Also media.
Welcome back to the Court of Robert Evans Bastard Guy podcast. Yeah that's right, got a gabble. See take that our engineers, they're not gonna be happy.
Who let you get a gap?
I got sent this by the judge again. It works exactly like vampires made me. And it's lovely. It's a beautiful gabble, look at it.
Yeah.
I can also buy that from like toy z r Us or whatever children's store has survived.
It would mean nothing at all in your hands, Sophie, you haven't gone through the extensive training and preparation to become a United States municipal judge like.
I have cool.
Cool, Welcome back to behind the bast I.
Really hate that you have power of any kind.
I know, I know, tremendous power, unaccountable power. I'm now eligible for the Supreme Court. Although I think technically anyone is fun.
Uh.
I actually think you would be a no.
Yeah, I'd be a great.
Supremacurt you'd be better than one Supreme Court like ninety percent of the time and then ten percent of the time. You would be like I think that every one should have a personal nuke. You be k canster, but here's the thing. I think you'd be better going to.
Be any more home invasions.
Margaret, You're better than the nine we have.
You know, that's very true?
Quite true?
Yeah, Well, speaking of someone who would have been better on the Supreme Court, Woody Guthrie, that's who we're talking about in part two of these episodes, yep, Margaret dad, though not his clansman of father.
Before we jump into this, though, I want to plug something really fast, if that's okay.
Uh oh.
I just want to plug a series that our colleague and my dear friend, Jimmie lost Fist has been doing on her podcast, sixteenth Minute of Fame. Ever heard of it about the Manosphere? I think they and the Bastard's audience would really enjoy it. Jimmy has worked very hard on the writing is incredible, So check that out on sixteenth Minute of Fame.
The Manisphere, if you're not aware, is the kind of colloquial term for this network of far right generally like masculinity influencers. All all of them have fed into the trumpest movement in groups like the Proud Boys. It's a very important like social phenomenon that explains a lot of why we are where we are right now, and Jamie does a great job of breaking it down, so check that out. On sixteenth minute.
Robert is interviewed on one of the parts.
Ooh, sure, I've only heard part one so far.
I am. I am well speaking of part two, Let's do the part two of these episodes.
Huh, yes, No, I also haven't talked to this one yet.
Let's kill it. Let's murder it. Let's bury it in the woods in a tree stump, under a tree stump so that nobody finds it, and then cash in at Social Security for you. I don't know what I'm doing here, Margaret,
Part two, So what do you go? Thrie had weed Mary in nineteen thirty three, and by nineteen thirty six when he quit Texas for California, which is what you have to legally call it when you're talking about the night teen thirties, she'd had one child with him and was pregnant with another, and he kind of abandons her, like not entirely, like he doesn't like break up with her, and like she eventually moves to California with him, but he does just kind of bounce to go try and
find a living you know, in the West, and this is a thing a lot of guys are doing and a lot of people have to do. It's also not a thing that the family's thrilled with. The specific project that he left for was a dam that was being built outside of Redding, California, in a place called Happy Valley. I have lived in and around there. I can assure you it is not a particularly happy valley now, and it wasn't one then either. In fact, the name was kind of like ironic like because it was a shanty
town that was miserable, so like Greenland, like Greenland. Yes, it's a I guess probably a better place now, although I can't really in good conscious recommend anyone go to Redding. So yeah, anyway, that's where Woody heads up to and he's there for a little while. It's in this shanty town with like about five thousand other work seekers who are all like you know, showing up to try and
q in lines and get jobs every day. Right, And there were a lot of spaces like this around the country, you know, there were a lot of these government work camps basically right which is where Woody is, And there were also in areas like Sacramento, and Seattle. These things called Hooverville's and Hooverville's were essentially large camp sites built by homeless workers and their families as they migrated around searching for work during the Great Depression.
Well, it's actually in the US they're called vacuum towns, vacuumville.
That was good. That was good, Margaret, Thank you, it was good.
Thanks, I'll be here all day.
Electro lux cities, I don't know. I just think it's funny because the old catchphrase was nothing sucks like an electro lux And I've never heard an advertisement that was more clearly made before the Internet. You couldn't get away with that today, or you could, but it would be a different.
Pro Although in England they had the we put the d and Bread campaign only a couple of years ago.
That pretty funny, Yes.
Not bad.
I'm never gonna get over that, oh Man. So hoovervill were named kind of it was an attack on President Herbert Hoover, right, Like that's why they get their to him because he was this this will not sound familiar to anything that's about to happen. He was this corrupt Republican president whose policies which benefited the incredibly wealthy, fed into the Great Depression, and like allowed for the kind of deregulation that made it much worse. And we're seen
as having largely led the country into economic calamity. And so they named these massive homeless camps for like homeless families. Basically, Hooverville's the largest and longest lasting. I'm not sure if it was absolutely the largest, but it was the longest lasting and among the largest. Hoovervilles was outside of Seattle, and it stood from nineteen thirty one to nineteen forty one.
As an interesting side note, it was operated on land next to Elliott Bay South, which I believe is where Fraser's condo was meant to be located in the TV series. That doesn't mean anything. I just thought it was interesting. So Wood he missed out on the big West coast Hooverville's, but he was in and round. You know, reading is people who are heading up to Seattle or coming back down from Seattley's talking to them. There's a big one
in Sacramento. He's talking to them, and he's in this work camp and Happy Valley that's kind of similar Hooverville, right, And he's supposed to be up there working on this big damn project. But he does a lot better and it's a lot more stable for him to just busk for music, right, and so that's what he actually spends
most of his time doing. Now, I say he's better at this than he is at laboring, he's not great at it, and he's only able to send the occasional very small money order back home to his wife and two kids. So he is not The idea is I'm coming out here to support my family, but he's not able to support Mary. She and her now two kids are utterly dependent on her parents, which was a very embarrassing situation for her. Mary later said, I know it
upset my dad a lot, my mother too. Wood he wasn't doing the manly thing, And I think it's both worth like saying that that's her impression and the family's impression of this. This is not an uncommon position for people to be in, and I don't know that Woody was doing very well back in Texas, so it's kind of unclear to me, you know, what the right thing
to do here was. Ultimately, Woody, like a lot of people, was put in a very difficult situation of trying to do something he hoped would allow him to support his family, and it didn't work very well for a while, right, I.
Mean it was the Great Depression.
It was like a Great Depression.
Yeah. We see a lot of this now, where like people are like, oh, I'm failing under capitalism, I must personally be a failure and you're like, yeah, no, times are really hard right now.
Well, and we also on this show, like we've had like guys like Steven Segall who as a guest yes yes, uh, friend of the pod, like absolutely abandoned his family to start his Hollywood career. That is a story we've told a few times. Woody is his family feels like he's doing that at the start. That's not actually what he does here, right, because he's not actually like cutting ties with them. But they're not.
Migrant laborers do this all the time today, Like my grand labors come to the United States. They're not abandoning their family to try and but.
They're usually not going out there to play guitar.
That's fair.
Yeah, I think that's kind of part of why, because he's not really doing the work that you know, a lot of these other guys were you know, he's doing some of that, but that's not how he really makes most of his bread. Yeah, So in short order, Wood he left Reading for Glendale, which I've also done, and I can tell you good call, much better place to be than reading. He vaguely knew that he had an aunt in the area, and as was often the case, he just sort of they're not like sending letters usually
back and forth. They certainly don't have phones or whatever you usually just like I was told once by a relative that I have an aunt in Glendale. I'm just gonna show up and figure out where she is and hopefully she'll take me in. And social ties were such that when he shows up on her doorstep, she's like, all right. He is twenty five years old when he makes it to the Los Angeles area after several months of stress and internal recriminations because what, he's not thrilled
with himself either. He had wanted to be doing better. He knows how little he's sending back to his family. He's not happy about this. He gets a lucky break courtesy of his cousin Leon, who everyone else either called Jack or Oki Guthrie, and Ok is like a it's kind of a pejorative term for someone from Oklahoma. Both was used as an insult and also is like a
term of pride by people from Oklahoma. Right, the Guthries are all Oakie's right, so calling him ok Guthrie must have been a little bit confusing to like Woody, who is also an Okie.
Uh huh.
Jack and his family had left home back at the start of the Depression and moved to Sacramento. Like many Guthries, he was musically talented, and so was his wife, and they'd built a reputation for themselves as good musicians and performers. He suggested teaming up with Woody to try and start and act in Los Angeles. This was not the obviously good idea that it would later seem, as Ed Gray explains in the book ramblin Man. Jack was a Western singer.
His songs were heavily influenced by popular music. Wood he was a country singer, his music born of an older oral tradition. In practice, they could neither sing nor play guitar together. Indeed, would he privately despise the treakly sentiment of jack sagebrush serenades. Jack the guitarist used the jazz influenced chords of popular music and played up the neck of the instrument. Would he disdained chords beyond the minimal tonic,
subdominant and dominant. So this is not a great pairing and Wood he's a little bit like he's a little bit of a snob. Right, It's like, Oh, your music's all popular and jazzy. You're not doing the cool punks. You know, it's not really punk. But that's it's very similar in attitude to that kind of guy.
Right, I mean he's doing folk punk before, it's.
Right, Yeah, at least he's about to be starting to do folk punk.
It's interesting because the country western eye had never occurred to me that those were separate categories.
Yes, because I mean it's this mix of these songs that are like folk songs that are we would call western because they're like songs about the West and about you know, being a cowboy or whatever, and songs that are like Western songs that are made for like the different kinds of like floor shows and entertainment, you know, radio and whatever that's popular at the time. Like those are kind of different beasts. So in better times, these
guys probably would never have worked together. But desperation made, you know, some kind of collaboration necessary, and they developed a fairly successful act and we're able to book recurring gigs on the radio through a station called kf VD. Woody found himself increasingly drawing the folk music with a sense of class consciousness, like Goebel Reeves nineteen thirty four. Tune Hobo's Lullaby, And here's Woody Guthrie singing a portion of Hobo's Lullaby, which is again a song by another guy.
And this is a folk song, it's also kind of punk, as you'll catch from this section.
Oh, I used to listen to it while riding trains. Oh well, the guitar.
I know. The police calls you trouble. They call trouble every but when you die and go to heaven, you find policeman.
Okay, that's good. That's a good little bar. So I would also be remiss because that's pretty cool if I didn't expound on the fact that racism too was a recurrent part of wood He's act and often on his mind while living in Echo Park and fighting on behalf of poor white people, because he's like an activist, you know, helping like rent strike type stuff right, Like he is an advocate for like poor downtrodden white people living in Los Angeles. He also is drawing cartoons of people he
called jungle blacks and monkeys, and like that's bad. He wrote poems so racist that I don't even feel like I should describe them on the air to you, They're bad. Oh god, Yeah, found a good LA Weekly article on the subject by an author named Johnny Whiteside, and I'm
going to read a quote from it now. Broadcasting on Pasadena's Kaffidi, Guthrie often indulged in on air employee of a Bonix, and was stunned when a black listener characterized the singer as unintelligent after hearing Guthrie performed songs with titles like Run, Inward Run, and Inward Blues. Fortunately for Guthrie,
recordings of these tunes do not survive. Later, Guthrie said, a young negro in Los Angeles wrote me a nice letter one day telling me the meaning of that word, the inWORD, and that I shouldn't say it anymore on the air, so I apologized. He next tore all the Inward songs out of his songbook. Huh, so you can take that however you want. Right, the fact that he is singing that kind of stuff on the air and like just writing poems about it not great. But he's
also not unable to change or immune to criticism. So he's willing to like listen to this criticism that a black man gives him and be like, oh, you know what, that is kind of fucked up and that ain't nothing for the son of a klansman, right when you're yeah, you know again, that's kind of up to your personal take.
When we talk about like how do you judge people, you know, to what extent do you judge them based on their time or based on some sort of concept of objective morality, one thing that always matters to me
is where did they start versus where did they end up? Right, Because someone who was raised in a slaveholding household and becomes an abolitionist but is still racist is a lot more impressive to me than a guy who just like isn't outwardly racist because he grew up in the nineteen nineties, but like crosses the street when he sees a.
Black guy, right, totally.
Because one of those is a person who like went on a journey recognized a bad thing about themselves and made changes.
You know, there's people that like will never get my pronouns right, who I suspect would kill someone who tried to hurt me. And there's other people who would absolutely always get my pronouns right and be super respectful and would be like, oh no, a bad thing is happening if they watch me get murdered for them.
You know.
Yeah, I'm trying to be like, it's therefore okay, Like I'm not trying.
The reason I included this because it's pretty bad and you should know that about the guy.
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not trying to Yeah, but.
This is not a part of his entire life or his whole creative life. He writes anti racist songs later in life, Like, it does seem like he makes a change, And I do think it's worth noting like this is a guy who was raised by a klansman in like the thirties, twenties and thirties, you know, so you know, again, you can figure out morally wherever you want to figure
that out. But I don't think it's worth kind of looking at the whole sweep of the personal journey the man went on there in nineteen thirty seven, Woody's wife, Mary and two children moved to Los Angeles to be with him. Jack wound up leaving the act and show business for a while, but Woody paired up with Maxine Chrisman, whose family was friends with his cousin and had taken
Woody in too. He dubbed Maxine Lefty Lou. The Tube played songs by other artists that spoke to the poor and downtrodden, like Hobo's Lullaby, but they also started playing Woody's original compositions, like the Talking dust Bowl Blues. This song really embodies what people were starting to love about Woody. His music had a wartz end all description of life during the Depression and the struggles of the hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to move west during
the dust Bowl. He sung about relatable nuts and bolts issues that are still familiar to a lot of people today. If you were a poor punk kid who lived on a semi permanent road trip for a while basically and had the experience of trying to coast by turning your car off on downhill runs because you can't afford gasoline, here's Woody Gathrie singing about the same thing.
Way up yonder on the mountain curve. It's a way up yonder in the pine, he would. And I give that rolling forward to shove and eyes going to coast as fur as it could come in coasting pigging up speed was a half in turn. I didn't make it, man, I'm telling you. The fiddles and the guitars really flew. That Ford took off like a b lime squirrel, and it flew halfway around the world, scattered wives and children's all over the side of that mountain.
Man, I don't know.
I love his talking blues.
Yeah, I love his talking. I love the way he says children like. It just tickles the hell out of me. Reminds me of the good parts of Live in a fucking middle of Nowhere, Oklahoma. Like I do like that about him. And you know what I like.
Even more, Margaret, is it the sponsors of the show. Yes, they're all great.
They're all great, and they've all had the experience of having the coast in their Ford truck to save gas money too. Look, it's hard times for everyone, even large brands.
They've probably driven stuff off of the road before.
Yeah. Absolutely, we could talk about what truck drivers are forced to do in order to make their times. Anyway, whatever we're done, Margaret, Yes, I do find it fun. How much of like his dust Bowl songs are very relatable to like punk life today. Yeah, totally hate the cops fucking coasting in my car, you know, camping out on the woods and shit like did.
He do Big Rock Candy Mountains as this someone else.
In my head? He did Big Rock Candy Mountains, but I didn't double check on that.
I mean, he might have just sung it.
I'm fairly certain I've heard a version of the song by him. Harry McClintock was the guy who I first recorded and wrote it.
Yeah, one of the first people I ever rode trains with. I haven't written trains nearly as much as going to make it sound like when I do these episodes, But was this focusing on him Ryan Harvey, And so that's why I have a lot of these associations with riding trains in particular. But we used to sit around and sing Big Rock Candy Mountains, but change the words very slightly to be like modern anarchy, and you didn't have
to change much. And my favorite was and the Hens lay Vegan Eggs was my favorite clan.
Ah that's good. Oh man, that's funny. Wait a second, yeah, yeah yeah, police dogs can't sniff your weed. Yeah, totally so Wood. He had attained a degree of local fame by thirty eight thirty nine. Right nineteen thirty eight to nineteen thirty nine, he's doing reasonably well. In fact, he and Lefty Loo were so beloved that the radio station where they played received thousands of fan letters over the
course of just a few months. They were doing okay in terms of money, but not great because again, he has a lot of fans, but they're broke ass dust bowl refugees, So he's not getting rich off these people, right, And he's also not very interested in getting rich. He seemed to feel like he had a responsibility to reach and provide relief for his people suffering in government work
camps and embarrassed by their situation. From a write up by the Library of Congress quote he also sang at government camps that gave these people some measure of dignity, health, and safety. Joining him was Will Gear, an actor and ernest leftwinger, who helped would he better understand the injustice of an economic system that would allow Americans to live in such pa And this is where he starts getting
pilled on socialism, right, and eventually becomes a communist. He will call himself a card carrying communist, as we'll talk about he never actually has a card, and he could.
Have gotten one.
But Wood, he's a little bit of a fabulous right He lies a little bit, not in a way that is massively meaningful, because he was a communist and very committed, but you know, he also he's a little bit of a tall tale spinner. So yeah, and you know it's to his credit that he's again, rather than focusing on making money off of this growing fame, he's giving a lot of free shows to provide relief for his people.
Right.
He is very dedicated to his people in a way that I think is pretty admirable. Wood. He's popularity and by now fairly mature class consciousness started to make him more connections with the radical political set, including various left wing writers, journalists and socialists and communist activists. He began writing songs that spoke not just of left wing politics, but of the rage of the working and increasingly his own hatred of the people that maintained the system that
kept his people down trodden. In nineteen thirty nine, he wrote one of his most famous songs, The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd, about an Oklahoma outlaw active in the early nineteen thirties who regular listeners will know was my cousin. Now. My great grandmother knew him as a girl. I grew up here in songs about him from her and my family. They,
as I talk about, often very conservative people. But my great grandma particularly would always tell us, you know, you got outlaw blood in you, right, like it was something she was very proud of. In a way that's a little weird if you heard the way these people tended to talk about other like urban crime, right. Outlaw crime was very different to them. And I'm talking particularly my relatives who were survivors of the Great Depression. Outlaws are
very different than modern criminals in their eyes. Right. I'm not saying that's actually a fair, but their conception of these people is extremely different. And a big part of why is not just Woody, but songs like this that would he made. Who turned these guys who were bank robbers and gangsters into Robin hood figures, right, and Floyd was a fairly easy one to turn into a Robinhood character, because he kind of was at least a little bit
that guy. There's a debateis to like how much of that sort of character was real and how much of it is kind of myth making that Floyd did, but some of it's certainly true. Floyd was born in Georgia, but had moved with his family to Aiken's, Oklahoma, in nineteen eleven, and his career as a criminal had started early when he was arrested at age eighteen for stealing three dollars and fifty cents worth of I think stamps from a post office. A few years later, he robbed
a payroll in Saint Louis. So he goes from like stamp theft to armed robbery fairly quickly, and he does three years or so in prison for that. After he's released, he becomes a Kansas City area bank robber. One thing you get about Floyd is he that doesn't seem to have ever considered not being a criminal. Yeah, just immediately.
Like, no, you know, he found this thing that sort of works. Yeah, well, because it didn't really work. That's the other weird thing about it. Huh.
No, but he never really thinks about doing anything but being an outlaw, and he quickly gains He starts Robin Banks in Kansas City, and he earns the nickname pretty Boy, which eventually becomes pretty Boy Floyd because people thought he was very good looking. He hated this nickname. So he's gonna pull up a picture of the man. You can decide yourself how good looking he was.
Is this a picture of Luigi?
Americans do love their sexy criminals.
Yeah, yeah, huh, not my type, but you know, the standards were not as high back. He's got like a soft gaze that nice, you know.
Like, yeah, prominent nose, good jaw line.
Yeah, he's not bad looking.
Certainly, not nice hair. Yeah.
Yeah, he's better looking at what he got. Three if we go to ab real quick.
Yeah, he is a hardened criminal. He killed at least one federal agent. He also killed the sheriff of Macintosh County. Other members of his gang killed several police officers and other criminals as well. There are multiple police officer murders that he is also a suspect in that we don't fully know did he kill all those cops, but he killed a number of cops you know, like he shoots
a lot of police. In the early depression years, he took to robbing banks in Oklahoma, where in addition to taking money for himself, he would destroy mortgage documents in order to free poor farmers from debt.
Hell.
Yeah, now we don't fully know if this happened, right, It's not the kind of thing how would you prove it? For one thing, right, people told stories about it. I will tell you that everyone I knew in the towns in Oklahoma like where he had been active, and again including my family members who knew him, would tell you that this is what he did. I don't know. It's
not provable. It's one of those things where it would make sense for him to do it, even if he was not really morally a Robin ho character, because if you're destroying people's mortgages, they will hide you from the cops. Yeah.
Like, I could tie this back to Italy. In the eighteen seventies, Mala Testa and all these other anarchists in Italy in Benevento Province would go and their idea of how to do propaganda of the deed was to go and they'd march on these small towns and they would destroy the tax and ownership records and they were like and then everyone would come out and be like, you have freed us. The priest was like came out of the church and was like, these people have been sent
by God to free us. And then they all got arrested. But then they actually only spent like a year in jail because everyone was going so crazy in Italy at that point that they were like, you know, we better just let these people out.
Yeah, we can't go too hard on these people. Everyone really likes them for so much.
Yeah, and so that's like there is a specific point and if you're going to be a criminal, if you go hard enough and make everyone like you, there's a certain safety in that.
One of my favorite Floyd's stories is that he had a gang and his gang decided they wanted to rob a bunch of people on like Black Wall Street at one point, which was very well armed, and Floyd was like, well, you guys can go do that. I'm not fucking with that, that seems like And sure enough they got fucking like shot to pieces. Yeah. So he was a smart man.
Yeah.
My other favorite story about him I mentioned in my high school ap English class that he was a cousin of mine, and my teacher, who was, you know, in her fifties or something, he said, he shot my grandfather in the leg.
Oh did you get in that class, buddy.
No.
No, she was like, it's okay. Again, because she was raised in this same culture, she was like, it's okay. Like pretty boy said, no move, and my grandpa moved. You know, he didn't kill him, he just shot him in the leg a little. Again, there's a lot of tolerance for these specific sorts of outlaws in that part of the South.
Like it's that you probably wouldn't find today. Just to be clear, anyone listening that you probably wouldn't find today, you will not find today.
So again, fascinating character. And yeah, I can't say how much of the whole robin Hood thing is true, but I think a lot of the robin Hood image that he has comes from Woody. Although it's also worth noting he is part of why it takes so long for him to get caught, because he's like one of the last gangsters to get caught and killed by the government. His death is generally agreed to have heralded the end
of the gangster era. Huh, yeah, because I think thirty four is when he's gunned down, and like there's a lot of stories of him like hiding with little old ladies and lying to the cops. And then when he like leaves, there's one hundred dollars bill under the plate
where she'd fed him dinner or something like that. So in nineteen thirty nine, you know, about five years after his death, when memories of this guy are still very strong, Woody writes the song that is very much responsible for crystallizing this image of pretty Boy Floyd as this kind of like banded outlaw king of the American South. And we're just going to listen to that song because it's Christmas and it's a song about my cousin.
Hell.
Yeah, if you'll gather around me, children, a story I will tell about perty Boy Floyd and Outlaw Oklahoma and you him. Well. It was in the town of Shawnee Saturday afternoon, his wife beside him in his wagon as into town may road. Baron Deputy Shirt approached him in a manner rather rude, vulgar words of anger, and his wife, she overheard pretty Boy grabbed a log chain and the deputy grabbed his gun. In the fight that followed, he laid that deputy down. Then he took to the tree
and timber to live alive. Of shame. Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name. But a mini a starving farmer. The same old story told how the outlaw paid their mortgage and saved their little holes. Others tell you about a stranger that comes to bag a meal. Underneath his napkin left a thousand dollars bills. It was in Oakland, a hord city. It was on a Christmas day. There was a whole car load of groceries come with a note to see. Well, you say that I'm an outlaw,
you say that I'm a thief. Here's a Christmas dinner for the family's on relief. Yes, it is through this world I've wondered. I've seen lots of money men. Some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen. And is through your life if you travel, Yes, it's through your life you roll. You will never see an outlaw drive family frumler hole.
I love the way that song ends. Yeah, and some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen.
That's a lot I hear all over the place.
It's it's a great fuck. I mean, this is one of his more famous songs. Yeah, but it's a damn good line.
I enjoyed that thorough.
I also like that. Look, I've seen a lot of outlaws. I'm not saying I'm not defending the things they've done, But it's not the outlaws I see forcing people to be homeless, you know, that's the bands. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So I disagree with my family about a lot, but our shared pride in our cop killing ancestor is not one of those things.
Yeah.
Anyway, as is often the case for people who come to Los Angeles for the music industry, would he wound up having to take his family back home to Texas and then lee them again to move to New York City in nineteen forty, chasing what had become for him a dream of folk stardom. By this point, he'd become a little bit of a legend, enough that the Library of Congress had him sit down and record his dust
Bowl songs for posterity. He laid down tracks with Pete Seeger and became an influential part of the urban folk revival of the time. In a letter to Alan Lomax, another influential pillar of the urban folk revival. He described his thoughts on what folk music ought to be. And I'm interested for your thoughts on this, Margaret Ken. A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it.
Or it could be who's hungry and where their mouth is, or who's out of work and where the job is, or who's broke and where the money is, or who's carrying a gun and where the piece is. That's folklore, and folks made it up because they've seen that the politicians couldn't find nothing to fix or nobody to feed or give a job a work.
That's good. That's It's so interesting to me because I if you'd say folk music in different places, you mean something so completely different. Right, American folk music is this like Woody Guthrie kind of vibe thing, whereasn't almost any other country. You're looking at stuff that's a little bit more like technically interesting, like musically yes, I don't know.
I have a lot of thoughts about like folk and folk instrumentation and music and all that, but I think what he's describing is great and specifically that thing that it's just like this is the stuff that people make up, you know, it's not fancy.
Yeah, and it's also how poor people without really any other idea of how to have a voice, talk about in a lot of ways, the kind of issues that today we ascribe to, like the job of journalists, right, who was hungry and where their mouth is? Who's carrying a gun and where the piece is?
Right?
Yeah, yeah, totally it's gossip.
Yes, yes, it's gossip and its agitation.
Right.
You look at a lot of folk songs and a lot of folks stories, and that's the first safe place to attack the wealthy and the powerful, right, totally a little bit, you know, totally oftentimes. You know, there's also plenty of folk stuff that reinforces some of those things, but it is where you see a lot of subversive stuff.
Yeah. I mean that's the thing about like populist and popular stuff, as it can really go either way. Yeah, but it's like yeah, still on some fundamental level. Interesting.
Yeah, Now, it's worth spending some time on just how radically folk music changes, as you noted, in other countries, it's very different. And part of why it's different in the US is Woody Guthrie. He changes what folk music
is in the United States in a fundamental way. In an article for The New Yorker, David Hajdou writes, quote, folk music, including country, blues and other vernacular styles, was supposed to be anonymous, a collective art passed along Worley, from singer to singer, generation to generation, sometimes culture to culture.
From the vantage point of today, when kids with their first guitar start writing songs before they learn to play other tunes, it is difficult to process how exceptional it was for a folk artist such as Woody Guthrie to have created a vast repertoire of deeply idiosyncratic works. Many Tenpanaley, Broadway and Hollywood songwriters of the thirties and earlier were as skilled and prolific as Guthrie, but they were working in a different vein writing to order for professional singers.
Guthrie brought the authorial imperative to vernacular music in America. And I think that's also very interesting.
Just to keep going with all the weird family connections, My great grandfather was a ten panale songwriter, and yeah, he just wrote. He wrote music that he didn't own the copyright to. He wrote the b sides for more popular musicians.
Like, yeah, yeah, that makes total sense. I'm not surprised that that's your family connection. Yeah. So, by this point in time, Woody was what you would call a left wing radical, although not again a card carrying one. He played benefits for and was associated with the American Communist Party, but he never got around adjoining and you'll find several different theories as to why. The leading one that you'll hear is that he liked his independence a little too
much to be a joiner. Now this sounds good, especially to people like you and me, but it leaves out a crucial fact, which is that wood He was his era's equivalent of like a Tanky right totally. I mean, it also leaves out the fact that he vocally took claim to have a card like claimed to be a member of the party right, and that it was the best thing he'd done, which he hadn't. Again, he wasn't immune to the worst impulses if the American left. During
this period. He had been enthusiastic about FDR early on, but once the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact was signed and the USSR locked into a treaty with the Nazis, he attacked Roosevelt as Quote Churchill's lapdog for his anti Nazi stance in support of Great Britain during the early months of the war. He argued that the developing World War was
a capitalist fraud. When Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland together, Guthrie supported Stalin to an extent and with such vociferousness that biographer Will Kaufman called it shocking. In ramblin Man, Ed Craig goes into more detail about a left wing anti war song he wrote called why do You Stand There in the Rain, based on the title of a New York Post article, and I'm going
to read from that section from ramblin Man here. Just days before, some six thousand delegates of the American Youth Congress had gathered in Washington to advocate jobs in peace. At the invitation of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the delegates gathered in front of the south portico of the White House and a cold drizzle to listen to a half hour speech by the President. Fdr threw down the gauntlet, aware that the Young Communist League had taken firm grip
on the once broadly based Popular Front ayc. The Soviet Union, as everyone who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship, and as absolute as any dictatorship in the world. It has allied itself with another dictatorship, and has invaded a neighbor, Finland, so infinitesimally small that it could do no conceivable harm to the Soviet Union, a neighbor which seeks only to live in peace as
a democracy, and a liberal, forward looking democracy. At that Roosevelt heard the booze and hisses through the cold rain. People's World columnist, would he Gothrie knew where he stood? He chided the president and song. Now the guns in Europe roar as they have so oft before, and the warlords play the same old game again. They butcher and they kill. Uncle Sam foots the bill with his own dear children, standing in the rain? Why do you stand there in the rain? Why do you stand there in
the rain. He's a strange carrying on the White House Capital lawn. Tell me, why do you stand there in the rain? Then the President's voice did ring. Why this is the silliest thing I have heard in all my fifty eight years of life. But it just stands to reason, as he passes another season, he'll be smarter by the
time he's fifty nine. So he's being like real shitty to Roosevelt there, specifically about his support of England in the war that is developing, and very defensive of the USSR and invading a much smaller neighbor in invading Poland. And it's one of those things where this is both like horrifying given what we know happens, you have to to extent while still saying he was wrong, look at his level of knowledge and what had actually happened previously.
World War One was the touchstone here. And in World War One the US did enable further butchering right, like we were arming and profiting off of a hideous war that we had no business sticking our noses into. Yeah, and he's pissed about that. It's also there's a lot less information about what was going on in the Soviet you now, I will also say more than enough that he should have known, right.
Yeah, I mean the internationalist newspaper stuff was pretty Yeah. Sometimes they were better at knowing what was going on around the world than like a modern leftist today. But he's holding the party line. They got told very specifically, like, I mean, is the problem with the common tern in the communist international, Yes, is that someone in the American
Communist Party during this era is literally taking orders from Russia. Yeah, And that's like one of the parts that we don't want to talk about with the Red scare, because the Red scare is bad, right, Yeah, But when they're like, oh, these foreign agents acting under a foreign national they were.
There was literally like they were taking direct like propaganda, direct orders like from Moscow, well not from Moscow, but like from the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. And they were really wrong on some things as a result of that, because it turns out Hitler's not an ally of international communism. It turns out now yeah, no, no, that goes very badly, very quickly. Yeah, And ye know what he had been had been describing himself as an
anti fascist at this point. But also I think he probably would have said that like, well, you know, the Communist Party knows its business if they think that's what they've got to do to secure themselves with matters is you know, the survival of communism, which you know, at that point had weathered a number of attacks from the international capitalist community, like during the Russian Civil War. And I'm not saying that because I think that's a good argument.
I'm saying I think that's he would have made. I'm pretty firmly on the stance of Stalin Bat and the Malotov Ribbentrop packed inexcusable. Yeah, But also I always emphasize inexcusable on behalf of the Soviet leadership. You know, I've got nothing but respect for the guys who wound up dying by the millions to stop the Nazis, absolutely totally
and the right those guys, yeah, and ladies. So it is impossible to look at this situation without saying commonalities between more modern failures of the left to condemn dictators seen as anti imperialist for very flawed reasons. I might suggest that we also not forget at the time one of the complicating factors here is how the US government deals with what it considers communism and what things it
considers communism, right, because that's important too. What he had an extensive FBI file, And in nineteen forty one, after he joined the Merchant Marine, one of his shipmates was cited as saying, would he quote followed the Communist Party line and that they were very pro Russian and advocated racial intermarriage. So again that is what the guy who informs on him and the FBI considers evidence of his Communist sympathies is he thinks that black people and white
people should be able to get married. So keep that in mind too.
The Communist Party was absolutely right about racial politics in the United States, Yes, one hundred percent, And they were one of the only non black organization, it was actually heavily black, but one of the only not majority black organizations that was right about this.
Yes, yes, And so like when we talk about like criticizing him, don't leave out the fact that he's he's also very much correct about this right totally. After the war, he would be accused by the California State Senate's far right Committee on un American Activities for being Joe Stalin's California mouthpiece, which wasn't one point true, but also for being a member of a factionalist sabotage group, which was absurd. What he never sought or attempted to do anything but
sing songs and write articles for socialist papers. He was not sabotaging anything.
I'm a feeling the reason he didn't get a card is he was like, I don't want to be on that list.
Yeah. Maybe, yeah, I mean that may have been at I think he also just might have been too lazy.
Yeah, I didn't want to pay the thiees whatever.
He's an artist, he's not good at signing papers.
Yeah.
Marjorie Guthrie, who is his second wife, he starts a family with her after he divorces his first wife Mary and moves to Coney Island, sums things up this way. I don't know what happened prior to my time, but from my time in Coney Island he was not welcomed by the party because he didn't want to follow a party line. You couldn't tell Woody what to think, and so we were not members of the party in Coney Island. And again I include that because she was his wife,
she knew him. But also that isn't entirely true, because he certainly followed the party line on some very fucked up things.
But actually that's still like even when we talk about the way that people have arcs, right, one of the things I've read a lot. I've read a lot about the UK Communists at this era where a lot of the Communists left the Communist Party once they realized that they were just being mouthpieces for Stalin.
You know, yeah, yeah, I mean, and again, there is a degree to which the fact that there's so much disinformation being pumped out about the Soviet and there's so much bad like its certainly more reasonable then for someone to doubt a lot of the official narratives coming out and to doubt a lot of the information that makes Stalin look bad from their position in the United States. Right again, I think enough that a man is obviously intelligent,
as Woody should have been better informed. But he's not the only one who makes this mistake and it's a more understandable mistake then than it is now. As what I'll say, that's without forgiving it, you know. So, yeah, however, you want to mark this down morally for Woody, his U the US shouldn't be getting into this capitalist war. They're all cooking this World War two thing up. That
attitude ends for Woody. On June twenty second, nineteen forty one, when Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union, this is Operation Barbarossa. Would he ran to his friend Pete Seeger after this like breaks and told him, well, I guess we're not going to be singing any more of them peace songs. Woody was not the only man forced to change his tune rapidly due to world events.
Winston Churchill anyway, yeah, yeah, well done, well done.
Winston Churchill, who was one of the world's loudest anti communists, was forced by sheer necessity to make temporary amends and even express support for the cause of Soviet soldiers. When Woody heard this, he told a friend Churchill's flip flopped. We got a flip flop too. You know who doesn't flip flop though, Margaret.
The consistency with which our sponsors, yes, high quality goods and services.
That's right, that's right. Our sponsors have never once changed their opinion, which is why today, tomorrow and forever they advise you to vote Millard Fillmore for president. We're back. Our sponsors are all old hair tonics from the eighteen hundreds. Anyway, vote Fillmore. Much of the Woody that we know, the famous Woody Guthrie. You know, you brought up as soon
as I said what do you know of him? That the picture of him with a guitar, that has a this machine kills fascist sticker slapped across it.
Yeah.
By the way, that sticker was like put out by the US government.
Huh that makes sense.
Yeah, it was a proper game, strange bedfilm and piece of prop. There were a lot of machines we were using to kill fascists, perfectly and reasonable to put some stickers on.
Wait did they Oh that was like a the government was putting that on machines to raise morale. And he took one of those and was like, I'm putting this on my guitar.
I think it's something like that. I read it in that article and I think La Weekly by the fellow who was writing about like Woody's history with racism, was like this, you know, this thing was like a product of the government that he has.
That makes so much sense. I never quite understood that. I always really liked though, when people carve into their ak's, wouldn't stock this machine makes folk music?
Yeah, there's been some good ones of that coming out of Syria.
Yeah.
So he changes his opinion very rapidly, and once the Nazis invade the USSR, he starts getting much more patriotic. And again he had been making anti Nazi music and been anti Nazi prior to this. And if you're saying, well, that's incoherent for him to be against the war, and you know whatnot, Yes, lots of people have incoherent politics, but his politics get a lot more cohesive after Operation Barbarossa.
An article for Oklahoma History dot Org notes in New York, he appeared on numerous popular radio shows before joining the Merchant Marines with Cisco Houston. During World War Two, Guthrie was on three torpedoed ships and the day Germany surrendered, he was drafted into the US Army.
Like he was on ships that were hit by torpedes three.
Is and the Merchant Marine is effectively a part of the military during a war. Right, he is a combat veteran. Yeah, you know, like that's like he's on three ships that get hit.
Yeah.
Now he's not in the army very long. It basically immediately gets out because the war ends. But yeah, he does like his bit, you know, he is not when we play songs of his where he's talking about wanting to fight the fascists, he goes and does it. You know, he is doing an important, dangerous job where he gets shot at so you cannot. Yeah, he's very willing to put his skin in the game.
Yeah, one blown up ship. If you quit after one blown up ship, no one's mad you did.
Nobody will call you a coward. Yeah, I don't know that. Yeah. And so, from late nineteen forty one to the end of the war, Woody Guthrie wrote several iconic anti fascist anthems, including Ruben James, about a US destroyer that was torpedoed and sunk by the Nazis in nineteen forty one. As you might expect from Woody and the kind of songs he wrote, this song focused on the lives and deaths of normal men at war. The refrain went, tell me what was their names? Tell me what was their names?
Did you have a friend on that? Good Ruben James. It's a good song. But if you want my personal favorite war years Woody Guthrie song, nothing beats this particular banger, soph He's gonna put it up now for the very boil.
We'll show these fascist what a couple of hill billies can do. Wow.
Well, I'm gonna tell you, fascist, you may be surprised people in this world are getting organized.
You're bound to lose you Fascist, Found.
To lose WHOA all you Fascist? Last, all you Fascist? Yes, all fascist? Bound you fascist. There's people of every nation marchings.
Find the side marching across the hills where a many of fascists died.
You're bound to lose you Fascist. Bound to.
Ah banger music.
It's so good.
It's a real banger.
I enjoyed that immensely.
Yeah, one of my favorites. So near the end of Woody's wartime experiences, he would record the first official version of a song that he'd been working on since nineteen forty This Land Is Your Land, which would go on to be undoubtedly his most famous work of music. It is definitely the one Woody Guthrie song everyone's fucking heard like. You can't get through school without hearing this Land is Your Land.
So easily recuperated.
Yes, And in the decades since nineteen forty four, it's also been criticized for what many people interpret as an air of imperialism and support for manifest destiny, which is definitely present in the version of the song that is commonly sung. Given this, I think it's interesting to actually look into why wood he wrote the song and what its original lyrics were This Land is Your Land was initially something of a folk music dis track. It was
a response to Irving Berlin's God Bless America. This is a song Berlin wrote in nineteen eighteen, after being drafted and re released in nineteen forty one, is something of a cash grap The lyrics if you aren't familiar, go like this, God bless America, Land that I love, Stand beside her and guide her through the night with a light from above. Woody fucking hated this song, and it's
good he did because it's a fucking dogshit song. He considered it far too sweet, a hymn for a nation that had just sent millions of its citizen and do a depression. This Land is Your Land was meant to be a retort discussing the real America that Irving had tried to conceal. The original title was God Bless America for Me. Joe Riley writes of this first version of the song, quote, it was more of a question than affirmation.
In fact, it was a sarcastic retort. Woody later changed the refrain to this land was made for you and me, and the song to this Land is Your Land the verses he ultimately emitted from the final draft of the song include this banger there was a big high wall there that tried to stop me. The sign was painted said private property, but on the backside it didn't say nothing. This land was made for you and me, and the squares of the city and the shadow of the steeple
near the relief office. I see my people, and some are a grumblin and some are wondering if this land still made for you and me. And that's a banger that's very much not an imperialist song. That's more him talking about like this, the people that this country to be four are the ones being harmed by the system that governs it, right, Like that's the original point of the song, that said, this is not a case of it being recuperated by someone else who changes the lyrics
because they'd think that they can tweak it. They don't like Woody's original version. Woody changes it right, and he changes it. He removes that verse about the relief office because late in the war he decided it was too pessimistic, and he replaces it with lines like from the redwood forest to the Gulf stream waters, this land was made for you and me, which is not all that different from like some of the stuff Irving had been. Totally right,
The song becomes a massive hit. It is practically a new national anthem, and Woody does not initially bother to copyright it because this is you know, that's not uncommon for him, right, He generally neglected to do that. Alas for Woody, the post war optimism faded quickly, I mean, and it so the first horrible thing that happens to Woody after the war, because things go downhill for him quickly.
In February of nineteen four, there is an electrical fire in his home and his little girl, Kathy Ann dies. Oh god, he has bad luck with fire, Like I said, he a horrible luck with fire. Now he and Marjorie have three other kids. But yeah, like that's obviously really fucks him up. And like that same year forty seven, and then in forty eight he gets repeatedly attacked as a communist, both in the State Committee of un American Activities in California and in the House of Representatives Committee
on American Activities. Now they were attacking him for being a communist, and he was, but he was not an American. No one was more American than Wood. He fucking Guthrie right. He suffers as a result of this, he gets blacklisted. He had written an autobiographical novel at this point called Bound for Glory that had been set to be turned into a major Hollywood production, but that deal and others like it, fell apart as unions were forced to take
anti communist stances in this new, more paranoid era. Wood he stopped getting hired to play the events that had largely supplemented his income, rather than fold as many did ounce the things that he believed would. He spoke out constantly against j Edgar Hoover, writing at one point quote the roaches crawl across my page tonight and make a noise that makes more sense than all that. Hoover writes,
He's a good bar. He became less dogmatic on the Moscow line as well, although he never stops being a communist. He starts writing that his goal was to quote get this thing called socialism nailed and hammered up just as quickly as he can, and praises Eugene V. Debs, former chairman of the Socialist Party, as quote a peer cross between Jesus Christ and Abe Lincoln, which again is not
really something that the Moscow Party once, you say. Despite the consequences to his career, he continues to seek and sing his mind. Quote. Fascism is being afraid. Fascism is fear bossing you. Fascism is worse than all of these things. And fascism is more closer to you than I can make you. See, I'm trying to wake you up and tell you that you're sleeping with something ten times more dangerous thing and a poison fang snake in your bed.
If fascism does come, and if it does kill me, well then you add me alone onto the hundreds of millions which fascism has already dusted under. And it don't scare me so very much.
That rules.
Yeah, like good line.
All right, it might kill me, it's killed millions of people before, so it will be in good company.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that's hard. I like that.
Yep, that's hard. And this is, unfortunately, Margaret, where the story gets awkward again.
No, is he gonna heel turn again? He keeps dancing.
It's more complicated than a heel turn. He's about to do a bad thing. There's a mitigating factor that's pretty significant. Okay, okay, but it's a pretty bad thing. Woody is at this point and always on the verge of being broke, but also a famous and influential musician. And we know what comes with that, right, which is the temptation to be a sex pest.
Yeah.
Yeah, And you know Woody does not commit like rape, but he does sexually harass someone very badly. And this is a very ugly story. The gist of it is that things with his second wife, Marjorie go downhill as his career does. She is the family money maker. She actually makes a very good living teaching dancing. She's an extremely accomplished dancer, and his career is not doing well. This leads to fighting, and Woody eventually moves out in Rinse a room for himself. He starts writing letters to
his old music partner, Lefty Loo's sister. She is twenty eight years old he is thirty six, so they're not like crazy far apart. But the bigger issue is she had never insinuated that she was into him, right, he is just writing her letters about wanting to fuck her apropos of nothing.
Oh fuck uh huh.
Now, wood he had just kind of assumed that because she like they knew each other, right, they were like friendly, But she gets divorced, and he just kind of assumes, while I'm getting divorced too, that must mean she wants to fuck, right, and his letters to her take on an air of obsession. He writes at least twelve long letters suggesting they move out together, hit the road, and
start having sex. These letters include long, rambling descriptions of the kinds of sex, what he wanted to have, and more. And I'm going to quote from ramblin Man here. Into the envelopes Guthrie stuffed pages torn from New York's tabloids with muddy magenta circle slathered around stories of grisly murders. The packets, sometimes two or three a week, frightened Mary Ruth by their intensity, the sexual proposals, and the suggestion of violence. She drove to Los Angeles to show them
to her sister, who knew Guthrie best of all. You have no idea how horrible it was, her older sister, Maxine said. She in turn called the police. Now the police get involved because they think Woody might be a budding serial killer, and given the kind of stuff he's sending not an unreasonable thing to be afraid of, and given the fact that the FEDS are hounding him, I get why Woody is like, this is them going after me for my politics, but it really isn't. Yeah, he's
writing very upsetting things. Now there's another part to this story which does not make the things he's writing less fuck up or upsetting. But he is losing his mind. Okay, he is losing his mind in a degree that is very soon to be clinically diagnosed. Right in episode one, I mentioned that Woody's mother went insane when he was quite young and was institutionalized.
Right.
This traumatized him and at the time we didn't have an explanation for what she was going for. They just said madness. Right, we now know what she had because Woody has it, and it's diagnosable by the time he gets it, and it's called Huntington's disease. Yeah, his mom and Woody gets it, and he is starting to suffer
the effects of Huntington's by the late forties. This is a neurodegenerative disorder that Huntington's Disease News describes as characterized by uncontrolled movements, loss of cognitive ability and psychiatric problems. The middle stages of the illness are associated with psychosis. Some patients experienced delusions which they tend to be convinced
are accurate. And it also comes with these like sort of obsessive delusions, right, which might explain the whole him thinking that this was something that was reciprocated.
Right, So this isn't a heel turn. This is just a degeneration.
This is just a this is a very tragic degeneration, right, you know, I don't know how again you want to parse it up morally, but like he is diagnosed, like he is losing his mind. He is going to spend most of the rest of his life in an institution. So this is not just a case of like a powerful man in music being a sex pest, right, totally a man who was not like this before so far as we know, absolutely declining in becoming like increasingly delusional.
And like Famous Man's sex pesting is fans say, famous Man's sex pestiing is like or everyone in your orbit you just assume they want to fuck you, which I guess he's like doing to this. No, Yeah, the degeneration thing, that just makes sense.
It's just yeah, he'd probably always had a crush on her, and then this, like he becomes convinced that there is something going on there that there's not right.
But the fact that it was out of the blue to her means that he probably kept his fucking mouth shut about the fact that he a crush on her.
One would assume, right, So it's not great. He has ultimately charged in nineteen forty nine with sending him scene material through the mail. He avoids prison time, but is sentenced to therapy, and he and his therapist do not
have a good relationship. His therapist does not like him, but he's not diagnosed with anything quite yet, so his therapist is just like, he's kind of an asshole, which I can't blame the therapist for because he's being an asshole if you don't know the mitigating factor of the family mental illness that destroyed his mother and is destroying him Wood. He eventually refuses court mandated therapy, and his lawyer manages to narrowly get him out of a six
month sentence. His lawyer who is at one of his shipmates. Right, he and this guy are torpedo together, and this lawyer, who's a very good friend who was like, I'm not going to let my war buddy go to a fucking jail. Wood, he was mostly angry when his sentence gets like cut off. He's kind of pissed because he had been planning a Christmas Eve show for the inmates that he doesn't get to do now, So there's still that piece of him in there.
Right.
By the mid nineteen fifties, Wood, he was disabled with Huntington's badly enough that his second wife, Marjorie, who again he has separated from, had to take charge of his affairs. And it does say something that this person who he was not nice to at the end, had enough affection for him still that she makes sure he's taken care of, right, which included she registers a copyright for this Land is Your Land for the first time, right, and for a
number of his other songs. And she's doing that because like, we're going to need some way of taking care of him, you know, And this makes sense, right. One of the fun side effects of this is that his family is going to wind up in a lawsuit with Donald Trump about this Land is Your Land because Trump kept trying to play it. It is now in the public domain but it wasn't for a while. So that same year, in nineteen fifty six, he was involuntarily committed to Greystone Park,
a New Jersey mental institution. Over the next five years, he lost the ability to play music or even to type. But and again this really says something about the amount of love there was still for him. He is not cut off or alone. His family visits him regularly. They take him out and he stays with them for weekends and holidays. He's taken out and you know, taken to shows and trips by his friends and by fellow artists.
Bob Dylan, who at this point is not particularly famous, starts visiting Woody at the asylum in nineteen sixty one, and Dylan starts working with other performers over the sixties. They like, they play shows. They take Woody to some of these shows where they're playing his music to this
new generation of newly radicalized Americans. And Woody lives long enough to see his music honored and it's like sold out shows by some of the you know, by fucking Bob Dylan, some of the most beloved up and coming
musicians of the sixties. So he does go out knowing that his music doesn't just live on, but is like influenced this new generation of people who are going to become incredibly famous and influential musicians in their own right, which, as far as being an artist goes, is about as much as you can hope for.
Totally.
Yeah, especially for.
Someone who's at the kind of beginning, not the very beginning of record music, but like pretty close to it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He dies in October of nineteen sixty seven. At that point he is unable to communicate by any means besides pointing at cards that said yes or no. But he left behind again, a pretty incredible legacy, two novels, hundreds of articles, more than a thousand songs and poems, five hundred illustrations, and a central role in the folk music
revival that changed American music forever. We've listened to a lot of Woody Guthrie's music in these episodes, and while I do hope you all take the opportunity to listen to more, I want to leave you with a quote of his that I think is quite relevant for our times, which Ed Cray picked out to open his two thousand and eight biography of the Man, about all a human being is anyway, is just a hoping machine, and I
like that. I also like this quote from Bob Dylan, who was asked in nineteen sixty three to s up his feelings on Woody Guthrie and twenty five words for a book on the man. As history dot Com notes, Dylan quote responded instead with one hundred and ninety four line poem called Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, which took the the eternal human search for hope and where do you look for this hope you're seeking? Dylan asks in the poem,
before proceeding to a kind of answer. You can either go to the church of your choice, or you can go to a Brooklyn State Hospital. You'll find God in the church of your choice. You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital.
Cool.
Yeah, anyway, that's Woody Guthrie. Yeah.
I knew so little about him. I know about some of his music and it's been super influential. But that's awesome.
I'm yeah, it was one of those like again, it's the messy story, but yeah, I see it was better I would have guessed.
Yeah, great pick for the non bastard Holiday episode.
A relevant kind of guy to know about for the kind of times we're heading into.
Yeah, and speaking of somebody people should know about, I adopted a second dog. Hello, did This is Anderson's sister Truman. She's learning how to be a dog. But she's a good girl.
She's already a good podcast dog, which is a hard level for a job.
Yeah, especially a hurting dog. Yeah, yeah, you're a good girl. Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess just to say happy holidays everyone.
Happy holiday, Yes, happy holidays. And I don't know, listen to some Woody Guthrie.
Yeah.
We'll be back in the new.
Year or the first week of the year.
We'll have a couple of Q and A episodes.
We'll have some cues, we'll answer some a's. It will be a good time.
Any final thoughts, Magpie, anything you want to.
Plug well, if you want Christmas. Every week I have a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, where I talk about cool people did cool stuff. And then either this week or next week, depending on when everything gets released. I also we'll be covering the history of the song Bella Chow because I got excited by this recording last week of part one and I thought I'm gonna do a song too.
It will be the week after releasing that.
So next Monday you all can hear me talk about the history of Bella chow awesome, all right, Harry, Christmas and or whatever you want to have, happy happy, Well.
That'll do it that, I'll do it first twenty for you're twenty twenty four.
Wow twenty four? Yeah, yeah, more or less, more.
Or less all right, yeah, be well, bye bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash Behind the Bastards