His full name was Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, an early hint that the man who
grew up to be one of his nation's most important songwriters would make his
political mark as well. As scholars today find in popular music a rich vein for
exploring American history, the career of the folk troubadour Woody Guthrie has
become a lively topic.
The first of what promises to be several books is Hard Travelin': The Life
and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, with which
Wesleyan University Press recently inaugurated its American Music Masters series. The book emerged from
a conference on Guthrie organized by
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and
Museum. Edited by the museum's Robert Santelli and Emily Davidson, the volume collects reminiscences
by Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, as
well as analyses of Guthrie's lyrics and his
artwork. In one essay, David R. Shumway, an associate professor of literary and cultural studies
at Carnegie Mellon University, argues
that Guthrie's canonization has "largely
excluded" his radical politics. "This Land Is Your Land,"
his most famous song, had an explicitly socialist agenda, Mr. Shumway points out.
Well before gaining notoriety as the "Anonymous" author of Primary
Colors, Joe Klein wrote the definitive biography, Woody Guthrie: A Life, which
Delta Press reissued last year .Now Ed Cray, a professor of journalism at the
University of Southern California, has signed a contract with W.W. Norton for a
new account of Guthrie's short, peripatetic life. Among other advantages, Mr.
Cray has in hand the research done by another professor, E. Victor Wolfenstein,
of the University of California at Los Angeles, who abandoned his own biography
25 years ago when he began writing about Malcolm X.
Guthrie also plays a part in larger scholarly stories about Dust Bowl America. Peter La Chapelle, a
graduate student in history at U.S.C.,
talks about Guthrie's years as a radio disk
jockey in Los Angeles in a Ph.D. dissertation on migrants, race, and political identity in the region's
country music.
Two other historians will devote a chapter to Guthrie in a book on the character of Tom Joad, the Okie
immortalized in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Guthrie's song "The Ballad of Tom Joad," turned Joad into a
union organizer and supporter of the
left-wing Popular Front, explains Bryant
Simon, of the University of Georgia. Mr. Simon and William Deverell, of the California Institute of
Technology, got the idea for a
biography of the character when Bruce Springsteen released his 1995 album, The Ghost of Tom Joad.
Mr. Springsteen's turn for a scholarly conference will surely come. In the
meantime, the next books in the Wesleyan series, each based on a Hall of Fame
event, are about Jimmie Rodgers, Robert Johnson, and Louis Jordan.
Copyright 2000, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Reprinted with
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