The Nearly Complete Woody Guthrie Folk Songs
About this book
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, born 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma. Childhood in an oil boom town. In 1935 he drifted to California, along with thousands of other "Okies" forced by dust storms and depression woes to leave their homes. Made a living singing in saloons, occasional fly-by-night radio programs and later on for union meetings, parties, political rallies, dance and theatre groups, the Libraryof Congress Folksong Archives. Dozens of restless trips across the USA. Three marriages and many children. And over one thousand songs. He put his rhymes to tunes which were, more often than not, amended versions of older folk melodies. He was often not exactly conscious of where he got the tune, till it was pointed out to him. "So Long" and "Reuben James" borrowed older melodies for the verses, but to both of these he added choruses worthy of any good composer. He fiddled around with elements of the verse melody till he compounded and developed elements of it into a singable refrain. He rarely wrote a song to order. Anything worth discussing was worth a song to news off the front page, sights and sounds of the countryside he travelled through, thoughts brought to mind by reading anything from Rabelais to Will Rogers. He composed for himself and his friends, and had a rather disparaging attitude toward the hit parade, and any kind of commercial success. Why are the songs great? Yes, the words show a fine sense of poetry, of reaching out for exactly the right word at exactly the right place. He used some fine time-tested tunes. The songs are honest; they say things that need to be said. But above all else, the songs show simplicity. It takes genius to attain simplicity. In addition to the generous selection of his musical output, the book includes a number of original illustrations by Woody Guthrie that round out our understanding of this giant of American folk culture.