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Chapter 5: River of Ice
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We used to have strange conversations.
"In another life, I could have been you," she'd say.
"Yeah, but then I wouldn't have been the same person in that life."
"Yeah, that's right. Let's work on it."
On this particular day, we were just sitting around talking and she asked me if I'd ever heard of Woody Guthrie. I said sure, I'd heard him on the Stinson records with Sonny Terry and Cisco Houston. Then she asked me if I'd ever heard him all by himself on his own records. I couldn't remember having done that. Flo said that her brother Lyn had some of his records and she'd take me over there to hear them-that Woody Guthrie was somebody that I should definitely get hip to. Something about this sounded important and I became definitely interested. There wasn't much distance between the drugstore and her brother's house, maybe a half a mile or so. Her brother Lyn was an attorney for the city's social services-had thin, wispy hair, wore a bow tie and little James Joyce glasses. He had seen me and me him, a couple of times throughout the summer. I had heard him play a few folk songs, but he never said much and I never spoke to him. He had never invited me over to listen to anybody's records.
He was at home when Flo brought me by. He said it was okay to look through his record collection, pulled out a few record albums of old 78s and said I should listen to these. One was the Spirituals to Swing Concert at Carnegie Hall. This was a collection of 78s with Count Basie, Meade Lux Lewis, Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe among many others. The other collection was the one that Flo had told me about-a Woody Guthrie set of about twelve double sided 78 records. I put one on the turntable and when the needle dropped, I was stunned-didn't know if I was stoned or straight. What I heard was Woody singing a whole lot of his own compositions all by himself . . . songs like "Ludlow Massacre," "1913 Massacre," "Jesus Christ," "Pretty Boy Floyd," "Hard Travelin'," "Jackhammer John," "Grand Coulee Dam," "Pastures of Plenty," "Talkin' Dust Bowl Blues," "This Land Is Your Land."
All these songs together, one after another made my head spin. It made me want to gasp. It was like the land parted. I had heard Guthrie before but mainly just a song here and there-mostly things that he sang with other artists. I hadn't actually heard him, not in this earth shattering kind of way. I couldn't believe it. Guthrie had such a grip on things. He was so poetic and tough and rhythmic. There was so much intensity, and his voice was like a stiletto. He was like none of the other singers I ever heard, and neither were his songs. His mannerisms, the way everything just rolled off his tongue, it all just about knocked me down. It was like the record player itself had just picked me up and flung me across the room. I was listening to his diction, too. He had a perfected style of singing that it seemed like no one else had ever thought about. He would throw in the sound of the last letter of a word whenever he felt like it and it would come like a punch. The songs themselves, his repertoire, were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them. Not one mediocre song in the bunch. Woody Guthrie tore everything in his path to pieces. For me it was an epiphany, like some heavy anchor had just plunged into the waters of the harbor.
That day I listened all afternoon to Guthrie as if in a trance and I felt like I had discovered some essence of self-command, that I was in the internal pocket of the system feeling more like myself than ever before. A voice in my head said, "So this is the game." I could sing all these songs, every single one of them and they were all that I wanted to sing. It was like I had been in the dark and someone had turned on the main switch of a lightning conductor.
A great curiosity respecting the man had also seized me and I had to find out who Woody Guthrie was. It didn't take me long. Dave Whittaker, one of the Svengali-type Beats on the scene happened to have Woody's autobiography, Bound for Glory, and he lent it to me. I went through it from cover to cover like a hurricane, totally focused on every word, and the book sang out to me like the radio. Guthrie writes like the whirlwind and you get tripped out on the sound of the words alone. Pick up the book anywhere, turn to any page and he hits the ground running. Who is he? He's a hustling ex-sign painter from Oklahoma, an antimaterialist who grew up in the Depression and Dust Bowl days-migrated West, had a tragic childhood, a lot of fire in his life-figuratively and literally. He's a singing cowboy, but he's more than a singing cowboy. Woody's got a fierce poetic soul-the poet of hard crust sod and gumbo mud. Guthrie divides the world between those who work and those who don't and is interested in the liberation of the human race and wants to create a world worth living in. Bound for Glory is a hell of a book. It's huge. Almost too big.
His songs are something else, though, and even if you've never read the book, you'd know who he was through his songs. For me, his songs made everything else come to a screeching halt. I decided then and there to sing nothing but Guthrie songs. It's almost like I didn't have any choice. I liked my repertoire the way it was-stuff like "Cornbread, Meat and Molasses," "Betty and Dupree," "Pick a Bale of Cotton"-but I'd have to put it all on the back burner for a while, didn't know if I'd ever get back to it. Through his compositions my view of the world was coming sharply into focus. I said to myself I was going to be Guthrie's greatest disciple. It seemed like a worthy thing. I even seemed to be related to him. Even from a distance and having never seen the man, I could perceive his face with a clearness. He looks not unlike my father in my father's early days. I knew little about Woody. I wasn't even sure if he was alive anymore. The book makes it seem like he was a character from the old past. Whittaker, though, had got me up to date on him, that he was in ill health somewhere in the East and I pondered that.
During the next few weeks I went back a few times to Lyn's house to listen to those records. He was the only one who seemed to have so many of them. One by one, I began singing them all, felt connected to these songs on every level. They were cosmic. One thing for sure, Woody Guthrie had never seen nor heard of me, but it felt like he was saying, "I'll be going away, but I'm leaving this job in your hands. I know I can count on you."
Now that I crossed the divide, I was head over heels in singing nothing but Guthrie songs-at house parties, in the coffeehouses, street singing, with Koerner, not with Koerner-if I had a shower I would have sung them in there, too. There were a lot of them and outside of the main ones, not easily to be found. There were no reissues of his older records, there were only the original ones, but I would move heaven and earth to find them, even went to the Minneapolis public library to the Folkways section. (Public libraries were the one place for some reason that had most of the Folkways records.) I'd always be checking the repertoires of every out of town performer who came through to see what Guthrie songs they knew that I didn't, and I was beginning to feel the phenomenal scope of Woody's songs-the Sacco and Vanzetti ballads, Dust Bowl and children songs, Grand Coulee Dam songs, venereal disease songs, union and workingman ballads, even his rugged heartbreak love ballads. Each one seemed like a towering tall building with a variety of scenarios all appropriate for different situations. Woody made each word count. He painted with words. That along with his stylized type singing, the way he phrased, the dusty cowpoke deadpan but amazingly serious and melodic sense of delivery, was like a buzzsaw in my brain and I tried to emulate it any way I could. A lot of folks might have thought of Woody's songs as backdated, but not me. I felt they were totally in the moment, current and even forecasted things to come. I felt anything but like the young punk folksinger who had just begun out of nowhere six months previously. It felt more like I had instantly risen up from a noncommissioned volunteer to an honorable knight-stripes and gold stars.
Woody's songs were having that big an effect on me, an influence on every move I made, what I ate and how I dressed, who I wanted to know, who I didn't. In the late '50s and early '60s, teenage rebellion was beginning to make noise, but that scene hadn't appealed to me, not in a wholehearted way. It had no organized shape. The rebel-without-a-cause thing wasn't hands-on enough-even a lost cause, I thought, would be better than no cause. To the Beats, the devil was bourgeois conventionality, social artificiality and the man in the gray flannel suit.
Folk songs automatically went up against the grain of all these things and Woody's songs even went against that. In comparison, everything else seemed one-dimensional. The folk and blues tunes had already given me my proper concept of culture, and now with Guthrie's songs my heart and mind had been sent into another cosmological place of that culture entirely. All the other cultures of the world were fine, but as far as I was concerned, mine, the one I was born into, did the work of them all and Guthrie's songs even went further.
The sun had swung my way. I felt like I'd crossed the threshold and there was nothing in sight. Singing Woody's songs, I could keep everything else at a safe distance. This fantasy was short-lived, however. Thinking that I was wearing the sharpest looking uniform and the shiniest boots around, all of a sudden I felt a jolt and was stopped short in my tracks. It felt like someone had taken a chunk out of me. Jon Pankake, a folk music purist enthusiast and sometime literary teacher and film wiseman, who'd been watching me for a while on the scene, made it his business to tell me that what I was doing hadn't escaped him. "What do you think you're doing? You're singing nothing but Guthrie songs," he said, jabbing his finger into my chest like he was talking to a poor fool.
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