"I ain't got no home, I'm just a-roamin' round," Woody Guthrie
lamented in one of his most popular songs. A native of Oklahoma, he
was still in his teens when he moved to Pampa, Texas, where he
experienced the dust storms that would play such a crucial role in
forming his identity and shaping his work. He later joined
thousands of Americans who headed to California to escape the
devastation of the Dust Bowl. There he entered the West Coast
stronghold of the Popular Front, whose leftward influence on his
thinking would continue after his move in 1940 to New York, where
the American folk music renaissance began when Guthrie encountered
Pete Seeger and Lead Belly. Guthrie kept moving throughout his
life, making friends, soaking up influences, and writing about his
experiences. Along the way, he produced more than 3,000 songs, as
well as fiction, journalism, poetry, and visual art, that gave
voice to the distressed and dispossessed. In this insightful book,
Will Kaufman examines the artist's career through a unique
perspective: the role of time and place in Guthrie's artistic
evolution. Guthrie disdained boundaries-whether of geography,
class, race, or religion. As he once claimed in his inimitable
style, "There ain't no such thing as east west north or south."
Nevertheless, places were critical to Guthrie's life, thought, and
creativity. He referred to himself as a "compass-pointer man," and
after his sojourn in California, he headed up to the Pacific
Northwest, on to New York, and crossed the Atlantic as a merchant
marine. Before his death from Huntington's disease in 1967, Guthrie
had one more important trip to take: to the Florida swamplands of
Beluthahatchee, in the heart of the South. There he produced some
of his most trenchant criticisms of Jim Crow racism-a portion of
his work that scholars have tended to overlook. To map Guthrie's
movements across space and time, the author draws not only on the
artist's considerable recorded and published output but on a wealth
of unpublished sources-including letters, essays, song lyrics, and
notebooks-housed in the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
This trove of primary documents deepens Kaufman's intriguing
portrait of a unique American artist.
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