[music]
Nora Guthrie: My father’s history–you have to remember what you know is what someone decided to record. And in the time that my father was recording, there was a depression going on, there was war going on, there was a dustbowl going on. There were very heavy things happening in this country. So he was kind of commissioned in many cases to work up this material. He’d say, “Sure, I’ll give you ten songs about unions. I’ll give you fifteen songs about the war. I’ll give you whatever.”
Jay Bennett: I mean we knew the part of the story that everybody knows: the dustbowl balladeer, hobo, train-riding guy.
[music]
Guy Logsdon: Woody was a working man’s poet. Period. He totally believed in democracy. To him, greed was the evil. He would say, “I’m not right wing, left wing, I’d just like a chicken wing.”
[music]
Nick Spitzer: Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma. As a child, he heard church hymns, outlaw ballads, blues, fiddle tunes and popular music. In his home town, he experienced Anglo-Southern migrants, Native Americans and Blacks in a setting where an oil boom mentality rapidly transformed the small farm town. In a 1940 recording session at the Library of Congress, Woody told Alan Lomax that the Guthries were not a hardscrabble farm family.
Alan Lomax: How did you people live out there in Oklahoma, did you live pretty well?
Woody Guthrie: I don’t know, Alan. To start with, I was a little bit different from the class that John Steinbeck called the “Okies” because dad to start with was worth about $35 or $40,000, and he had everything hunky-dory. Then, he started having a little bad luck; in fact our whole family had a little bit of it. I don’t know whether it’s worth talking about or not, I never do talk it much. But then this six-room house burned down just a day or two after it was built. It was supposed to be one of the biggest, finest in that whole country. Right after that, my fourteen-year-old sister either set herself afire or caught a fire accidentally; there’s two different stories got out about it. Anyway, she caught afire while she was doing some ironing that afternoon on the old kerosene stove. It caught her afire, and she ran around the house about twice before anybody could catch her. The next day she died. And my mother, that was a little bit too much for her nerves or something, I don’t know exactly how it was. But anyway, my mother died in the insane asylum in Norman, Oklahoma. And after that, I don’t know, I kindly took to the road. I hit the road one day; the first day that I ever hit the highway to be what’s called ramblin’ man or a hobo or a tramp was in 1927.
[music]
To hear the full program, tune in Saturdays at 5 and Sundays at 6 on WWNO, or listen at americanroutes.org.