Mapping Woody Guthrie by Will Kaufman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mapping Woody Guthrie by Will Kaufman Steven H. Wilson Mapping Woody Guthrie. By Will Kaufman. American Popular Music Series. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 160. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6178-5.) Will Kaufman has written three books on Woody Guthrie. The first, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (Urbana, 2011), considers the sources and application of the singer’s politics. Woody Guthrie’s Modern World Blues (Norman, Okla., 2017) examines Guthrie’s understanding of and relationship to twentieth-century modernism in art, science, and culture. In Mapping Woody Guthrie, the third volume in his makeshift trilogy, Kaufman analyzes how changing spaces and places affected Guthrie’s artistic and intellectual development. This is not a biography, and the author does not attempt to chart all of Guthrie’s wanderings in this brief volume (it is just a bit more than one hundred pages, although Kaufman appends a useful chronology of a dozen pages). Kaufman admits that “Guthrie’s was such a vagabond spirit that we may never know all the places where he actually set foot” (p. 13). Instead, he describes journeys and events that left perceptible impacts on Guthrie’s artistic or social attitudes. It may be helpful to read the previous works, but it is not absolutely necessary to know a great deal about Guthrie’s life in order to understand or enjoy this book. Kaufman amply illustrates his points by quoting Guthrie’s original compositions as well as other tunes he sang and borrowed from, ranging from gospel standards to progressive songs drawn from the Wobbly songbook. Kaufman draws not only on Guthrie’s recorded work but also on unpublished lyrics, letters, essays, and notebook scribblings. In the first two of the seven chapters, Kaufman reminds readers why Woody Guthrie is so justifiably associated with the Dust Bowl and the “Okie” migration that followed that environmental disaster. Guthrie was born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma, which saw an oil boom and bust in the years before the Great Depression. This echoed the Guthrie family’s cycle of prosperity and poverty, as they followed opportunity (and fled misfortune) throughout the 1920s. Eventually, Woody Guthrie landed in Pampa, Texas, another booming oil town that went bust. Then there were clouds of grasshoppers, herds of jackrabbits, and finally a “‘black blizzard’” of dust (p. 21). Ultimately, when Guthrie joined the migration to California, he saw and absorbed the despair and anger of the masses. Guthrie bore witness to these experiences with his early breakthrough recording, Dust Bowl Ballads (1940). Yet, as Kaufman shows, Guthrie’s “witness” is a complicated issue, to be taken “more in the bardic sense than the literal sense” (p. 34). The Guthrie family had direct experience with bankers and lawyers, and he certainly saw enough hard living on the road to feed his muse. Yet he only observed the Hoovervilles and hobo camps; he [End Page 219] did not live in them. He based his songs on news reports, gossip, or tall tales as often as on direct observation. His genius was in absorbing such sources and transforming them into authentic chronicles. Heading west, Guthrie was among people he knew well. Subsequent encounters provided fresh material for Guthrie’s art. In 1930s Los Angeles, he encountered the professional radicals of the Popular Front, who exerted lasting influence on Guthrie’s politics, although he sometimes broke with orthodoxy. On a tour of the Pacific Northwest, he famously wrote about the Grand Coulee Dam. Then during World War II, he crossed the Atlantic as a wartime merchant marine. In 1940 Guthrie had moved to New York City, where he met Pete Seeger and Lead Belly, setting the stage for the postwar folk renaissance. In Kaufman’s final chapter, Guthrie visits Beluthahatchee, Florida, where he saw, and scathingly criticized, the Jim Crow regime. Guthrie wrote countless songs as he traveled this long road and produced a mass of additional work. Kaufman chooses effective examples to demonstrate that encountering diverse people and broader horizons enlarged Guthrie’s outlook and deepened his art. Steven H. Wilson Lehigh University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association