There have been times in our nation — none more insistent than now — when we, the masses, have hungered for a re-freshening, a unifying message or a courageous voice to heal and take us forward. Or someone to remind us of America’s allusive greatness. Not necessarily someone to point to our better angels, but someone to remind us of our better selves. Are you with me?
We can long for such a leader and inspiration, but 2½ centuries of American history says we will likely fail in our search. There have been partial, temporal or faux figureheads but never a single savior. We can’t claim we’ve ever had a true people’s champion or an American Moses with a new set of stone tablets. We certainly shouldn’t expect one now.
But we have had George Washington, the Father of our Country. We’ve had the Great Emancipator in Abraham Lincoln, a New Deal reformer with Franklin D. Roosevelt, a New Generation knight from Camelot in John F. Kennedy and a spiritual warrior embodied in Martin Luther King, Jr.
We’ve had “folk heroes” like Paul Revere, Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Huck Finn, Davy Crockett, Geronimo, Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower, John Glenn, Cesar Chavez, Joe DiMaggio, Will Rogers, and many others including Mickey Mouse and Elvis Presley.
But America has never had its own Zeus or Jupiter. And we should never expect one from a people’s democracy. (You can’t vote for a god.)
Today’s times of deliberate divisiveness, ugly name-calling and enflamed “culture wars” are in the greatest need of a moderating influence and sane voice.
So what “voice choices” do we have?
Who is already getting listened to, and who might have a song or message we can spread among us? Who do you listen to and that you might nominate? Are there any folk heroes alive among us today? Staying away from all politicians, who commands the biggest audiences and most sway in our current moments?
Rap singers and hip-hop artists command large and devoted followings. Could Jay Z or LL Cool Jay be our man? Yo, but, then you’ve got to introduce the universal push of Beyonçe and her mega-billion tour and following.
Maybe there’s another female performer we know who commands even a bigger legion of believers on the planet right now. We know she can move a million votes (probably) with a single Tweet. So, are we ready for a Swifties cleansing and shifting of the United States?
“Taylor Swift for President,” would get millions of votes. But she only sings about “break-ups.” Not our national or democracy’s break-up, but just between two lovers. It looks like she would decline any elected post she might win.
Ms. Swift might agree, or not, but what we seem to need is a healing, humble and definitive voice. These times call for an “everyman” who can walk his or her talk and be welcomed equally in our country’s rural farmlands and our energetic suburbs and dusty big cities — all with the same message and background music. This mystical person needs to have the powers to open doors in Washington, D.C. and get invited to the lecterns of our major colleges and universities. But when they show up they need to take a moment and scrape some mud off their shoes. Being authentic is more than a slogan; it’s a way of living.
For all the “little guys” not just some
We’d like to find someone who celebrates the little guy, the unheralded family farmers and small town volunteers as well as the disenfranchised people of color, locked in urban poverty. We don’t need someone who makes apologies for the mega-rich corporations but we don’t need a shrill voice that yells too much about social justice all the time — maybe, just some of the time.
We need someone who might be a songwriter, a filmmaker, a novelist, a high tech entrepreneur, a community organizer or a very independent politician. Do any names come to mind? Sorry, but we can’t think of any, either — at least not among the current choices of the living.
But one name from the past does come to mind. And that name is Woody Guthrie. As we said, we’ll never find a perfect choice, but Woody’s life and travels could offer our present times many useful examples and lessons.
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in Oklahoma in 1912 and grew up through the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years of Midwest farm blight and widespread poverty. Guthrie also was part of the westward migration to California and crisscrossed the country several times living in New York City on more than one stop. (He once lived in a housing project owned by Donald Trump’s father and he wrote a song about it called “Old Man Trump.”)
Woody hoboed his way across the Rockies and to the great Columbia River. Along the way, he joined union picket lines and strikes. And, with his songs and guitar, he became part of a bohemian crowd of fellow folk singers, poets, political activists and similar elites. He worked as a radio deejay, a farm laborer, a sign painter and in the Colorado mines. He married three times and had eight children.
Guthrie only recorded one album of his songs, Dust Bowl Ballads in 1940 with Alan Lomax. But since his death in 1967, there have more than two dozen collections of his songs and performances released. Scores of musicians, including his son Arlo, continue to sing his songs and keep his spirit alive.
According to the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he wrote over 3,000 songs and left behind 750,000 words of unpublished writings. While alive, he wrote two autobiographical books, “Bound for Glory” and “Pastures of Plenty” along with dozens of songbooks full of his sketches.
Why might Woody Guthrie be a voice that could heal America’s divide? Read this paragraph he wrote:
“I’ve lived in these dust storms just about all my life. (I mean, I tried to live). I met millions of good folks trying to hang on and to stay alive with the dust cutting down every hope. I am made out of this dust and out of this fast wind and I know that I’m going to win out on top of both of them if only my government and my office holder will help me.”
Guthrie always offered lots of humor and homespun sayings from his rural travels and conversations. He called his music and songwriting, “people’s songs.”
“A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it, 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 peace is,” he also wrote.
From his book “Pastures of Plenty,” he wrote: “The note of hope is the only note that can help us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine.”
Guthrie is most famous for writing the song “This Land is Your Land,” written in 1940. He said he wrote the song in response to Irving Berlin’s “America the Beautiful” which he said was out of touch with the lives of all the Americans he had met in his travels. Guthrie’s song is now sung in every school and all across America, except at Major League baseball games.
Everybody knows the opening lyrics: “From California to the New York Island, From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters; This land was made for you and me.”
But not many people know about some other lyrics he wrote in his song, such as: “In the squares of the city, in the shadow of a steeple; By the relief office, I saw my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, Is this land made for you and me?”
Among other reasons Guthrie would not make a perfect messenger for our troubled times is his association with the Communist Party. He was never an official member of the party be he did write a column for a few years in the party’s newsletter. He wrote about support for workers everywhere, both union and nonunion, and he railed against fascism. “I don’t call myself a communist,” he once said, “but I’ve been in the red all my life.”
After his younger years in Oklahoma and getting married at age 19, Guthrie started his lifelong pattern of restless rambling. He followed the Okies to California and shared his early songs with the migrant campers and dustbowl refugees in California. He met the thespian Will Geer and writer John Steinbeck who both convinced him to take his songs to New York and a fertile folk music community. Once there he met up with Pete Seeger among other musicians and he picked up a young follower, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, that reminded him of himself in many ways.
Guthrie never had what you could call a professional music career but his 1940 Dustbowl Ballads record and songs were very instrumental in the era’s folk music scene. “I ain’t a writer,” Woody once wrote. “I want that understood. I’m just a little one-cylinder guitar picker.”
By the time he reached his mid-30s, Woody was diagnosed with Huntington’s Chorea, the same debilitating disease that took his mother although she wasn’t diagnosed at the time. His health took a long downward turn until his death at age 55 in 1967. He was hospitalized and bed-stricken for almost the last decade of his life.
Although nearly paralyzed from Huntington’s, Guthrie was able to keep writing song lyrics and other compositions. His family and friends organized Sunday visits to his hospital room. One of those visitors in 1961 was a young Bob Dylan who had just arrived in New York City from Minnesota five days earlier. Guthrie was 48 at the time and could only communicate with facial gestures and scribbled notes, one of which he wrote to Dylan: “I ain’t dead yet.” Dylan was just 19.
Today and tomorrow for America
Don’t try to tell me that if more people sang Woody’s “This Land is Your Land” in more places and more often that America wouldn’t be greater. Together in a large gathering or separated by city boundaries, political party affiliations or contrary moods, singing about our New York Island, the Gulf Stream waters and California’s redwoods couldn’t fail but raise a shared pride in our American continent, our enduring nation and our mix of peoples.
For Woody, it was always about the “little guy,” people like all of us who are worried about the mortgage, other monthly bills, illnesses, the “unforeseens” and all the obstacles against just being left alone and feeling safe.
One of our big problems today in our divided, un-united United States is we don’t look out for all the other “little guys.” Some of us might include oppressed people of color, but exclude rural family farmers. Others might stand beside Middle America churchgoers, but turn their backs on their more liberal-leaning children attending a state university or Ivy League school. Aren’t high-tech computer lab workers and Amazon warehouse stackers both “little guys” that share more in common than not?
To look for all of America’s disconnected “little guys” we could re-trace Woody’s travels from our middle America farm belt to the golden shores of California and east to the liberal-leaning seacoast of New York — and everywhere in between.
It’s a message Woody wrote in his dustbowl tribute to John Steinbeck’s Tom Joad: “Everybody might be just one big soul; Well it looks that a-way to me. Wherever little children are hungry and cry, Wherever people ain’t free, Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights, That's where I’m a-gonna be.”
We think Woody Guthrie should have been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian award, a long time ago. So we suggest that everyone vote for the presidential candidate most likely to amend this grave oversight.
Vote for Woody.
— Rollie Atkinson
9-20-2024
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We need to stop looking for a savior and staring looking to our local communities for inspiration and learn to inspire ourselves :/ ROLLIE FOR MAYOR OF GUERNVILLE!
Your voice is resonating, thank you