Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon

Robert is joined again by Margaret Killjoy for part two of our holiday non bastard episode about Woody Guthrie.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to the Court of Robert Evans Bastard Guy podcast.
Yeah that's right, got a gabble. See take that our engineers,
they're not gonna be happy.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Who let you get a gap?

Speaker 2 (00:17):
I got sent this by the judge again. It works
exactly like vampires made me. And it's lovely. It's a
beautiful gabble, look at it.

Speaker 4 (00:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
I can also buy that from like toy z r
Us or whatever children's store has survived.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
It would mean nothing at all in your hands, Sophie,
you haven't gone through the extensive training and preparation to
become a United States municipal judge like.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
I have cool.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Cool, Welcome back to behind the bast I.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
Really hate that you have power of any kind.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
I know, I know, tremendous power, unaccountable power. I'm now
eligible for the Supreme Court. Although I think technically anyone
is fun.

Speaker 4 (00:54):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
I actually think you would be a no.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, I'd be a great.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
Supremacurt you'd be better than one Supreme Court like ninety
percent of the time and then ten percent of the time.
You would be like I think that every one should
have a personal nuke. You be k canster, but here's
the thing. I think you'd be better going to.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Be any more home invasions.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Margaret, You're better than the nine we have.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
You know, that's very true?

Speaker 3 (01:19):
Quite true?

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, Well, speaking of someone who would have been better
on the Supreme Court, Woody Guthrie, that's who we're talking
about in part two of these episodes, yep, Margaret dad,
though not his clansman of father.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Before we jump into this, though, I want to plug
something really fast, if that's okay.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Uh oh.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
I just want to plug a series that our colleague
and my dear friend, Jimmie lost Fist has been doing
on her podcast, sixteenth Minute of Fame. Ever heard of
it about the Manosphere? I think they and the Bastard's
audience would really enjoy it. Jimmy has worked very hard
on the writing is incredible, So check that out on
sixteenth Minute of Fame.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
The Manisphere, if you're not aware, is the kind of
colloquial term for this network of far right generally like
masculinity influencers. All all of them have fed into the
trumpest movement in groups like the Proud Boys. It's a
very important like social phenomenon that explains a lot of
why we are where we are right now, and Jamie
does a great job of breaking it down, so check

(02:18):
that out. On sixteenth minute.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
Robert is interviewed on one of the parts.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
Ooh, sure, I've only heard part one so far.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
I am. I am well speaking of part two, Let's
do the part two of these episodes.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
Huh, yes, No, I also haven't talked to this one yet.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Let's kill it. Let's murder it. Let's bury it in
the woods in a tree stump, under a tree stump
so that nobody finds it, and then cash in at
Social Security for you. I don't know what I'm doing here, Margaret,
Part two, So what do you go? Thrie had weed
Mary in nineteen thirty three, and by nineteen thirty six
when he quit Texas for California, which is what you

(02:57):
have to legally call it when you're talking about the
night teen thirties, she'd had one child with him and
was pregnant with another, and he kind of abandons her,
like not entirely, like he doesn't like break up with her,
and like she eventually moves to California with him, but
he does just kind of bounce to go try and
find a living you know, in the West, and this
is a thing a lot of guys are doing and

(03:19):
a lot of people have to do. It's also not
a thing that the family's thrilled with. The specific project
that he left for was a dam that was being
built outside of Redding, California, in a place called Happy Valley.
I have lived in and around there. I can assure
you it is not a particularly happy valley now, and
it wasn't one then either. In fact, the name was
kind of like ironic like because it was a shanty

(03:42):
town that was miserable, so like Greenland, like Greenland. Yes,
it's a I guess probably a better place now, although
I can't really in good conscious recommend anyone go to Redding.
So yeah, anyway, that's where Woody heads up to and
he's there for a little while. It's in this shanty
town with like about five thousand other work seekers who
are all like you know, showing up to try and

(04:03):
q in lines and get jobs every day. Right, And
there were a lot of spaces like this around the country,
you know, there were a lot of these government work
camps basically right which is where Woody is, And there
were also in areas like Sacramento, and Seattle. These things
called Hooverville's and Hooverville's were essentially large camp sites built
by homeless workers and their families as they migrated around

(04:24):
searching for work during the Great Depression.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
Well, it's actually in the US they're called vacuum towns, vacuumville.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
That was good. That was good, Margaret, Thank you, it
was good.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
Thanks, I'll be here all day.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
Electro lux cities, I don't know. I just think it's
funny because the old catchphrase was nothing sucks like an
electro lux And I've never heard an advertisement that was
more clearly made before the Internet. You couldn't get away
with that today, or you could, but it would be
a different.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
Pro Although in England they had the we put the
d and Bread campaign only a couple of years ago.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
That pretty funny, Yes.

Speaker 4 (04:55):
Not bad.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
I'm never gonna get over that, oh Man. So hoovervill
were named kind of it was an attack on President
Herbert Hoover, right, Like that's why they get their to
him because he was this this will not sound familiar
to anything that's about to happen. He was this corrupt
Republican president whose policies which benefited the incredibly wealthy, fed
into the Great Depression, and like allowed for the kind

(05:18):
of deregulation that made it much worse. And we're seen
as having largely led the country into economic calamity. And
so they named these massive homeless camps for like homeless families. Basically,
Hooverville's the largest and longest lasting. I'm not sure if
it was absolutely the largest, but it was the longest
lasting and among the largest. Hoovervilles was outside of Seattle,

(05:40):
and it stood from nineteen thirty one to nineteen forty one.
As an interesting side note, it was operated on land
next to Elliott Bay South, which I believe is where
Fraser's condo was meant to be located in the TV series.
That doesn't mean anything. I just thought it was interesting.
So Wood he missed out on the big West coast Hooverville's,
but he was in and round. You know, reading is
people who are heading up to Seattle or coming back

(06:02):
down from Seattley's talking to them. There's a big one
in Sacramento. He's talking to them, and he's in this
work camp and Happy Valley that's kind of similar Hooverville, right,
And he's supposed to be up there working on this
big damn project. But he does a lot better and
it's a lot more stable for him to just busk
for music, right, and so that's what he actually spends
most of his time doing. Now, I say he's better

(06:24):
at this than he is at laboring, he's not great
at it, and he's only able to send the occasional
very small money order back home to his wife and
two kids. So he is not The idea is I'm
coming out here to support my family, but he's not
able to support Mary. She and her now two kids
are utterly dependent on her parents, which was a very
embarrassing situation for her. Mary later said, I know it

(06:46):
upset my dad a lot, my mother too. Wood he
wasn't doing the manly thing, And I think it's both
worth like saying that that's her impression and the family's
impression of this. This is not an uncommon position for
people to be in, and I don't know that Woody
was doing very well back in Texas, so it's kind
of unclear to me, you know, what the right thing

(07:08):
to do here was. Ultimately, Woody, like a lot of people,
was put in a very difficult situation of trying to
do something he hoped would allow him to support his family,
and it didn't work very well for a while, right, I.

Speaker 3 (07:22):
Mean it was the Great Depression.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
It was like a Great Depression.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yeah. We see a lot of this now, where like
people are like, oh, I'm failing under capitalism, I must
personally be a failure and you're like, yeah, no, times
are really hard right now.

Speaker 2 (07:34):
Well, and we also on this show, like we've had
like guys like Steven Segall who as a guest yes yes, uh,
friend of the pod, like absolutely abandoned his family to
start his Hollywood career. That is a story we've told
a few times. Woody is his family feels like he's
doing that at the start. That's not actually what he
does here, right, because he's not actually like cutting ties

(07:56):
with them. But they're not.

Speaker 3 (07:58):
Migrant laborers do this all the time today, Like my
grand labors come to the United States. They're not abandoning
their family to try and but.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
They're usually not going out there to play guitar.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
That's fair.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
Yeah, I think that's kind of part of why, because
he's not really doing the work that you know, a
lot of these other guys were you know, he's doing
some of that, but that's not how he really makes
most of his bread. Yeah, So in short order, Wood
he left Reading for Glendale, which I've also done, and
I can tell you good call, much better place to
be than reading. He vaguely knew that he had an
aunt in the area, and as was often the case,

(08:31):
he just sort of they're not like sending letters usually
back and forth. They certainly don't have phones or whatever
you usually just like I was told once by a
relative that I have an aunt in Glendale. I'm just
gonna show up and figure out where she is and
hopefully she'll take me in. And social ties were such
that when he shows up on her doorstep, she's like,
all right. He is twenty five years old when he

(08:52):
makes it to the Los Angeles area after several months
of stress and internal recriminations because what, he's not thrilled
with himself either. He had wanted to be doing better.
He knows how little he's sending back to his family.
He's not happy about this. He gets a lucky break
courtesy of his cousin Leon, who everyone else either called
Jack or Oki Guthrie, and Ok is like a it's

(09:14):
kind of a pejorative term for someone from Oklahoma. Both
was used as an insult and also is like a
term of pride by people from Oklahoma. Right, the Guthries
are all Oakie's right, so calling him ok Guthrie must
have been a little bit confusing to like Woody, who
is also an Okie.

Speaker 3 (09:30):
Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
Jack and his family had left home back at the
start of the Depression and moved to Sacramento. Like many Guthries,
he was musically talented, and so was his wife, and
they'd built a reputation for themselves as good musicians and performers.
He suggested teaming up with Woody to try and start
and act in Los Angeles. This was not the obviously
good idea that it would later seem, as Ed Gray

(09:53):
explains in the book ramblin Man. Jack was a Western singer.
His songs were heavily influenced by popular music. Wood he
was a country singer, his music born of an older
oral tradition. In practice, they could neither sing nor play
guitar together. Indeed, would he privately despise the treakly sentiment
of jack sagebrush serenades. Jack the guitarist used the jazz

(10:14):
influenced chords of popular music and played up the neck
of the instrument. Would he disdained chords beyond the minimal tonic,
subdominant and dominant. So this is not a great pairing
and Wood he's a little bit like he's a little
bit of a snob. Right, It's like, Oh, your music's
all popular and jazzy. You're not doing the cool punks.
You know, it's not really punk. But that's it's very

(10:34):
similar in attitude to that kind of guy.

Speaker 3 (10:36):
Right, I mean he's doing folk punk before, it's.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
Right, Yeah, at least he's about to be starting to
do folk punk.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
It's interesting because the country western eye had never occurred
to me that those were separate categories.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yes, because I mean it's this mix of these songs
that are like folk songs that are we would call
western because they're like songs about the West and about
you know, being a cowboy or whatever, and songs that
are like Western songs that are made for like the
different kinds of like floor shows and entertainment, you know,
radio and whatever that's popular at the time. Like those

(11:07):
are kind of different beasts. So in better times, these
guys probably would never have worked together. But desperation made,
you know, some kind of collaboration necessary, and they developed
a fairly successful act and we're able to book recurring
gigs on the radio through a station called kf VD.
Woody found himself increasingly drawing the folk music with a

(11:28):
sense of class consciousness, like Goebel Reeves nineteen thirty four.
Tune Hobo's Lullaby, And here's Woody Guthrie singing a portion
of Hobo's Lullaby, which is again a song by another guy.
And this is a folk song, it's also kind of punk,
as you'll catch from this section.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
Oh, I used to listen to it while riding trains.
Oh well, the guitar.

Speaker 4 (11:52):
I know. The police calls you trouble. They call trouble
every but when you die and go to heaven, you
find policeman.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
Okay, that's good. That's a good little bar. So I
would also be remiss because that's pretty cool if I
didn't expound on the fact that racism too was a
recurrent part of wood He's act and often on his
mind while living in Echo Park and fighting on behalf
of poor white people, because he's like an activist, you know,

(12:36):
helping like rent strike type stuff right, Like he is
an advocate for like poor downtrodden white people living in
Los Angeles. He also is drawing cartoons of people he
called jungle blacks and monkeys, and like that's bad. He
wrote poems so racist that I don't even feel like
I should describe them on the air to you, They're bad.

(12:56):
Oh god, Yeah, found a good LA Weekly article on
the subject by an author named Johnny Whiteside, and I'm
going to read a quote from it now. Broadcasting on
Pasadena's Kaffidi, Guthrie often indulged in on air employee of
a Bonix, and was stunned when a black listener characterized
the singer as unintelligent after hearing Guthrie performed songs with
titles like Run, Inward Run, and Inward Blues. Fortunately for Guthrie,

(13:20):
recordings of these tunes do not survive. Later, Guthrie said,
a young negro in Los Angeles wrote me a nice
letter one day telling me the meaning of that word,
the inWORD, and that I shouldn't say it anymore on
the air, so I apologized. He next tore all the
Inward songs out of his songbook. Huh, so you can
take that however you want. Right, the fact that he

(13:42):
is singing that kind of stuff on the air and
like just writing poems about it not great. But he's
also not unable to change or immune to criticism. So
he's willing to like listen to this criticism that a
black man gives him and be like, oh, you know what,
that is kind of fucked up and that ain't nothing
for the son of a klansman, right when you're yeah,
you know again, that's kind of up to your personal take.

(14:03):
When we talk about like how do you judge people,
you know, to what extent do you judge them based
on their time or based on some sort of concept
of objective morality, one thing that always matters to me
is where did they start versus where did they end up? Right,
Because someone who was raised in a slaveholding household and
becomes an abolitionist but is still racist is a lot

(14:27):
more impressive to me than a guy who just like
isn't outwardly racist because he grew up in the nineteen nineties,
but like crosses the street when he sees a.

Speaker 3 (14:36):
Black guy, right, totally.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Because one of those is a person who like went
on a journey recognized a bad thing about themselves and
made changes.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
You know, there's people that like will never get my
pronouns right, who I suspect would kill someone who tried
to hurt me. And there's other people who would absolutely
always get my pronouns right and be super respectful and
would be like, oh no, a bad thing is happening
if they watch me get murdered for them.

Speaker 4 (15:00):
You know.

Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, I'm trying to be like, it's therefore okay, Like
I'm not trying.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
The reason I included this because it's pretty bad and
you should know that about the guy.

Speaker 3 (15:08):
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not trying to Yeah, but.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
This is not a part of his entire life or
his whole creative life. He writes anti racist songs later
in life, Like, it does seem like he makes a change,
And I do think it's worth noting like this is
a guy who was raised by a klansman in like
the thirties, twenties and thirties, you know, so you know, again,
you can figure out morally wherever you want to figure

(15:30):
that out. But I don't think it's worth kind of
looking at the whole sweep of the personal journey the
man went on there in nineteen thirty seven, Woody's wife,
Mary and two children moved to Los Angeles to be
with him. Jack wound up leaving the act and show
business for a while, but Woody paired up with Maxine Chrisman,
whose family was friends with his cousin and had taken
Woody in too. He dubbed Maxine Lefty Lou. The Tube

(15:54):
played songs by other artists that spoke to the poor
and downtrodden, like Hobo's Lullaby, but they also started playing
Woody's original compositions, like the Talking dust Bowl Blues. This
song really embodies what people were starting to love about Woody.
His music had a wartz end all description of life
during the Depression and the struggles of the hundreds of
thousands of people who were forced to move west during

(16:16):
the dust Bowl. He sung about relatable nuts and bolts
issues that are still familiar to a lot of people today.
If you were a poor punk kid who lived on
a semi permanent road trip for a while basically and
had the experience of trying to coast by turning your
car off on downhill runs because you can't afford gasoline,
here's Woody Gathrie singing about the same thing.

Speaker 4 (16:39):
Way up yonder on the mountain curve. It's a way
up yonder in the pine, he would. And I give
that rolling forward to shove and eyes going to coast
as fur as it could come in coasting pigging up
speed was a half in turn. I didn't make it, man,

(17:00):
I'm telling you. The fiddles and the guitars really flew.
That Ford took off like a b lime squirrel, and
it flew halfway around the world, scattered wives and children's
all over the side of that mountain.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
Man, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (17:18):
I love his talking blues.

Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah, I love his talking. I love the way he
says children like. It just tickles the hell out of me.
Reminds me of the good parts of Live in a
fucking middle of Nowhere, Oklahoma. Like I do like that
about him. And you know what I like.

Speaker 3 (17:32):
Even more, Margaret, is it the sponsors of the show. Yes,
they're all great.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
They're all great, and they've all had the experience of
having the coast in their Ford truck to save gas
money too. Look, it's hard times for everyone, even large brands.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
They've probably driven stuff off of the road before.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
Yeah. Absolutely, we could talk about what truck drivers are
forced to do in order to make their times. Anyway,
whatever we're done, Margaret, Yes, I do find it fun.
How much of like his dust Bowl songs are very
relatable to like punk life today. Yeah, totally hate the
cops fucking coasting in my car, you know, camping out

(18:12):
on the woods and shit like did.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
He do Big Rock Candy Mountains as this someone else.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
In my head? He did Big Rock Candy Mountains, but
I didn't double check on that.

Speaker 3 (18:19):
I mean, he might have just sung it.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
I'm fairly certain I've heard a version of the song
by him. Harry McClintock was the guy who I first
recorded and wrote it.

Speaker 3 (18:29):
Yeah, one of the first people I ever rode trains with.
I haven't written trains nearly as much as going to
make it sound like when I do these episodes, But
was this focusing on him Ryan Harvey, And so that's
why I have a lot of these associations with riding
trains in particular. But we used to sit around and
sing Big Rock Candy Mountains, but change the words very
slightly to be like modern anarchy, and you didn't have
to change much. And my favorite was and the Hens

(18:50):
lay Vegan Eggs was my favorite clan.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
Ah that's good. Oh man, that's funny. Wait a second, yeah,
yeah yeah, police dogs can't sniff your weed. Yeah, totally
so Wood. He had attained a degree of local fame
by thirty eight thirty nine. Right nineteen thirty eight to
nineteen thirty nine, he's doing reasonably well. In fact, he

(19:16):
and Lefty Loo were so beloved that the radio station
where they played received thousands of fan letters over the
course of just a few months. They were doing okay
in terms of money, but not great because again, he
has a lot of fans, but they're broke ass dust
bowl refugees, So he's not getting rich off these people, right,
And he's also not very interested in getting rich. He
seemed to feel like he had a responsibility to reach

(19:38):
and provide relief for his people suffering in government work
camps and embarrassed by their situation. From a write up
by the Library of Congress quote he also sang at
government camps that gave these people some measure of dignity, health,
and safety. Joining him was Will Gear, an actor and
ernest leftwinger, who helped would he better understand the injustice
of an economic system that would allow Americans to live

(19:59):
in such pa And this is where he starts getting
pilled on socialism, right, and eventually becomes a communist. He
will call himself a card carrying communist, as we'll talk
about he never actually has a card, and he could.

Speaker 3 (20:10):
Have gotten one.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
But Wood, he's a little bit of a fabulous right
He lies a little bit, not in a way that
is massively meaningful, because he was a communist and very committed,
but you know, he also he's a little bit of
a tall tale spinner. So yeah, and you know it's
to his credit that he's again, rather than focusing on
making money off of this growing fame, he's giving a

(20:33):
lot of free shows to provide relief for his people.

Speaker 5 (20:36):
Right.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
He is very dedicated to his people in a way
that I think is pretty admirable. Wood. He's popularity and
by now fairly mature class consciousness started to make him
more connections with the radical political set, including various left
wing writers, journalists and socialists and communist activists. He began
writing songs that spoke not just of left wing politics,

(20:58):
but of the rage of the working and increasingly his
own hatred of the people that maintained the system that
kept his people down trodden. In nineteen thirty nine, he
wrote one of his most famous songs, The Ballad of
Pretty Boy Floyd, about an Oklahoma outlaw active in the
early nineteen thirties who regular listeners will know was my cousin. Now.

(21:18):
My great grandmother knew him as a girl. I grew
up here in songs about him from her and my family. They,
as I talk about, often very conservative people. But my
great grandma particularly would always tell us, you know, you
got outlaw blood in you, right, like it was something
she was very proud of. In a way that's a
little weird if you heard the way these people tended
to talk about other like urban crime, right. Outlaw crime

(21:42):
was very different to them. And I'm talking particularly my
relatives who were survivors of the Great Depression. Outlaws are
very different than modern criminals in their eyes. Right. I'm
not saying that's actually a fair, but their conception of
these people is extremely different. And a big part of
why is not just Woody, but songs like this that
would he made. Who turned these guys who were bank

(22:03):
robbers and gangsters into Robin hood figures, right, and Floyd
was a fairly easy one to turn into a Robinhood character,
because he kind of was at least a little bit
that guy. There's a debateis to like how much of
that sort of character was real and how much of
it is kind of myth making that Floyd did, but
some of it's certainly true. Floyd was born in Georgia,

(22:25):
but had moved with his family to Aiken's, Oklahoma, in
nineteen eleven, and his career as a criminal had started
early when he was arrested at age eighteen for stealing
three dollars and fifty cents worth of I think stamps
from a post office. A few years later, he robbed
a payroll in Saint Louis. So he goes from like
stamp theft to armed robbery fairly quickly, and he does

(22:46):
three years or so in prison for that. After he's released,
he becomes a Kansas City area bank robber. One thing
you get about Floyd is he that doesn't seem to
have ever considered not being a criminal. Yeah, just immediately.

Speaker 3 (23:00):
Like, no, you know, he found this thing that sort
of works. Yeah, well, because it didn't really work. That's
the other weird thing about it. Huh.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
No, but he never really thinks about doing anything but
being an outlaw, and he quickly gains He starts Robin
Banks in Kansas City, and he earns the nickname pretty Boy,
which eventually becomes pretty Boy Floyd because people thought he
was very good looking. He hated this nickname. So he's
gonna pull up a picture of the man. You can
decide yourself how good looking he was.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
Is this a picture of Luigi?

Speaker 2 (23:30):
Americans do love their sexy criminals.

Speaker 3 (23:33):
Yeah, yeah, huh, not my type, but you know, the
standards were not as high back. He's got like a
soft gaze that nice, you know.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
Like, yeah, prominent nose, good jaw line.

Speaker 3 (23:46):
Yeah, he's not bad looking.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
Certainly, not nice hair. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:52):
Yeah, he's better looking at what he got. Three if
we go to ab real quick.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, he is a hardened criminal. He killed at least
one federal agent. He also killed the sheriff of Macintosh County.
Other members of his gang killed several police officers and
other criminals as well. There are multiple police officer murders
that he is also a suspect in that we don't
fully know did he kill all those cops, but he
killed a number of cops you know, like he shoots

(24:19):
a lot of police. In the early depression years, he
took to robbing banks in Oklahoma, where in addition to
taking money for himself, he would destroy mortgage documents in
order to free poor farmers from debt.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
Hell.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
Yeah, now we don't fully know if this happened, right,
It's not the kind of thing how would you prove it?
For one thing, right, people told stories about it. I
will tell you that everyone I knew in the towns
in Oklahoma like where he had been active, and again
including my family members who knew him, would tell you
that this is what he did. I don't know. It's

(24:53):
not provable. It's one of those things where it would
make sense for him to do it, even if he
was not really morally a Robin ho character, because if
you're destroying people's mortgages, they will hide you from the cops. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
Like, I could tie this back to Italy. In the
eighteen seventies, Mala Testa and all these other anarchists in
Italy in Benevento Province would go and their idea of
how to do propaganda of the deed was to go
and they'd march on these small towns and they would
destroy the tax and ownership records and they were like
and then everyone would come out and be like, you
have freed us. The priest was like came out of

(25:28):
the church and was like, these people have been sent
by God to free us. And then they all got arrested.
But then they actually only spent like a year in
jail because everyone was going so crazy in Italy at
that point that they were like, you know, we better
just let these people out.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Yeah, we can't go too hard on these people. Everyone
really likes them for so much.

Speaker 3 (25:44):
Yeah, and so that's like there is a specific point
and if you're going to be a criminal, if you
go hard enough and make everyone like you, there's a
certain safety in that.

Speaker 2 (25:54):
One of my favorite Floyd's stories is that he had
a gang and his gang decided they wanted to rob
a bunch of people on like Black Wall Street at
one point, which was very well armed, and Floyd was like, well,
you guys can go do that. I'm not fucking with that,
that seems like And sure enough they got fucking like
shot to pieces. Yeah. So he was a smart man.

Speaker 3 (26:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
My other favorite story about him I mentioned in my
high school ap English class that he was a cousin
of mine, and my teacher, who was, you know, in
her fifties or something, he said, he shot my grandfather
in the leg.

Speaker 3 (26:30):
Oh did you get in that class, buddy.

Speaker 4 (26:33):
No.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
No, she was like, it's okay. Again, because she was
raised in this same culture, she was like, it's okay.
Like pretty boy said, no move, and my grandpa moved.
You know, he didn't kill him, he just shot him
in the leg a little. Again, there's a lot of
tolerance for these specific sorts of outlaws in that part
of the South.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
Like it's that you probably wouldn't find today. Just to
be clear, anyone listening that you probably wouldn't find today,
you will not find today.

Speaker 2 (27:01):
So again, fascinating character. And yeah, I can't say how
much of the whole robin Hood thing is true, but
I think a lot of the robin Hood image that
he has comes from Woody. Although it's also worth noting
he is part of why it takes so long for
him to get caught, because he's like one of the
last gangsters to get caught and killed by the government.
His death is generally agreed to have heralded the end

(27:23):
of the gangster era. Huh, yeah, because I think thirty
four is when he's gunned down, and like there's a
lot of stories of him like hiding with little old
ladies and lying to the cops. And then when he
like leaves, there's one hundred dollars bill under the plate
where she'd fed him dinner or something like that. So
in nineteen thirty nine, you know, about five years after
his death, when memories of this guy are still very strong,

(27:47):
Woody writes the song that is very much responsible for
crystallizing this image of pretty Boy Floyd as this kind
of like banded outlaw king of the American South. And
we're just going to listen to that song because it's
Christmas and it's a song about my cousin.

Speaker 5 (28:03):
Hell.

Speaker 4 (28:03):
Yeah, if you'll gather around me, children, a story I
will tell about perty Boy Floyd and Outlaw Oklahoma and
you him. Well. It was in the town of Shawnee

(28:28):
Saturday afternoon, his wife beside him in his wagon as
into town may road. Baron Deputy Shirt approached him in
a manner rather rude, vulgar words of anger, and his wife,

(28:50):
she overheard pretty Boy grabbed a log chain and the
deputy grabbed his gun. In the fight that followed, he
laid that deputy down. Then he took to the tree

(29:13):
and timber to live alive. Of shame. Every crime in
Oklahoma was added to his name. But a mini a
starving farmer. The same old story told how the outlaw

(29:35):
paid their mortgage and saved their little holes. Others tell
you about a stranger that comes to bag a meal.
Underneath his napkin left a thousand dollars bills. It was

(29:59):
in Oakland, a hord city. It was on a Christmas day.
There was a whole car load of groceries come with
a note to see. Well, you say that I'm an outlaw,
you say that I'm a thief. Here's a Christmas dinner

(30:22):
for the family's on relief. Yes, it is through this
world I've wondered. I've seen lots of money men. Some
will rob you with a six gun and some with
a fountain pen. And is through your life if you travel, Yes,

(30:51):
it's through your life you roll. You will never see
an outlaw drive family frumler hole.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
I love the way that song ends. Yeah, and some
will rob you with a six gun and some with
a fountain pen.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
That's a lot I hear all over the place.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
It's it's a great fuck. I mean, this is one
of his more famous songs. Yeah, but it's a damn
good line.

Speaker 1 (31:27):
I enjoyed that thorough.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
I also like that. Look, I've seen a lot of outlaws.
I'm not saying I'm not defending the things they've done,
But it's not the outlaws I see forcing people to
be homeless, you know, that's the bands. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
So I disagree with my family about a lot, but
our shared pride in our cop killing ancestor is not
one of those things.

Speaker 3 (31:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
Anyway, as is often the case for people who come
to Los Angeles for the music industry, would he wound
up having to take his family back home to Texas
and then lee them again to move to New York
City in nineteen forty, chasing what had become for him
a dream of folk stardom. By this point, he'd become
a little bit of a legend, enough that the Library
of Congress had him sit down and record his dust

(32:12):
Bowl songs for posterity. He laid down tracks with Pete
Seeger and became an influential part of the urban folk
revival of the time. In a letter to Alan Lomax,
another influential pillar of the urban folk revival. He described
his thoughts on what folk music ought to be. And
I'm interested for your thoughts on this, Margaret Ken. A
folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it.

(32:34):
Or it could be who's hungry and where their mouth is,
or who's out of work and where the job is,
or who's broke and where the money is, or who's
carrying a gun and where the piece is. That's folklore,
and folks made it up because they've seen that the
politicians couldn't find nothing to fix or nobody to feed
or give a job a work.

Speaker 3 (32:52):
That's good. That's It's so interesting to me because I
if you'd say folk music in different places, you mean
something so completely different. Right, American folk music is this
like Woody Guthrie kind of vibe thing, whereasn't almost any
other country. You're looking at stuff that's a little bit
more like technically interesting, like musically yes, I don't know.

(33:15):
I have a lot of thoughts about like folk and
folk instrumentation and music and all that, but I think
what he's describing is great and specifically that thing that
it's just like this is the stuff that people make up,
you know, it's not fancy.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Yeah, and it's also how poor people without really any
other idea of how to have a voice, talk about
in a lot of ways, the kind of issues that
today we ascribe to, like the job of journalists, right,
who was hungry and where their mouth is? Who's carrying
a gun and where the piece is?

Speaker 1 (33:42):
Right?

Speaker 3 (33:42):
Yeah, yeah, totally it's gossip.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
Yes, yes, it's gossip and its agitation.

Speaker 6 (33:49):
Right.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
You look at a lot of folk songs and a
lot of folks stories, and that's the first safe place
to attack the wealthy and the powerful, right, totally a
little bit, you know, totally oftentimes. You know, there's also
plenty of folk stuff that reinforces some of those things,
but it is where you see a lot of subversive stuff.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
Yeah. I mean that's the thing about like populist and
popular stuff, as it can really go either way. Yeah,
but it's like yeah, still on some fundamental level. Interesting.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
Yeah, Now, it's worth spending some time on just how
radically folk music changes, as you noted, in other countries,
it's very different. And part of why it's different in
the US is Woody Guthrie. He changes what folk music
is in the United States in a fundamental way. In
an article for The New Yorker, David Hajdou writes, quote,
folk music, including country, blues and other vernacular styles, was

(34:39):
supposed to be anonymous, a collective art passed along Worley,
from singer to singer, generation to generation, sometimes culture to culture.
From the vantage point of today, when kids with their
first guitar start writing songs before they learn to play
other tunes, it is difficult to process how exceptional it
was for a folk artist such as Woody Guthrie to
have created a vast repertoire of deeply idiosyncratic works. Many Tenpanaley,

(35:02):
Broadway and Hollywood songwriters of the thirties and earlier were
as skilled and prolific as Guthrie, but they were working
in a different vein writing to order for professional singers.
Guthrie brought the authorial imperative to vernacular music in America.
And I think that's also very interesting.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
Just to keep going with all the weird family connections,
My great grandfather was a ten panale songwriter, and yeah,
he just wrote. He wrote music that he didn't own
the copyright to. He wrote the b sides for more
popular musicians.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
Like, yeah, yeah, that makes total sense. I'm not surprised
that that's your family connection. Yeah. So, by this point
in time, Woody was what you would call a left
wing radical, although not again a card carrying one. He
played benefits for and was associated with the American Communist Party,
but he never got around adjoining and you'll find several

(35:53):
different theories as to why. The leading one that you'll
hear is that he liked his independence a little too
much to be a joiner. Now this sounds good, especially
to people like you and me, but it leaves out
a crucial fact, which is that wood He was his
era's equivalent of like a Tanky right totally. I mean,
it also leaves out the fact that he vocally took

(36:14):
claim to have a card like claimed to be a
member of the party right, and that it was the
best thing he'd done, which he hadn't. Again, he wasn't
immune to the worst impulses if the American left. During
this period. He had been enthusiastic about FDR early on,
but once the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact was signed and the
USSR locked into a treaty with the Nazis, he attacked
Roosevelt as Quote Churchill's lapdog for his anti Nazi stance

(36:37):
in support of Great Britain during the early months of
the war. He argued that the developing World War was
a capitalist fraud. When Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union
invaded Poland together, Guthrie supported Stalin to an extent and
with such vociferousness that biographer Will Kaufman called it shocking.
In ramblin Man, Ed Craig goes into more detail about

(36:58):
a left wing anti war song he wrote called why
do You Stand There in the Rain, based on the
title of a New York Post article, and I'm going
to read from that section from ramblin Man here. Just
days before, some six thousand delegates of the American Youth
Congress had gathered in Washington to advocate jobs in peace.
At the invitation of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the delegates

(37:19):
gathered in front of the south portico of the White
House and a cold drizzle to listen to a half
hour speech by the President. Fdr threw down the gauntlet,
aware that the Young Communist League had taken firm grip
on the once broadly based Popular Front ayc. The Soviet Union,
as everyone who has the courage to face the fact knows,
is run by a dictatorship, and as absolute as any
dictatorship in the world. It has allied itself with another dictatorship,

(37:43):
and has invaded a neighbor, Finland, so infinitesimally small that
it could do no conceivable harm to the Soviet Union,
a neighbor which seeks only to live in peace as
a democracy, and a liberal, forward looking democracy. At that
Roosevelt heard the booze and hisses through the cold rain.
People's World columnist, would he Gothrie knew where he stood?
He chided the president and song. Now the guns in

(38:04):
Europe roar as they have so oft before, and the
warlords play the same old game again. They butcher and
they kill. Uncle Sam foots the bill with his own
dear children, standing in the rain? Why do you stand
there in the rain? Why do you stand there in
the rain. He's a strange carrying on the White House
Capital lawn. Tell me, why do you stand there in
the rain? Then the President's voice did ring. Why this

(38:26):
is the silliest thing I have heard in all my
fifty eight years of life. But it just stands to reason,
as he passes another season, he'll be smarter by the
time he's fifty nine. So he's being like real shitty
to Roosevelt there, specifically about his support of England in
the war that is developing, and very defensive of the

(38:47):
USSR and invading a much smaller neighbor in invading Poland.
And it's one of those things where this is both
like horrifying given what we know happens, you have to
to extent while still saying he was wrong, look at
his level of knowledge and what had actually happened previously.

(39:09):
World War One was the touchstone here. And in World
War One the US did enable further butchering right, like
we were arming and profiting off of a hideous war
that we had no business sticking our noses into. Yeah,
and he's pissed about that. It's also there's a lot
less information about what was going on in the Soviet

(39:30):
you now, I will also say more than enough that
he should have known, right.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
Yeah, I mean the internationalist newspaper stuff was pretty Yeah.
Sometimes they were better at knowing what was going on
around the world than like a modern leftist today. But
he's holding the party line. They got told very specifically, like,
I mean, is the problem with the common tern in
the communist international, Yes, is that someone in the American

(39:55):
Communist Party during this era is literally taking orders from Russia. Yeah,
And that's like one of the parts that we don't
want to talk about with the Red scare, because the
Red scare is bad, right, Yeah, But when they're like, oh,
these foreign agents acting under a foreign national they were.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
There was literally like they were taking direct like propaganda,
direct orders like from Moscow, well not from Moscow, but
like from the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. And
they were really wrong on some things as a result
of that, because it turns out Hitler's not an ally

(40:29):
of international communism. It turns out now yeah, no, no,
that goes very badly, very quickly. Yeah, And ye know
what he had been had been describing himself as an
anti fascist at this point. But also I think he
probably would have said that like, well, you know, the
Communist Party knows its business if they think that's what
they've got to do to secure themselves with matters is

(40:49):
you know, the survival of communism, which you know, at
that point had weathered a number of attacks from the
international capitalist community, like during the Russian Civil War. And
I'm not saying that because I think that's a good argument.
I'm saying I think that's he would have made. I'm
pretty firmly on the stance of Stalin Bat and the
Malotov Ribbentrop packed inexcusable. Yeah, But also I always emphasize

(41:13):
inexcusable on behalf of the Soviet leadership. You know, I've
got nothing but respect for the guys who wound up
dying by the millions to stop the Nazis, absolutely totally
and the right those guys, yeah, and ladies. So it
is impossible to look at this situation without saying commonalities
between more modern failures of the left to condemn dictators
seen as anti imperialist for very flawed reasons. I might

(41:34):
suggest that we also not forget at the time one
of the complicating factors here is how the US government
deals with what it considers communism and what things it
considers communism, right, because that's important too. What he had
an extensive FBI file, And in nineteen forty one, after
he joined the Merchant Marine, one of his shipmates was

(41:55):
cited as saying, would he quote followed the Communist Party
line and that they were very pro Russian and advocated
racial intermarriage. So again that is what the guy who
informs on him and the FBI considers evidence of his
Communist sympathies is he thinks that black people and white
people should be able to get married. So keep that
in mind too.

Speaker 3 (42:15):
The Communist Party was absolutely right about racial politics in
the United States, Yes, one hundred percent, And they were
one of the only non black organization, it was actually
heavily black, but one of the only not majority black
organizations that was right about this.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
Yes, yes, And so like when we talk about like
criticizing him, don't leave out the fact that he's he's
also very much correct about this right totally. After the war,
he would be accused by the California State Senate's far
right Committee on un American Activities for being Joe Stalin's
California mouthpiece, which wasn't one point true, but also for

(42:50):
being a member of a factionalist sabotage group, which was absurd.
What he never sought or attempted to do anything but
sing songs and write articles for socialist papers. He was
not sabotaging anything.

Speaker 3 (43:02):
I'm a feeling the reason he didn't get a card
is he was like, I don't want to be on
that list.

Speaker 2 (43:06):
Yeah. Maybe, yeah, I mean that may have been at
I think he also just might have been too lazy.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
Yeah, I didn't want to pay the thiees whatever.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
He's an artist, he's not good at signing papers.

Speaker 3 (43:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
Marjorie Guthrie, who is his second wife, he starts a
family with her after he divorces his first wife Mary
and moves to Coney Island, sums things up this way.
I don't know what happened prior to my time, but
from my time in Coney Island he was not welcomed
by the party because he didn't want to follow a
party line. You couldn't tell Woody what to think, and
so we were not members of the party in Coney Island.

(43:40):
And again I include that because she was his wife,
she knew him. But also that isn't entirely true, because
he certainly followed the party line on some very fucked
up things.

Speaker 3 (43:50):
But actually that's still like even when we talk about
the way that people have arcs, right, one of the
things I've read a lot. I've read a lot about
the UK Communists at this era where a lot of
the Communists left the Communist Party once they realized that
they were just being mouthpieces for Stalin.

Speaker 2 (44:06):
You know, yeah, yeah, I mean, and again, there is
a degree to which the fact that there's so much
disinformation being pumped out about the Soviet and there's so
much bad like its certainly more reasonable then for someone
to doubt a lot of the official narratives coming out
and to doubt a lot of the information that makes
Stalin look bad from their position in the United States.

(44:27):
Right again, I think enough that a man is obviously intelligent,
as Woody should have been better informed. But he's not
the only one who makes this mistake and it's a
more understandable mistake then than it is now. As what
I'll say, that's without forgiving it, you know. So, yeah, however,
you want to mark this down morally for Woody, his

(44:48):
U the US shouldn't be getting into this capitalist war.
They're all cooking this World War two thing up. That
attitude ends for Woody. On June twenty second, nineteen forty one,
when Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union, this is Operation Barbarossa.
Would he ran to his friend Pete Seeger after this
like breaks and told him, well, I guess we're not
going to be singing any more of them peace songs.

(45:16):
Woody was not the only man forced to change his
tune rapidly due to world events.

Speaker 3 (45:20):
Winston Churchill anyway, yeah, yeah, well done, well done.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
Winston Churchill, who was one of the world's loudest anti communists,
was forced by sheer necessity to make temporary amends and
even express support for the cause of Soviet soldiers. When
Woody heard this, he told a friend Churchill's flip flopped.
We got a flip flop too. You know who doesn't

(45:45):
flip flop though, Margaret.

Speaker 3 (45:46):
The consistency with which our sponsors, yes, high quality goods
and services.

Speaker 2 (45:52):
That's right, that's right. Our sponsors have never once changed
their opinion, which is why today, tomorrow and forever they
advise you to vote Millard Fillmore for president. We're back.
Our sponsors are all old hair tonics from the eighteen hundreds. Anyway,
vote Fillmore. Much of the Woody that we know, the

(46:12):
famous Woody Guthrie. You know, you brought up as soon
as I said what do you know of him? That
the picture of him with a guitar, that has a
this machine kills fascist sticker slapped across it.

Speaker 3 (46:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
By the way, that sticker was like put out by
the US government.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
Huh that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
Yeah, it was a proper game, strange bedfilm and piece
of prop. There were a lot of machines we were
using to kill fascists, perfectly and reasonable to put some
stickers on.

Speaker 3 (46:34):
Wait did they Oh that was like a the government
was putting that on machines to raise morale. And he
took one of those and was like, I'm putting this
on my guitar.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
I think it's something like that. I read it in
that article and I think La Weekly by the fellow
who was writing about like Woody's history with racism, was
like this, you know, this thing was like a product
of the government that he has.

Speaker 3 (46:51):
That makes so much sense. I never quite understood that.
I always really liked though, when people carve into their ak's,
wouldn't stock this machine makes folk music?

Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah, there's been some good ones of that coming out
of Syria.

Speaker 3 (47:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
So he changes his opinion very rapidly, and once the
Nazis invade the USSR, he starts getting much more patriotic.
And again he had been making anti Nazi music and
been anti Nazi prior to this. And if you're saying, well,
that's incoherent for him to be against the war, and
you know whatnot, Yes, lots of people have incoherent politics,
but his politics get a lot more cohesive after Operation Barbarossa.

(47:29):
An article for Oklahoma History dot Org notes in New York,
he appeared on numerous popular radio shows before joining the
Merchant Marines with Cisco Houston. During World War Two, Guthrie
was on three torpedoed ships and the day Germany surrendered,
he was drafted into the US Army.

Speaker 3 (47:44):
Like he was on ships that were hit by torpedes three.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
Is and the Merchant Marine is effectively a part of
the military during a war. Right, he is a combat veteran. Yeah,
you know, like that's like he's on three ships that
get hit.

Speaker 3 (47:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
Now he's not in the army very long. It basically
immediately gets out because the war ends. But yeah, he
does like his bit, you know, he is not when
we play songs of his where he's talking about wanting
to fight the fascists, he goes and does it. You know,
he is doing an important, dangerous job where he gets
shot at so you cannot. Yeah, he's very willing to
put his skin in the game.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
Yeah, one blown up ship. If you quit after one
blown up ship, no one's mad you did.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Nobody will call you a coward. Yeah, I don't know that. Yeah.
And so, from late nineteen forty one to the end
of the war, Woody Guthrie wrote several iconic anti fascist anthems,
including Ruben James, about a US destroyer that was torpedoed
and sunk by the Nazis in nineteen forty one. As
you might expect from Woody and the kind of songs
he wrote, this song focused on the lives and deaths

(48:44):
of normal men at war. The refrain went, tell me
what was their names? Tell me what was their names?
Did you have a friend on that? Good Ruben James.
It's a good song. But if you want my personal
favorite war years Woody Guthrie song, nothing beats this particular banger,
soph He's gonna put it up now for the very boil.

Speaker 4 (49:01):
We'll show these fascist what a couple of hill billies
can do. Wow.

Speaker 6 (49:18):
Well, I'm gonna tell you, fascist, you may be surprised
people in this world are getting organized.

Speaker 4 (49:27):
You're bound to lose you Fascist, Found.

Speaker 5 (49:29):
To lose WHOA all you Fascist? Last, all you Fascist? Yes,
all fascist? Bound you fascist. There's people of every nation marchings.

Speaker 6 (49:52):
Find the side marching across the hills where a many
of fascists died.

Speaker 4 (49:57):
You're bound to lose you Fascist. Bound to.

Speaker 7 (50:06):
Ah banger music.

Speaker 3 (50:37):
It's so good.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
It's a real banger.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
I enjoyed that immensely.

Speaker 2 (50:41):
Yeah, one of my favorites. So near the end of
Woody's wartime experiences, he would record the first official version
of a song that he'd been working on since nineteen
forty This Land Is Your Land, which would go on
to be undoubtedly his most famous work of music. It
is definitely the one Woody Guthrie song everyone's fucking heard like.
You can't get through school without hearing this Land is

(51:02):
Your Land.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
So easily recuperated.

Speaker 2 (51:05):
Yes, And in the decades since nineteen forty four, it's
also been criticized for what many people interpret as an
air of imperialism and support for manifest destiny, which is
definitely present in the version of the song that is
commonly sung. Given this, I think it's interesting to actually
look into why wood he wrote the song and what
its original lyrics were This Land is Your Land was

(51:27):
initially something of a folk music dis track. It was
a response to Irving Berlin's God Bless America. This is
a song Berlin wrote in nineteen eighteen, after being drafted
and re released in nineteen forty one, is something of
a cash grap The lyrics if you aren't familiar, go
like this, God bless America, Land that I love, Stand
beside her and guide her through the night with a

(51:48):
light from above. Woody fucking hated this song, and it's
good he did because it's a fucking dogshit song. He
considered it far too sweet, a hymn for a nation
that had just sent millions of its citizen and do
a depression. This Land is Your Land was meant to
be a retort discussing the real America that Irving had
tried to conceal. The original title was God Bless America

(52:11):
for Me. Joe Riley writes of this first version of
the song, quote, it was more of a question than affirmation.
In fact, it was a sarcastic retort. Woody later changed
the refrain to this land was made for you and me,
and the song to this Land is Your Land the
verses he ultimately emitted from the final draft of the
song include this banger there was a big high wall

(52:32):
there that tried to stop me. The sign was painted
said private property, but on the backside it didn't say nothing.
This land was made for you and me, and the
squares of the city and the shadow of the steeple
near the relief office. I see my people, and some
are a grumblin and some are wondering if this land
still made for you and me. And that's a banger

(52:54):
that's very much not an imperialist song. That's more him
talking about like this, the people that this country to
be four are the ones being harmed by the system
that governs it, right, Like that's the original point of
the song, that said, this is not a case of
it being recuperated by someone else who changes the lyrics
because they'd think that they can tweak it. They don't

(53:15):
like Woody's original version. Woody changes it right, and he
changes it. He removes that verse about the relief office
because late in the war he decided it was too pessimistic,
and he replaces it with lines like from the redwood
forest to the Gulf stream waters, this land was made
for you and me, which is not all that different
from like some of the stuff Irving had been. Totally right,

(53:36):
The song becomes a massive hit. It is practically a
new national anthem, and Woody does not initially bother to
copyright it because this is you know, that's not uncommon
for him, right, He generally neglected to do that. Alas
for Woody, the post war optimism faded quickly, I mean,
and it so the first horrible thing that happens to
Woody after the war, because things go downhill for him quickly.

(53:58):
In February of nineteen four, there is an electrical fire
in his home and his little girl, Kathy Ann dies.
Oh god, he has bad luck with fire, Like I said,
he a horrible luck with fire. Now he and Marjorie
have three other kids. But yeah, like that's obviously really
fucks him up. And like that same year forty seven,
and then in forty eight he gets repeatedly attacked as

(54:19):
a communist, both in the State Committee of un American
Activities in California and in the House of Representatives Committee
on American Activities. Now they were attacking him for being
a communist, and he was, but he was not an American.
No one was more American than Wood. He fucking Guthrie right.
He suffers as a result of this, he gets blacklisted.
He had written an autobiographical novel at this point called

(54:41):
Bound for Glory that had been set to be turned
into a major Hollywood production, but that deal and others
like it, fell apart as unions were forced to take
anti communist stances in this new, more paranoid era. Wood
he stopped getting hired to play the events that had
largely supplemented his income, rather than fold as many did
ounce the things that he believed would. He spoke out

(55:02):
constantly against j Edgar Hoover, writing at one point quote
the roaches crawl across my page tonight and make a
noise that makes more sense than all that. Hoover writes,
He's a good bar. He became less dogmatic on the
Moscow line as well, although he never stops being a communist.
He starts writing that his goal was to quote get

(55:24):
this thing called socialism nailed and hammered up just as
quickly as he can, and praises Eugene V. Debs, former
chairman of the Socialist Party, as quote a peer cross
between Jesus Christ and Abe Lincoln, which again is not
really something that the Moscow Party once, you say. Despite
the consequences to his career, he continues to seek and
sing his mind. Quote. Fascism is being afraid. Fascism is

(55:49):
fear bossing you. Fascism is worse than all of these things.
And fascism is more closer to you than I can
make you. See, I'm trying to wake you up and
tell you that you're sleeping with something ten times more
dangerous thing and a poison fang snake in your bed.
If fascism does come, and if it does kill me,
well then you add me alone onto the hundreds of
millions which fascism has already dusted under. And it don't

(56:10):
scare me so very much.

Speaker 3 (56:12):
That rules.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
Yeah, like good line.

Speaker 3 (56:15):
All right, it might kill me, it's killed millions of
people before, so it will be in good company.

Speaker 5 (56:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:22):
Yeah, yeah, that's hard. I like that.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
Yep, that's hard. And this is, unfortunately, Margaret, where the
story gets awkward again.

Speaker 3 (56:30):
No, is he gonna heel turn again? He keeps dancing.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
It's more complicated than a heel turn. He's about to
do a bad thing. There's a mitigating factor that's pretty significant. Okay, okay,
but it's a pretty bad thing. Woody is at this
point and always on the verge of being broke, but
also a famous and influential musician. And we know what
comes with that, right, which is the temptation to be

(56:53):
a sex pest.

Speaker 3 (56:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
Yeah, And you know Woody does not commit like rape,
but he does sexually harass someone very badly. And this
is a very ugly story. The gist of it is
that things with his second wife, Marjorie go downhill as
his career does. She is the family money maker. She
actually makes a very good living teaching dancing. She's an
extremely accomplished dancer, and his career is not doing well.

(57:17):
This leads to fighting, and Woody eventually moves out in
Rinse a room for himself. He starts writing letters to
his old music partner, Lefty Loo's sister. She is twenty
eight years old he is thirty six, so they're not
like crazy far apart. But the bigger issue is she
had never insinuated that she was into him, right, he
is just writing her letters about wanting to fuck her

(57:39):
apropos of nothing.

Speaker 3 (57:40):
Oh fuck uh huh.

Speaker 2 (57:41):
Now, wood he had just kind of assumed that because
she like they knew each other, right, they were like friendly,
But she gets divorced, and he just kind of assumes,
while I'm getting divorced too, that must mean she wants
to fuck, right, and his letters to her take on
an air of obsession. He writes at least twelve long
letters suggesting they move out together, hit the road, and
start having sex. These letters include long, rambling descriptions of

(58:05):
the kinds of sex, what he wanted to have, and more.
And I'm going to quote from ramblin Man here. Into
the envelopes Guthrie stuffed pages torn from New York's tabloids
with muddy magenta circle slathered around stories of grisly murders.
The packets, sometimes two or three a week, frightened Mary
Ruth by their intensity, the sexual proposals, and the suggestion
of violence. She drove to Los Angeles to show them

(58:26):
to her sister, who knew Guthrie best of all. You
have no idea how horrible it was, her older sister,
Maxine said. She in turn called the police. Now the
police get involved because they think Woody might be a
budding serial killer, and given the kind of stuff he's
sending not an unreasonable thing to be afraid of, and
given the fact that the FEDS are hounding him, I
get why Woody is like, this is them going after

(58:48):
me for my politics, but it really isn't. Yeah, he's
writing very upsetting things. Now there's another part to this
story which does not make the things he's writing less
fuck up or upsetting. But he is losing his mind. Okay,
he is losing his mind in a degree that is
very soon to be clinically diagnosed. Right in episode one,

(59:11):
I mentioned that Woody's mother went insane when he was
quite young and was institutionalized.

Speaker 4 (59:16):
Right.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
This traumatized him and at the time we didn't have
an explanation for what she was going for. They just
said madness. Right, we now know what she had because
Woody has it, and it's diagnosable by the time he
gets it, and it's called Huntington's disease. Yeah, his mom
and Woody gets it, and he is starting to suffer
the effects of Huntington's by the late forties. This is

(59:38):
a neurodegenerative disorder that Huntington's Disease News describes as characterized
by uncontrolled movements, loss of cognitive ability and psychiatric problems.
The middle stages of the illness are associated with psychosis.
Some patients experienced delusions which they tend to be convinced
are accurate. And it also comes with these like sort
of obsessive delusions, right, which might explain the whole him

(01:00:01):
thinking that this was something that was reciprocated.

Speaker 3 (01:00:04):
Right, So this isn't a heel turn. This is just
a degeneration.

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
This is just a this is a very tragic degeneration, right,
you know, I don't know how again you want to
parse it up morally, but like he is diagnosed, like
he is losing his mind. He is going to spend
most of the rest of his life in an institution.
So this is not just a case of like a
powerful man in music being a sex pest, right, totally
a man who was not like this before so far

(01:00:27):
as we know, absolutely declining in becoming like increasingly delusional.

Speaker 3 (01:00:33):
And like Famous Man's sex pesting is fans say, famous
Man's sex pestiing is like or everyone in your orbit
you just assume they want to fuck you, which I
guess he's like doing to this. No, Yeah, the degeneration thing,
that just makes sense.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
It's just yeah, he'd probably always had a crush on her,
and then this, like he becomes convinced that there is
something going on there that there's not right.

Speaker 3 (01:00:53):
But the fact that it was out of the blue
to her means that he probably kept his fucking mouth
shut about the fact that he a crush on her.

Speaker 2 (01:00:58):
One would assume, right, So it's not great. He has
ultimately charged in nineteen forty nine with sending him scene
material through the mail. He avoids prison time, but is
sentenced to therapy, and he and his therapist do not
have a good relationship. His therapist does not like him,
but he's not diagnosed with anything quite yet, so his
therapist is just like, he's kind of an asshole, which
I can't blame the therapist for because he's being an

(01:01:20):
asshole if you don't know the mitigating factor of the
family mental illness that destroyed his mother and is destroying
him Wood. He eventually refuses court mandated therapy, and his
lawyer manages to narrowly get him out of a six
month sentence. His lawyer who is at one of his shipmates. Right,
he and this guy are torpedo together, and this lawyer,
who's a very good friend who was like, I'm not
going to let my war buddy go to a fucking jail. Wood,

(01:01:43):
he was mostly angry when his sentence gets like cut off.
He's kind of pissed because he had been planning a
Christmas Eve show for the inmates that he doesn't get
to do now, So there's still that piece of him
in there.

Speaker 4 (01:01:54):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
By the mid nineteen fifties, Wood, he was disabled with
Huntington's badly enough that his second wife, Marjorie, who again
he has separated from, had to take charge of his affairs.
And it does say something that this person who he
was not nice to at the end, had enough affection
for him still that she makes sure he's taken care of, right,
which included she registers a copyright for this Land is

(01:02:18):
Your Land for the first time, right, and for a
number of his other songs. And she's doing that because like,
we're going to need some way of taking care of him,
you know, And this makes sense, right. One of the
fun side effects of this is that his family is
going to wind up in a lawsuit with Donald Trump
about this Land is Your Land because Trump kept trying
to play it. It is now in the public domain
but it wasn't for a while. So that same year,

(01:02:41):
in nineteen fifty six, he was involuntarily committed to Greystone Park,
a New Jersey mental institution. Over the next five years,
he lost the ability to play music or even to type.
But and again this really says something about the amount
of love there was still for him. He is not
cut off or alone. His family visits him regularly. They
take him out and he stays with them for weekends

(01:03:03):
and holidays. He's taken out and you know, taken to
shows and trips by his friends and by fellow artists.
Bob Dylan, who at this point is not particularly famous,
starts visiting Woody at the asylum in nineteen sixty one,
and Dylan starts working with other performers over the sixties.
They like, they play shows. They take Woody to some
of these shows where they're playing his music to this

(01:03:24):
new generation of newly radicalized Americans. And Woody lives long
enough to see his music honored and it's like sold
out shows by some of the you know, by fucking
Bob Dylan, some of the most beloved up and coming
musicians of the sixties. So he does go out knowing
that his music doesn't just live on, but is like
influenced this new generation of people who are going to

(01:03:46):
become incredibly famous and influential musicians in their own right, which,
as far as being an artist goes, is about as
much as you can hope for.

Speaker 3 (01:03:54):
Totally.

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
Yeah, especially for.

Speaker 3 (01:03:56):
Someone who's at the kind of beginning, not the very
beginning of record music, but like pretty close to it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:04:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):
He dies in October of nineteen sixty seven. At that
point he is unable to communicate by any means besides
pointing at cards that said yes or no. But he
left behind again, a pretty incredible legacy, two novels, hundreds
of articles, more than a thousand songs and poems, five
hundred illustrations, and a central role in the folk music
revival that changed American music forever. We've listened to a

(01:04:26):
lot of Woody Guthrie's music in these episodes, and while
I do hope you all take the opportunity to listen
to more, I want to leave you with a quote
of his that I think is quite relevant for our times,
which Ed Cray picked out to open his two thousand
and eight biography of the Man, about all a human
being is anyway, is just a hoping machine, and I

(01:04:47):
like that. I also like this quote from Bob Dylan,
who was asked in nineteen sixty three to s up
his feelings on Woody Guthrie and twenty five words for
a book on the man. As history dot Com notes,
Dylan quote responded instead with one hundred and ninety four
line poem called Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, which took the
the eternal human search for hope and where do you

(01:05:08):
look for this hope you're seeking? Dylan asks in the poem,
before proceeding to a kind of answer. You can either
go to the church of your choice, or you can
go to a Brooklyn State Hospital. You'll find God in
the church of your choice. You'll find Woody Guthrie in
Brooklyn State Hospital.

Speaker 3 (01:05:25):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (01:05:27):
Yeah, anyway, that's Woody Guthrie. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:33):
I knew so little about him. I know about some
of his music and it's been super influential. But that's awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):
I'm yeah, it was one of those like again, it's
the messy story, but yeah, I see it was better
I would have guessed.

Speaker 1 (01:05:48):
Yeah, great pick for the non bastard Holiday episode.

Speaker 2 (01:05:52):
A relevant kind of guy to know about for the
kind of times we're heading into.

Speaker 1 (01:05:56):
Yeah, and speaking of somebody people should know about, I
adopted a second dog. Hello, did This is Anderson's sister Truman.
She's learning how to be a dog. But she's a
good girl.

Speaker 3 (01:06:12):
She's already a good podcast dog, which is a hard
level for a job.

Speaker 1 (01:06:17):
Yeah, especially a hurting dog. Yeah, yeah, you're a good girl. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:06:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:24):
I guess just to say happy holidays everyone.

Speaker 2 (01:06:27):
Happy holiday, Yes, happy holidays. And I don't know, listen
to some Woody Guthrie.

Speaker 7 (01:06:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:36):
We'll be back in the new.

Speaker 3 (01:06:37):
Year or the first week of the year.

Speaker 1 (01:06:38):
We'll have a couple of Q and A episodes.

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
We'll have some cues, we'll answer some a's. It will
be a good time.

Speaker 1 (01:06:45):
Any final thoughts, Magpie, anything you want to.

Speaker 3 (01:06:47):
Plug well, if you want Christmas. Every week I have
a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, where I
talk about cool people did cool stuff. And then either
this week or next week, depending on when everything gets released.
I also we'll be covering the history of the song
Bella Chow because I got excited by this recording last
week of part one and I thought I'm gonna do

(01:07:09):
a song too.

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
It will be the week after releasing that.

Speaker 3 (01:07:16):
So next Monday you all can hear me talk about
the history of Bella chow awesome, all right, Harry, Christmas
and or whatever you want to have, happy happy, Well.

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):
That'll do it that, I'll do it first twenty for
you're twenty twenty four.

Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
Wow twenty four? Yeah, yeah, more or less, more.

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
Or less all right, yeah, be well, bye bye. Behind
the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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(01:07:56):
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