Woody Guthrie, American Radical (review)

In Woody Guthrie: American Radical Will Kaufman addresses a previously incomplete portion of the Woody Guthrie biography and points out a lesson to be learned from Guthrie’s life: when self-mythologizing, one should be careful that the myth doesn’t overwhelm and obscure one’s true goals. Having been granted access to the Guthrie archives, Kaufman shares many previously unpublished essays, letters, and lyrics to more accurately capture Guthrie’s complex personality and his far-left political agenda, which previously remained largely hidden by the Will Rogers-inspired camouflage Guthrie skillfully created. Kaufman undermines this camouflage and reveals a more sophisticated and progressive thinker than the “rube” persona Guthrie frequently presented to the world. While Kaufman admits right off that he cannot confirm or disprove that Guthrie was ever a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), he does prove conclusively that Guthrie was at least a “fellow traveler” who shared a political philosophy with the party, played for CPUSA events, wrote columns for CPUSA-sponsored papers, and worked in tandem with the organization throughout much of his life.

Those who feel they have come to know the real Woody Guthrie through reading his autobiographical novels Bound for Glory (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943) or Seeds of Man: An Experience Lived and Dreamed (New York: Dutton, 1976) may view many of Kaufman’s conclusions as folk music heresy. Kaufman’s careful research traces Guthrie’s political thought and discusses how his unwavering faith in the value of a “union world” evolved to accommodate new information and a changing world. His research also shows that although many of the traits attributed to “Saint Woody” were faithful to his personality, Guthrie could also be, among other things, violent, “selfish, petulant, bitchy, snide—and insufferably self-righteous” (p. xxi). In other words, Guthrie was, indeed, fully human.

Kaufman traces Guthrie’s life and fills in lesser-known biographical details. Like any believable myth, much of the Guthrie legend is grounded in fact. He was born and raised in Okemah, Oklahoma, but he was not from a family of tenant farmers. His father, Charley, was apparently a “socialist-hating, fistfighting small-town politician, real-estate agent, landlord, and sometime property swindler” (p. 8) who made a good amount of money when the oil boom came to Okemah in the early 1920s, and lost most of it when the oil ran out in 1928 and Wall Street crashed in 1929. In rapid succession Woody’s sister Clara died in a house fire, his father was badly burned in another, and his mother, Nora Belle, was institutionalized for the undiagnosed Huntington’s Disease that would eventually afflict Woody as well. The remaining Guthrie family moved to Pampa, Texas, another then-booming oil town, where Guthrie was living when the southern Plains region was devastated by the Dust Bowl, the environmental catastrophe that inspired many of his best known songs.

Guthrie dropped out of high school, married, and had two children before leaving his family in Pampa to seek work in California like thousands of other Dust Bowl refugees. He arrived in California in early 1937 with much of his radical political agenda already formed by the many socialist and progressive influences then fomenting in Oklahoma and Texas. Guthrie and his cousin, “Oklahoma” Jack Guthrie, soon landed an early morning daily show on the Los Angeles radio station KFVD. The existing tape of the duo’s audition shows that Guthrie was already writing socially conscious songs with political bite and disguising this bite with a “veneer of faux naiveté” (p. 4) and “Okie” rube humor. When he was offered the opportunity to write a regular column for People’s World, the West Coast’s communist daily, he combined this persona with the “cornpone philosophy and astute political satire” (p. 17) of Will Rogers, thereby launching the persona that he used throughout his life.

In California, Guthrie met Will Geer and...