DUST BOWL REFUGEE

Roy Kerridge on the

odd appeal to a later generation of Woody Guthrie's songs

IN THE late Fifties, when I left grammar school and went to art school, the music of school and college was skiffle, as sung by Lonnie Donegan. Older boys who were in the know loftily put it about that Lonnie Donegan had adapted most of his songs from those of a Negro guitarist, Leadbelly, and of a 'poor white' called Woody Guthrie. At that time, blues and hillbilly music were unavailable neat, and came to us in the diluted form of skiffle.

Donegan's choice of songs led me back to the original versions, but while I instant- ly took to blues, I was at first appalled by hillbilly music with its Bible Belt morality, full of repentant convicts lamenting that they had broken their mothers' hearts.

Woody Guthrie took the songs of hoboes, drifters and dust bowl refugees and rewrote them as hymns to working- class America. His patriotism was some- times brash and overdone, but acceptable to the communists and bohemians of the Thirties, Forties and later, because of its glorification of the Great American Bum, an archetypal migrant worker with muscles like Popeye and a habit of building hyd- roelectric dams and power stations all over the place. This bum's rough and rowdy ways, which included murder, were justi- fied because he was building a new Amer- ica and fighting fascism.

Very often Guthrie transformed reli- gious ballads into trade union songs. Almost all his songs, except his sentimental nursery rhymes, were written from the point of view of a migrant worker harried by officialdom from pillar to post, yet fired with patriotism for the America of the future. Strangely, this touched a chord in English art students and beatkniks who yearned for the America of the past, as revealed to them by skiffle and books on jazz.

Many of Woody's best songs were tradi- tional ballads spiced up with verses taken from Negro blues, very much in the tradi- tion of non-political hillbilly singers like the Carter Family. Guthrie's guitar style closely followed the Carters, who were popular in the American South during the Twenties but almost unknown elsewhere. He in turn was copied by Bob Dylan, who was himself copied by a British folk singer, Donovan, the grating nasal tone and hill- billy guitar just about surviving all these permutations.

Guthrie sought fame in New York, and became known as a folk rather than a country singer. When war broke out he enlisted, despite his poor health, and wrote some rather simple-minded anti-Nazi songs. These were full of praise for our Russian allies and treated Hitler as an exaggerated version of a hobo-hating cop or a blackleg miner. One of these songs was 'Miss Pavlichenko', in honour of the Russian sniper paraded around the West by communists who touted her as the New Woman, as likely to kill you as look at you, if she thought you were ideologically un- sound.

Miss Pavlichenko's well known to fame; Russia's your country, fighting is your game, Your smile shines as bright

As my new morning sun, But more than three hundred Nazidogs Fell by your gun.

This song was never a success in .Eng- land, where until recently love of dogs far exceeded hatred of Nazis. After the war, Guthrie fell victim to a lingering disease, Huntington's chorea, and died leaving the world over a thousand songs and an auto- biography, Bound for Glory, which makes curious reading. We learn, early in the book, that Guthrie's father was a land dealer during an oil boom in Oklahoma, and used to be out fighting most of the time, evidently to cement deals. Woody grew up to be the man of every art school skiffler's dream, a hard-working guitar-plucking hobo, riding the rails, half romantic scallywag and half champion of workers' rights. Much of the book seems to be fantasy, such as the description of a gang fight so ferocious that nobody could possibly have survived it, yet the victorious leader Woody claims to have been eight years old at the time! His gang, who used the comic-book device of dustbins converted to armoured vehicles, were called the Boomtown Rats, a title later borrowed by a pop group. Other parts of the story, such as Woody's rejection of a rich relatives mansion, complete with butler, and his love for a peach-picker's daughter, do not have the ring of truth. But this may be because the book is so badly written, in a slipshod Kerouac-meets-Huck-Finn-and- goes-slightly-mental style, never saying `the' when `th" will do, and spelling 'you as `ya', a technique greatly admired by young would-be Americans. Young peo- ple's admiration for America is seldom for Uncle Sam, but more often for his wild rebellious nephews, be they cowboys, gangsters, draft dodgers or folk singers. In its muddled way, Woody's book does tell a story of America. The settlement of the West was an inspiring achievement, men pouring in from the East, taming a, rugged land, building roads, towns and farms in a wilderness and covering a vast, continent with a slightly one-dimensionat version of Western civilisation, torn from its mediaeval roots. America is a mono' ment to hard work, and the worker's point of view is the only one Woody Guthrie ever understood. There is another side to the coin, of the buffalo and the Indian staring in amaze" ment at the frantic ragged armies of oppor- tunists appearing well in advance of law, .s and states and court-houses, armed with pistols, bowie knives and fake land deeds for the latecoming tenderfoots. Brawling their way across a continent, they were well described by Charles Dickens, Mari'. Twain and to some extent Woody Guthrie. Honest men had to be swindled before the West was won, and the cost has been America's lasting addiction to firearms. Woody was born too late for prairies and wild animals, but he was born right in the middle of wrangles over land. In the dust bowl, defeated nature struck back at her conquerors, for greedy farmers overwork- ed the soil, which then blew away. Woody blamed bankers. He happened to take the side of unionised workers, but his book gives me the feeling that 'blacklegs' had a point too, as well as the bosses, bankers, company spies, vigilantes and railroad police that he describes. A nightmare democracy emerges, with everybody bashing and shooting everybody else and nothing to choose between any of them. After the writings, the songs are a breath of fresh air.

However, Woody's views of fresh air and wilderness are strictly of the noble- worker-conquering-nature type, perhaps understandable in a land of vast and eerie solitudes, where even G. K. Chesterton Might yearn for a sewing-machine factory to cheer things up. Here are some of Woody Guthrie's reflections on seeing the `Talking River, in a 'talking blues' called Talking Columbia'.

Just watch this river and pretty soon Ever'body's goin' to be changin' their tune. The big Grand Coulee an' the Bonneville Dam Run a thousand factories for Uncle Sam. An' ever'body else in the world. Makin' ever'thing from sewing machines to fertiliser.

Atomic bedrooms! Plastic!

Ever'thing's gonna be made out of plastic!

Guthrie's most famous disciple was folk singer Bob Dylan, who acquired a hobo past in the South, thanks to his fertile imagination, and then later switched to surrealistic lyrics. The Beatles followed, and soon drug addicts, terrorists and murderers found inspiration in these non- sense songs, which were taken very seriously and used as coded instructions, or blank cheques, for any amount of mischief- Making. That era has passed, and madmen have returned to misinterpreting the Bible. As I remember it, the grammar school and art college liking for blues and hillbilly Music led to curious mental sensations, as the s.outherri songs of America's unsophisticated poor accommodated themselves in fairly complex literary minds. For the first time Frankie and Johnny jostled with Dostoievsky, and Tom Dooley made his Alan with Pinter. Folk-song collectors like 7tail Lomax, and popularisers like Lonnie '-innegan did their work too well, and these ditties seemed literally to be in the wrong heads. Such startlingly displaced hages prepared the way for surrealistic eking, which, when it came, was mixed u 13 with science fiction and R. D. Laing's r, of salvation through dottiness; and the titles led us on into the Sixties. 'Good- night Little Arlo, Goodnight,' sang Woody Guthrie to his baby son, but Arlo was to grow up into a hippie.

Even Guthrie's drawings, childish scrib- bles of men walking about in enormous shoes and trousers, inspired the cartoonists of America's underground press, who not only go in for pornography but for violent- ly anti-negro humour, accepted as being ultra-left-wing. If Woody Guthrie had re- mained a naïve country singer, and had never been taken up as every intellectual's man of the people, would the world now be a better place?

Now why won't you answer my question? Tell me why, oh why.

Because I don't know the answer. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.