Woody Guthrie

by Steve Earle

When Bob Dylan took the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, all leather and Ray-Bans and Beatle boots, and declared emphatically and (heaven forbid) electrically that he wasn’t “gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more,” the folk music faithful took it personally. They had come to see the scruffy kid with the dusty suede jacket pictured on the covers of Bob Dylan and Freewheelin’. They wanted to hear topical songs. Political songs. Songs like The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, Masters of War and Blowin’ in the Wind.  They wanted the heir apparent. The Dauphin. They wanted Woody Guthrie.

Dylan wasn’t goin’ for it. He struggled through two electric numbers before he and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band retreated backstage. After a few minutes he returned alone and, armed with only an acoustic guitar, delivered a scathing It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue and walked.

Woody Guthrie himself had long since been silenced by Huntington’s chorea, a hereditary brain-wasting disease, leaving a hole in the heart of American music that would never be filled, and Dylan may have been the only person present at Newport that day with sense enough to know it.

One does not become Woody Guthrie by design. Dylan knew that because he had tried. We all tried, every one of us who came along later and tried to follow in his footsteps only to find that no amount of study, no apprenticeship, no regimen of self-induced hard travelin’ will ever produce another Woody. Not in a million years.

Woody Guthrie was what folks who don’t believe in anything would call an anomaly. Admittedly, the intersection of space and time at the corner of July 14, 1912, and Okemah, Oklahoma, was a long shot to produce anything like a national treasure.

Woody was born in one of the most desolate places in America, just in time to come of age in the worst period in our history. Then again, the Dust Bowl itself was no accident either. (more…)