Scholar of Woody Guthrie Talks to Jacobin About the Bard's Radicalism

Will Kaufman, author of three books about "poet, novelist, playwright, painter, illustrator, sculptor, and essayist" Woody Guthrie, speaks with Arvind Dilawar at Jacobin about the lyricist's engagement with radical politics. "He engaged with subjects such as love, sex, the environment, science and technology, mass communications, cinema, theater, and literature," says Kaufman. "He was cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and urban, behind the pose of the unlettered 'Okie Bard' or 'Dust Bowl Balladeer.'" More:

…He had a great interest in Jewish culture and history, having married into a Jewish family, and he even wrote some songs in Yiddish. (My book Woody Guthrie’s Modern World Blues focuses on all his modern expansiveness.) So there’s a lot of his work that can be depoliticized by folks who are looking to do that.

With “This Land Is Your Land,” we’re not sure exactly why it was depoliticized or even who was responsible for it. We know that the original manuscript contains the three anti-capitalist verses that probably weren’t sung at too many Republican Party conventions, and we know there’s only one version that Woody recorded with the verse against private property.

Pete Seeger believed that the short, anodyne, apolitical version that most of us sang in school was down to Woody treating that song just as one of thousands of his songs: casually. He’d forget verses or not bother to sing them depending on his mood. Possibly he was constricted by the three-minute time limit often imposed on 78 RPM recordings, producing the truncated version that was largely picked up and first circulated through school songbooks. And that particular version of “This Land” is what got Woody noticed — and, as his friend Irwin Silber said, “They’ve taken a revolutionary and turned him into a conservationist!”

The full interview is at Jacobin.