Happy 100th Birthday Woody!

Saturday, July 14, 2012 marks the 100th birthday of Woody Guthrie. For nearly half of that century, 45 years to be exact, Woody has been gone; his life cut short by a pernicious nerve disorder known as Huntington's Chorea. In times like these it is usual to look back at a man, his work and his life a full 100 years after his birth, but whether we realize it or not, the spirit of Woody is with us everyday.

Of course, Guthrie is most famous for his brilliant and ubiquitous anthem, "This Land Was Made For You And Me", a song that nearly every American school child of the last six decades has grown up learning to sing. It is in many ways, more American than our national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, in that it evades the Francis Scott Key bombast and jingoism to supplant a more noble idea that this coalition of states and immigrants is a humble unit and not a victorious force.

Guthrie actually penned "This Land" as a response to his intense dislike of Irving Berlin's God Bless America" which he thought to be a trite and simplistic view of our nation. Instead of creating a pastoral and bland view of America, Guthrie wrote America as he had seen it, riding its rails, hitching its roads and working its land. He wrote of natural beauty, of man made wonder and vastness and of people fighting for their very lives. In other words, he wrote the truth, and nothing but the truth. Guthrie envisioned America as a beautiful and flawed place. A land that he loved and felt he could claim ownership of, but not at the expense of a fellow human being. It was not a song about the greatness of America, but of its heart and potential. Guthrie saw what was great and that which was broken, but could some day be great and he wrote it all down and set it to music.

For many, this is the extent of the legacy of a scruffy hobo from Okemah, Oklahoma. Guthrie was a man who wrote a song that children grow up singing and he rode some railroads in the depression. Beyond that, he was just a folksinger. But to paint such a one dimensional picture of th man would be to miss the point entirely.

In so many ways, Guthrie's ability to write such an affecting song as "This Land" could only be possible through the life which he had lived. He sufered through the west Texas dust bowl as a sign painter and headed west to California without his wife and children, essentially leaving them behind. Guthrie, like the land in his song, was a flawed entity with the an innate selfishness and rambling ambition. He entertained migrant workers on a nightly radio show, he joined the Merchant Marines during World War Two and even settled in New York City after the war, a sort of Kerouacian hero who finally settled down to start a new family in the late forties.

By joining forces with the Almanac Singers, Guthrie became a direct personal influence on folk icon, Pete Seeger and his recordings during the 1940s were the architectural plans on which the folk revival of the early 1960s was built. The songs and stories of this man have become the lore of our national concept. He was a humble, meager, rambling rag top with a scratchy voice, a devious sense of humor and an insatiable case of wanderlust. Guthrie was and is a legend, a real life folk hero that is equal parts Huck Finn, Johnny Appleseed and Sal Paradise. Woody's story is the American story and this author hopes that one day his grateful nation will make his song the national anthem and put his face on a postage stamp.