militantly determined to beat the Axis. They were as “American” in their patriotism as any Legionnaire or Ku Kluxer.

His backlighted curls glowing, “this little boy turned around and looked at me, and I knew right then and there that I was going to marry him.” It was a stunning realization for the twenty-four-year-old woman born Marjorie Greenblatt in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She was already married, to Joseph Mazia, a metallurgist who worked on a classified job at the government’s Frankfort Arsenal.

Once again, as Cisco Houston admiringly put it, here was this scrawny guy who “was a little bit unwashed, but he always managed to get the beautiful women.”

Joe Mazia was alternately angry and disbelieving. He had just had a visit from two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who were conducting a security check on him. The agents asked him if he knew his wife “was having an affair with a Communist.”

While he was now organized, his manuscript was not. According to Gordon Friesen, himself a published novelist, the twelve-hundred-page, single-spaced manuscript did not have an acceptable conclusion. “There was a beginning, a middle, but then the story just went on and on.”

Aware of the protective fictions he had crafted and the heroic yarns he spun, Guthrie invariably called his book “an autobiographical novel.” Others were to assume Guthrie’s fantasies were true; there lay the seeds of myth.

Leadbelly and his wife, Martha, looked on Guthrie in a parental way. Their apartment “was always a place where Woody could go and did go often for food and a place to sleep and probably gave Martha, Huddie’s wife, fits, . . . considering some of his personal habits, because Martha had one of the best kept houses I’ve ever seen,” Lee Hays commented.*

Still married to Mary and the ostensible supporter of three young children, Guthrie was exempt from the draft.

All the while Marjorie wavered between her duty to her faithful husband and her love for Guthrie. On December 20, 1942, she finally found a compromise, and a decision. She would stay in Philadelphia with Joseph until he received his security clearance from the FBI in April.

To Mary he inscribed, improbably, generously: “Anything good I ever do will be because of you, Mary.” In return, Mary mailed Guthrie a copy of the divorce papers she had signed in El Paso on March 23, 1943. She was doing well, working her way up from a three-dollars-a-day waitress to manager of the Welcome Inn, with a staff as large as thirty-five people.

Cisco Houston, when he was not at sea, chided him for growing soft, an Okie too comfortable in New York’s honeyed luxury. There was a war to be won, and Guthrie was not doing his part. If Houston’s comments were a goad, Guthrie’s draft board was a prod. He was divorced, and though the father of four—three legitimatized by marriage, the fourth acknowledged by birth certificate—he was legally single and therefore subject to induction.

Guthrie would mind Cathy while Marjorie taught dance lessons during the day. He pushed Cathy in her stroller along the boardwalk, prepared her bottle, and diapered her, all chores he had avoided with his first three children.

Despite Asch’s seeming indifference, these were the first of more than three hundred different songs, ballads, and fiddle and harmonica tunes Guthrie was to record for him over the next eight years.

Three days after recording the first two songs, Guthrie was back in the Asch studio with Cisco Houston. In a day-long session they recorded fifty-six songs and ballads. They returned the next day—probably with Sonny Terry—to cut seventeen more masters. On April 24 and 25, the pair recorded another fifty songs.

Proud holder of NMU Book No. 86716, Guthrie had remained draft-exempt so long as he served in the merchant marine. But as he told Jim Longhi, the FBI had lifted Guthrie’s seaman’s papers because of an article he had written for the Sunday Worker. He would regain his papers, he promised, and sail with Jim Longhi on the next voyage. Guthrie’s appeal failed. A self-important officer from Naval Intelligence now sat screening seamen in the NMU hiring hall off Eighth Avenue. Guthrie’s name was on a blacklist.

He was inducted, ironically enough, on May 7, 1945, the day the embattled Third Reich surrendered.

While he had written, and sometimes sent a few dollars or toys, Guthrie had not seen Gwen, Sue, and Billy in almost four years.

The marriage had not only bound Guthrie to Marjorie, but it served to free him from the service. As a married man, he could now claim Cathy as a dependent. The father of four children, Guthrie had enough points under the army’s complicated system to qualify for a discharge.

On December 21, 1945, two days later, Private First Class Guthrie was released from active duty. Like millions of other ex-GIs, he returned home to hang his dress uniform with its “ruptured duck” in the far corner of a dark closet; it had never fit his slender frame anyway. He was honorably discharged on January 13, 1946.

Guthrie seemed unable to concentrate. He wrote a great deal, but no two days’ work fit together coherently.

He hurt others as well. When one woman he impregnated asked him for money to help pay for an abortion, Guthrie refused. His seed, his “creation ore,” was too precious to be squandered; the woman found a cooperative doctor without his help, and ended their affair.*

During the war, Guthrie had no difficulty reconciling the two; American patriot and American communist were one and the same. But as the Red Army on the east and the Allied armies on the west closed on Hitler’s Germany, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died; in his place was Harry S. Truman, as reflexively anticommunist as Roosevelt was instinctively a negotiator. Truman was of no mind to compromise when the second in command of the French Communist Party fired the first shot of the Cold War.

By mid-June 1945, the transformation was complete. Loyal Communists across the country were hastily retracting support of Browder, of “Teheranism,” of what now was officially termed “revisionism.”

Almost as a refuge, Guthrie in mid-1946 spent days typing hundreds of pages of his wartime essays and songs, papers that had been damaged by sea spray and salt water.

There would be no funeral. Marjorie and Woody had the body cremated with the intention of scattering Cathy’s ashes along the Coney Island beach she loved. A day or two after Cathy’s death, Cisco Houston and Jim Longhi silently walked along that dark beach with Guthrie, the seamen three bonded in grief. Guthrie suddenly threw himself on the sand, his arms and legs in the air, raging into the dark sky. “He screamed for thirty seconds,” Longhi recalled. “And then he got up. And it was over.”

Guthrie’s drinking did not surprise Longhi; because of a shipboard confidence, Longhi knew of Guthrie’s fear of the madness that had swept away Nora in 1925. “The rum made him feel good.”

According to Guthrie, songs had to be about people to be interesting, to be art. “A song was a different kind of thing than a speech. . . . A song had to have some staying power.”

Guthrie surrendered on August 2, 1949, in New York City on an indictment that charged him with mailing three letters containing material so obscene they could not be spread upon the court records. He was freed on a thousand dollars bail posted by Marjorie and her brother David.

In a plea bargain arranged by Longhi, Guthrie pled guilty on October 5, 1949, to a single count of mailing “an obscene, lewd and lascivious letter.” Longhi spent the next seven weeks, with the aid of four continuances, getting Guthrie into a pioneering psychiatric counseling program—and keeping him there.

Longhi scrambled to free his former shipmate. “The sentence was long enough to go over Christmas, and I didn’t like that,” he explained. “I did a little talking around, and got him out before Christmas. The irony is that some of my right-wing friends got him out.”

While in the hospital, Guthrie was visited by a twenty-year-old college dropout who called himself “Buck” Elliott. Born Elliot Charles Adnopoz, the son of a successful Brooklyn surgeon, young Elliott was fascinated by horses, cowboys, and the mythical West. He had run away from home at fourteen to join a rodeo, changed his name to something more American, scraped through high school between journeys westward, and taken up the guitar as the suitable instrument for a would-be cowboy from Brooklyn.

“We started playing music, and one day led to another,” Elliott explained. “I ended up staying there for about a year and one-half.” There was never a formal invitation to move in, “but they didn’t kick me out and I became like a member of the family.”

The two men managed to play together daily, sometimes for hours on end, Nora recalled. Her father would sometimes spike the children’s morning orange juice with rum so they would be quiet while he and Elliott played guitar. (To save time, he also fed them hot dogs for breakfast and bribed them with candy during the day.)

Elliott was, as he put it, the “perfect mimic.” For years after, he “did Woody Guthrie songs exactly the way that Woody did.” He played guitar the same way; he sang in the same rusty voice so well that people often mistook one for the other.

Whether it was Matusow’s testimony, or Ives’s, or the earlier citations by the California senate’s Un-American Activities Committee, the blacklist snared Guthrie in early 1952. Decca dropped the Weavers, its number one act.

Guthrie was not to be placated. In a flash of anger, he struck Marjorie—“He beat the hell out of me,” she later acknowledged—cut the telephone cord, then threatened her with the scissors.

At the hospital, Guthrie told the doctors that he suffered dizzy spells and blackouts. The doctors responded with an unsurprising diagnosis of alcoholism.

Guthrie spent a month in Bellevue, first wringing the alcohol from his guts, then undergoing the repair of a hernia by Jack Elliott’s surgeon father, Abraham Adnopoz.

Eventually, Earl Robinson’s brother-in-law, a doctor, suggested Guthrie transfer to Brooklyn State Hospital. The staff there was experimenting with insulin shock therapy to treat alcoholism.

Huntington’s chorea—“chorea,” or dance, for the spontaneous muscular contractions that wracked the limbs—was an inherited degenerative disease. It struck most often when the victim was between thirty and fifty years old; the physical, emotional, and cognitive symptoms appeared gradually, but inexorably worsened. There was no cure.

In the end the helpless victim died, limbs twitching or grown rigid and unmoving. As often as not, death came from choking, or infection, or starvation, not from the disease itself. Huntington’s chorea was a sentence of death by slow degrees. Later they all would wonder just when the disease began. Guthrie himself stated it was shortly after he got out of the Army Air Force. Marjorie attributed the onset to Cathy’s death, convinced there was a psychological trigger. However it began, alcohol seemed to exaggerate, if not exacerbate, Guthrie’s condition.

Will and Herta Geer had come the year before to join a clutch of liberal friends already established in the sparsely settled town. Herta had found the tract with its rustic house in Topanga Canyon and insisted they buy it. Will, blacklisted for his politics, could not appear in films, on radio, or the disdained medium of television. Instead they would build a hillside amphitheater with help from other blacklisted actors and writers, and present plays. They would get by, Herta insisted.

“She was a nice person—generous, talented, open,” said Bob DeWitt, who had sold the house to the Marshalls. “She was the first hippie that I ever knew . . . a free-spirited person in 1952 and that was unheard of at the time.”

For her part, Anneke wrote later, “I didn’t stop to think how jealous my husband would be in this strange set-up. As a matter of fact, I really didn’t care what he felt. I just wished he would go away, and leave me alone.”

(In reality, Hamilton realized, Guthrie was an intellectual. “I didn’t get the feeling that he was really a laborer in the proletarian sense of the word.”)

Gerlach played a twelve-string guitar in the style of Leadbelly, which irritated Guthrie. “Guthrie didn’t like imitators. He didn’t like people imitating him. He was not much for fans,” Gerlach noted. Guthrie advised Gerlach to find his own way of playing the unwieldy twelve-string.

Within a week the triangular relationship became strained, Elliott said. “Woody seemed to be a little uncomfortable with young me around. See, I was twenty-one, and Anneke was twenty-one, and Woody was forty-one.”

“Woody was more of an emotional burden than anybody else would have been,” she added with a laughing snort. “It was too much emotion in one small house.” Finally, they asked Guthrie and Anneke to leave.

He tried to write those kinds of stories for Geer, who was presenting blacklisted actors and singers under the omnibus title of “Folksay.” Guthrie’s scripts were unpresentable, Geer said, the writing both cumbersome and pornographic.

Topanga did not seem as welcoming. Elliott suggested Guthrie “might have been aware of the fact that people there were not real in love with him on account of the way he took off with Anneke.”

“I got up the next morning, and Woody was gone and so was our silverware. I imagine he pawned it for a bottle.”

Guthrie left El Paso by Greyhound bus for Tulsa on August 9, 1954, FBI agents trailing after him.

He had been arrested for trespassing in the freight yards, nabbed while sleeping. “Before the officer hauled me off, the brakeman slipped me a dollar. Something like that always happens just when you get to starving. I can safely say that Americans will let you get awful hungry but they never quite let you starve.”

On Thursday, September 16, 1954, Guthrie put a pad of writing paper, a shirt, and the manuscript for “Seeds of Man” into a paper bag. Bag in hand, he checked himself into Brooklyn State Hospital, surrendering finally to the doctors’ diagnosis.

Marjorie made it clear Guthrie was a member of her family when she linked with a new suitor, Al Addeo. She was frank, Nora noted. “She said that he was marrying both of them, and that she came with a ‘husband,’ that she came with Woody.”

As the applause ran on, the legend of Woody Guthrie—the banty, brilliant songmaker who had stood for the underdog and downtrodden—crystallized, Silber decided.

Guthrie, hospitalized but alert, reviewed the agreement that turned over to the trust all rights to his songs and publications. Any future income was to be used to pay medical and educational expenses for Arlo, Joady Ben, and Nora. (Creation of the trust also served to prevent state authorities from seizing the income from royalties to pay for Guthrie’s hospitalization.)*

Dr. George Comeau determined that Guthrie needed to be restrained “for the welfare of patient and safety of others.” Judge Nelson K. Mintz committed Guthrie to the New Jersey State Hospital at Greystone Park.

I’m worried about how you boys are doing. Out there, if you guys say you’re communists, they’ll put you in jail. “But in here, I can get up there and say I’m a communist and all they say is ‘Ah, he’s crazy.’ You know, this is the last free place in America.”

There were increasingly more of these acolytes, including a nineteen-year-old dropout from the University of Minnesota, Robert Zimmerman, who arrived amid a New York City snowstorm almost twenty years to the day after Guthrie. In late January or early February 1961, Bob Dylan, as Zimmerman had taken to calling himself, knocked on the door of the home Marjorie had bought in Howard Beach. One of Marjorie’s teenage dance students, hired to keep watch over the children, took one look at the young man’s work boots and mismatched attire, then politely suggested he come back another time.

In later visits to the Gleason home, Dylan fastened on Jack Elliott, who had returned from a six-year stay in Great Britain, where he had introduced Guthrie’s songs to a host of young musicians. Elliott, as he acknowledged in a newspaper interview, “did Woody Guthrie songs exactly the way that Woody did,” and was criticized for “being a perfect mimic, aping Woody Guthrie down to the very last movement and gesture and facial expression.” Years before, Guthrie had drawled, “Jack sounds more like me than I do.” Now, watching Elliott—whose two made-in-Britain recordings Dylan had repeatedly listened to in Minneapolis—Dylan copied appearance, manner, and gesture.

John Cohen had known Guthrie for as long as eight years and had seen the creeping pace of Huntington’s chorea. Later, watching Dylan sing in a Greenwich Village club, “jerking around, tilting his head this way, and making these moves—I’d never seen anything like that except in Woody. When I first saw him, I said, ‘Oh, my God, he’s mimicking Woody’s disease.’”*

Guthrie had spent four years, ten months, and five days at Greystone. In that span, his third wife had put their daughter up for adoption, had divorced him, remarried, and fled the country. Greystone dentists had removed eight of his teeth. Surgeons had repaired hernias on both his left and right sides and performed a hemorrhoidectomy on him.

By early 1966, Guthrie weighed no more than 100 pounds, down from the 125 pounds he had weighed when he was confined to Greystone nine years earlier.

Guthrie died at 7:20 A.M. the next morning, Tuesday, October 3, 1967. He was fifty-five years old. He had spent the last thirteen years and seventeen days in state mental hospitals, essentially untreated, wasting away slowly.

Marjorie would ask resisting secretaries how old they were. “If they’re under thirty, I say I’m Arlo’s mother. If they’re over thirty, I say I’m Woody’s wife.”)

Tragedy stalked the children of Woody Guthrie. Cathy, the child he had nicknamed “Stackabones,” was dead, fatally burned in a fire twenty years earlier. Her death had seemingly drained her father of creative energy; certainly there were few notable works from him after that.

Perhaps it is in the nature of performers to adopt a stage persona; Jack Elliott, Bob Dylan, and Guthrie’s son Arlo—born like Elliott “on a 5,000-acre cattle ranch” in Brooklyn, later given speech lessons to lose the local accent, bar mitzvahed on the Lower East Side of Manhattan—all would end up on stage with a generic Western drawl.

While he was less disciplined than members of the party, he nonetheless followed the party line, even to the extent of endorsing Communist North Korea’s invasion of autocratic South Korea.

That might describe Peter Seeger, who, blacklisted, spent more than a decade playing before growing audiences at colleges, churches, and gatherings of 1960s activists. He encouraged the notion that anyone could play an instrument and sing songs for their own enjoyment without regard to professional standards. In doing so, he transformed tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of music consumers into music makers. Seeger is aware of that achievement; he himself described it as his most important work in an interview in 1998.

novelist John Steinbeck erroneously attributed to drought and dust storm the migration of his fictional Joads and the hundreds of thousands of other Oklahomans who fled the eastern part of the state looking for work. (In the main, these “Okies” were victims of poor farming practices and low farm prices.

Marjorie was furious when Elliott, Dylan, and others imitated Guthrie after the disease had set in. “They heard Huntington’s, the slur when singing, talking. In Elliott, Dylan, you hear early Huntington’s. Dylan didn’t even know the real person. Woody was mythology in his own mind.”

At the first annual Woody Guthrie Festival in Okemah on July 18, 1998, Arlo, by then a long-experienced performer, commented on the release two weeks before of a postage stamp honoring Guthrie: “For a man who fought all his life against being respectable, this comes as a stunning defeat.”