Woody Guthrie Up Close: See Artifacts From New Exhibit on the Folk Legend
If Woody Guthrie were still here, his daughter says, the folk legend would still be his old vigilant self. “I think Woody would be writing everything down, from the minutiae of the daily news to the bigger questions of why are we here and what’s happening right now,” says Nora Guthrie, the president of Woody Guthrie Publications. “I think Woody would be thinking along those lines, questions like that.”
It may be impossible to ascertain Guthrie’s mindset, but a new exhibit — “Woody Guthrie: People Are the Song” —sheds new light on the singer, songwriter, and writer who wrote standards like “This Land Is Your Land” and influenced several generations of musicians, from Bob Dylan through Steve Earle and Billy Bragg.
The exhibit, open now at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum and running through May 22, traces Guthrie’s life through his notebooks, handwritten song lyrics, musical instruments, and even articles of clothing. (It may tour other parts of the country in the future as well.) The show is also accompanied by a book, Woody Guthrie: Songs and Art, Words and Wisdom, by Guthrie and historian Robert Santelli. Here are a few of the standout items in the collection.
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The Forgotten “This Land Is Your Land” Verses
Image Credit: © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. One of Guthrie’s most enduring songs, “This Land Is Your Land” had six verses, but only the first three are known to the public. This manuscript of the complete song allows visitors to see and read the added verses (which include, “In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people/By the relief office I seen my people/As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking/Is this land made for you and me?”). “It was first published in a children’s songbook and the music teachers said, ‘You can’t expect kindergarteners to learn six verses,’” says Nora Guthrie, who says the song was “his version of ‘God Bless America.’” When the song was performed by Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, and others at Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony in 2009, cue cards had to be cobbled together at the last minute so that the artists knew the extra words.
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The Guthrie-Trump Connection
Image Credit: © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. Between 1950 and 1953, Guthrie and his family lived in Brooklyn’s Beach Haven Apartments, built by the father of a certain future president — and in housing supposedly built for veterans but that was also unwelcoming to Black families. “Fred Trump loomed in Woody’s life,” says Nora. “He wrote surprisingly a lot about him — not just lyrics but in letters to other people. He would say, ‘I’m living in this place that doesn’t let Negroes in and it makes me sick.’” (As Guthrie wrote, “I suppose Old Man Trump knows/Just how much Racial Hate he stirred up/In the bloodspot of human hearts.”) When the Guthrie family was in search of funding for the Woody archive, Nora sent a copy of the apartment lease to the Trump Organization. “I said, ‘My Dad paid rent to yours, so how about you chipping in?’” she says. “I got a letter back from someone in the organization saying basically, ‘Forget about it.’ But I thought it was funny.”
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Guthrie’s Fascist-Killing Machine
Image Credit: Courtesy of the Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle One of Guthrie’s legacies is the way he’d festoon his guitars with the phrase “This Machine Kills Fascists.” This Martin guitar from the early Forties, with the words scratched onto the back, is the only surviving one with that motto on it. Another one, popularized in a widely seen photo, wound up in a guitar repair shop in New York’s Greenwich Village. According to what Nora Guthrie heard from once Village-based musician John Sebastian, “They fixed the guitar and cleaned it up — and sanded off the writing.”
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A Very Personal Notebook
Image Credit: © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. Guthrie wrote in many journals, often cover to cover and sometimes in the margins when he ran out of space. This particular 1942 notebook, pages of which have been digitized for the exhibit, has a heartbreaking back story. It’s essentially a long letter to his unborn daughter Cathy. “It includes all kinds of thoughts and advice on life, love, politics, how to handle your emotions, how he feels about my mother,” Nora says. “It covers a huge array of life.” Sadly, Cathy died in a house fire four years later, making the 365 pages of the journal especially poignant.
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Hospital T-shirt, Circa 1960
Image Credit: Courtesy of The Morgan Library and Museum One of the most arresting items in the show is a T-shirt Guthrie wore during his stay at New Jersey’s Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital between 1956 and 1961. (He suffered from Huntington’s disease, misdiagnosed as schizophrenia.) Nora Guthrie found it in a trunk with some of her father’s belongings. “I was teary-eyed but I also realized how small he was — the shirt is a petite, child-size,” she says. “He was generally small, but in the hospital it got worse and worse.” When he could no longer speak, Guthrie would answer yes or no questions by pointing to one of the signs seen in the display. “My mom made those cards,” she says. “She would say, ‘Do you still want to be here [alive]?’ And he would always point to ‘Yes.’ He was in the hospital for 15 years and kept pointing to yes.”
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When Dylan Came to Visit
Image Credit: Courtesy of Vince Hockey Collection Bob Dylan arrived in New York in early 1961 in order to visit Guthrie in the Brooklyn hospital where the singer was living at that point. Dylan wrote down directions on the back of a “reserved” card from a table at the fabled folk club Gerde’s Folk City (where Dylan got his start that same year). “First of all, the directions are correct,” says Nora Guthrie with a laugh. “Bob was beautiful in those years. He became one of dad’s caretakers. He would sing my dad’s songs to him, which was very sensitive of him; my dad wanted to know that he had done something that would last.” Guthrie remembers the first time Dylan stopped by the Guthrie home in Brooklyn and knocked on the door. Then a young teenager she was busy watching American Bandstand and trying to learn the Watusi dance move. “He said, ‘Is Woody here?’ and I said no and closed the door,” she says. “He knocked again and I said, ‘I can’t let strangers in.’” Eventually her brother Arlo and a babysitter invited Dylan in.
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Guthrie’s Life To-Do List
Image Credit: © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. According to Nora Guthrie, her father “could be very childlike in terms of forgetting certain things. He wasn’t raised domesticated. He was raised in the Wild West, to some degree. Very poor. Even hygiene was limited.” Between that and having a mother who also suffered from Huntington’s, Guthrie often needed help remembering some of the most basic chores in life, as this list from 1943 (which he called “New Years Rulin’s”) shows. “It says he had to be reminded to brush his teeth and put on clean underwear,” she says. “Later in life he had to be reminded to eat three meals a day. So this list is a serious reminder to himself, everything from wearing clean socks to fighting fascism. ‘Wake up and fight’ is the last one. It was serious. It wasn’t a joke.”
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Guthrie the Painter
Image Credit: © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. Although he’s best known for his songs, Guthrie began his career as an artist before he moved into music. “He started out as a painter as a young man,” his daughter says. “He would send away for painting lessons in the mail. He actually worked his way across the country making a living doing sign paintings and decorative illustrations. There’s a strong connection between his love of art and how he translated that into his love of words.” This painting, from 1936, reveals that side of him. “He was very much into adobes,” she says. Guthrie’s 1947 novel House of Earth, only recently unearthed and published, also featured those types of homes.
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A Note From John Lennon
Image Credit: Courtesy of the Woody Guthrie Archive In the early Nineties, Nora Guthrie was going through boxes of her father’s letters, correspondences and documents. “I reached into one of the boxes and there was an envelope that said ‘Lennon New York City,’” she recalls. “I opened it up and there was this letter from John Lennon that had been sitting in this box for at least 20 years. It was in an envelope and no one had opened it.” An accompanying note by Lennon’s assistant said that Lennon had just finished reading Woody Sez, a posthumous collection of Guthrie’s work from 1975. Given Guthrie’s support for immigrants, heard in songs like “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” Nora feels John connected with his work in a person way: “They were trying to deport John and he had just survived that — he had won.”
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An Enduring Civil Rights Message
Image Credit: © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. Both the exhibit and its accompanying book include numerous Guthrie illustrations. Nora Guthrie finds this one particularly relevant. “Right now, people are ‘safeguarding’ the elections by not letting people vote,” she says. “That’s exactly what the GOP is doing right now under the guise of ‘protecting election integrity.’ So I thought, ‘This is a good one for right now.’”
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