Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie (review)

Prophet Singer is a valuable contribution to Woody Guthrie scholarship, the first book-length analysis of Guthrie's writings in their social and historical contexts. Up to now, the most significant studies (not directed at juveniles) have been the two biographies by Joe Klein (1980) and Ed Cray (2004), a collection of essays edited by Robert Santelli and Emily Davidson (1999), and a number of chapters in general works devoted to the folk protest movement.¹ Jackson has delved into the three major repositories of Guthrie's unpublished writings—the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York, the Alan Lomax collection at the Library of Congress, and the Ralph Rinzler Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. Consequently, one of this book's greatest strengths is its substantial engagement with previously unstudied material.

Jackson is up front about his advocacy of Guthrie as one of America's greatest proletarian spokesmen, and fortunately he maintains enough critical distance to remain this side of hagiography (the title comes not from Jackson, but rather from a tongue-in-cheek letter from Guthrie to President Harry Truman). His major aim is to provide a textual analysis of Guthrie's lyrics and prose (Jackson is by training a literary scholar) so there is less attention to Guthrie's music than, as Jackson says, "the music of the words" (8).

The introductory chapter explores the political changes in successive versions of Guthrie's best-known song, "This Land Is Your Land," which began as an angry, Marx-inflected retort to the jingoism of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," but which, through stages of lyrical evisceration, eventually became the unofficial national anthem (a process about which radical music editor Irwin Silber complained: "They're taking a revolutionary, and turning him into a conservationist"). The book proceeds to establish the contexts of the textual analysis: "documenting the stories of America's agricultural workers" (48), "documenting the troubles of other American workers" (93), "documenting race and redemption" (127), "class consciousness in Guthrie's outlaw songs" (166), and trade unionism.

Jackson analyzes Guthrie's early Dust Bowl Ballads in relation to other aspects of 1930s cultural production, such as documentary photography and film, and in the context of contested scholarly studies of the Dust Bowl migration. He charts the flowering of Guthrie's proletarian consciousness which eventually enabled the songwriter to engage with industrial relations beyond those of the migrant farmers: cowboys and ranchers, lumber workers, construction workers, oil workers, transport workers, miners. The book's strongest chapter, on race, covers Guthrie's fascinating, almost Pauline, conversion from casual Oklahoma racist to anti-racist activist (due to his later relationships with African-American musicians such as Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Josh White in the progressive milieu of 1940s and 1950s New York).

Jackson's attention to Guthrie's outlaw ballads also underwrites a strong chapter that sets such songs as "The Unwelcome Guest," "The Dalton Boys," "Belle Starr," "Jesus Christ," and the magisterial "Pretty Boy Floyd" in the context of the folk inheritance from Britain and Ireland as well as the cultural activism of the Depression. Guthrie's rarely explored ballad, "Harriet Tubman," is presented as a link between Guthrie's growing racial awareness and "the radical outlaw tradition" which, in American music, has been overwhelmingly white-dominated (196). Guthrie's musical activism on behalf of organized labor receives its fullest attention in the final chapter, "That Union Feeling," which, through analysis of such songs as "66 Highway Blues," "Union Maid," and "The Final Call," establishes Guthrie's place in the radical tradition of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the Popular Front.

This important book does have at least three noteworthy drawbacks. First is its all-too-frequently employed modus operandi, which is to dutifully lay bare the discrepancies between the historical facts and Guthrie's version of them. So, for instance, in the analysis of Guthrie's heartbreaking ballad...