Download Woody Guthrie and the dignity of man History, literature, music, images

Woody Guthrie and the dignity of man
History, literature, music, images
International Conference
Bologna, 21-23 May 2008
Papers of the Conference
Arévalo Mateus Jorge
Since 1995 Jorge Arévalo Mateus has been Curator and Head Archivist of the Woody
Guthrie Foundation and Archive in New York City. He has worked with numerous
organizations and institutions, including the Louis Armstrong House and Archives
(Queens College, City University of New York), the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the
Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and
consulted for the Alan Lomax Archives (Hunter College, City University of New York),
the RAICES Archives of Latin Music at Boy’s Harbor, Inc., and the Center for
Traditional Music and Dance. Currently a doctoral candidate at Wesleyan University,
he is an ethnomusicologist, musician, and archivist with areas of specialization in North
American, Latin American, and Caribbean musical traditions and music collections.
Arévalo Mateus has published numerous essays, articles and reviews in scholarly and
popular journals and publications, including New York Archives Magazine,
Ethnomusicology, Journal of Popular Music Studies and Centro, The Journal of Puerto
Rican Studies. His most recent essay appears in Rockin’ Las Americas, The Global
Politics of Rock in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). In 2008
Arévalo Mateus received a Grammy for compilation producer of The Live Wire (2007).
Abstract
Imagining the Local and Global Woody Guthrie: Performance as Cultural and Political
Practice
In recent years the Woody Guthrie Archives (WGA) has been an active agent and
participant in the revitalization and re-evaluation of Woody Guthrie’s legacy. Through
a variety of synchronic, diachronic, and interdisciplinary approaches, new
interpretations about Guthrie’s life, his songs, and writings have contributed fresh
perspectives to popular, political, and intellectual traditions and discourses. While
issues of historicity, authenticity, and social commitment remain inevitably linked when
folk music or folklore as cultural or political practice are discussed, in this presentation
I focus on two recent projects emanating from the WGA—The Live Wire (2007) and
Global Woody—tracing a unique public performance document and a public program in
order to dialogically consider and ask questions about Guthrie’s relevance and
significance for the 21st century World.
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Cray Ed
Ed Cray, a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, is the
author of 16 books, including, most recently, a biography of Woody Guthrie entitled
Ramblin’ Man (W.W. Norton, 2004, 2006). A veteran journalist, he has worked on
newspapers, radio and magazines. He lives in Santa Monica, California.
Abstract
Depression America and Woody Guthrie
Woody Gee was 17 when Wall Street's crash of October, 1929, set off an economic
chain reaction that created what Americans now see as “The Great Depression”. The
resulting chaos from 25% unemployment, dismal crop prices, the sharecropping system,
depressed wages, sweeping drought and fierce winds, then, finally the resulting social
malaise had a profound impact on the young Guthrie, still not yet out of his
teens. Eventually the cumulative impact would set Guthrie off in his personal search
for America, to his own definition of “success”, and to lasting glory.
This paper will survey the impact of “The Great Depression” on Guthrie, and his
musical career.
Guthrie Nora
Nora Guthrie began working with her father’s materials in 1992 and in 1994 cofounded the Woody Guthrie Archives with Harold Leventhal and Archivist, Jorge
Arevalo. In addition to managing the Archives and preserving her father’s personal
materials and original creative works, Ms. Guthrie develops and produces new projects
which continue to expand Woody Guthrie's cultural legacy. Based on her intimate
connection to her father’s ideas and ideals, Nora brings a refreshing interpretation of his
work and a new understanding of his legacy. Nora's most recent project was coproducing The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949, a rare recording of a
Woody Guthrie concert, which subsequently won a 2008 Grammy for Best Historical
Album. For more information on Nora Guthrie or Woody Guthrie, please visit our
website - www.woodyguthrie.org
Jackson Mark Allan
He received his MA from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and his Ph.D from
Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Through a Smithsonian Fellowship at the
Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, he finished his dissertation, “Prophet Singer:
The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie”. In January 2007, the University Press of
Mississippi published this work as part of its American Made Music Series. He has also
produced, edited, and complied two CDs of archival materials: “John Handcox: Songs,
Poems, and Stories of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union” and “Coal Digging Blues:
The Songs of West Virginia Coal Miners”, both released through the West Virginia
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Press Sound Archive Series. This fall he will be joining the faculty of Middle
Tennessee State University as an Assistant Professor of Folklore.
Logsdon Guy
Abstract
Woody Guthrie and His Oklahoma Hills
Woody Guthrie was Oklahoma’s most creative native son. It was creativity influenced
not only by genetics, but also by an almost constant change in his daily life in his
hometown, Okemah, Oklahoma. His parents came from different states when they met
and both were musically talented; his father was intelligent, well read and a writer, and
Woody was greatly influenced creatively by his father. Woody grew up among
American Indians, cowboys, railroad workers, oil field workers, miners and workers
from many other occupations. This presentation will depict the changing environment
in Okemah as well as in Oklahoma.
London Frank
Frank London is a composer, trumpeter and bandleader. A founder of The Klezmatics
and leading figure in the world of Jewish music, critic Stephen Fruitman writes, “Frank
London is new Jewish music(s)’ heart, soul and yiddishe kop”. He is featured on over
250 recordings, working with a wide range of artists including John Zorn, LL Cool J,
Mel Torme, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, LaMonte Young, They Might Be Giants,
Jane Siberry, Ben Folds 5, Mark Ribot, Maurice El Medioni and Gal Costa, Matchbox
20’s Rob Thomas, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Itzhak Perlman. He has been featured
on HBO’s Sex and the City, and at international festivals from the North Sea Jazz
Festival to the Tokyo Festival of the Arts to the Lincoln Center Summer Festival. His
settings of Woody Guthrie’s texts helped The Klezmatics win a Grammy in
Contemporary World Music for their CD Wonder Wheel. Of his solo CD release,
Hazonos (with Cantor Jacob Mendelson), Stephen Silberman of Wired Magazine
writes, “One of the Most Stunning Albums of the Year”. Frank London’s Klezmer
Brass Allstars’ latest CD Carnival Conspiracy (In the Marketplace All is Subterfuge)
was #1 in Rolling Stone’s Top 10 Non-English CDs of 2006. With Glen Berger, he
wrote the Jewish folk-opera A Night In The Old Marketplace. Seth Rogovoy, author of
The Essential Klezmer, called it “the greatest and most significant Jewish musical since
Fiddler”. In addition, Frank composed music for Tony Kushner’s A Dybbuk, Vit
Horejs’ epic telling of the history of the Lower East Side, Once There Was a Village,
John Sayles’ The Brother from Another Planet, Pilobolus Dance Theater’s Davenen,
Great Small Works’ The Memoirs of Glikl of Hamelin, and Min Tanaka’s Romance as
well as for the documentary films The Shvitz, A Cantor’s Tale, and Divan.
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Abstract
The Brooklyn Years: The Klezmatics’ Settings of Woody’s New York Texts
Woody lived in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn with his wife, Marjory, and their
children, Cathy Ann, Arlo, Nora, and Joady. The songs that he wrote during this period
cover a wide range of topics: his family, life in Coney Island, the war and its aftermath,
Jewish life and especially the holiday of Hanuka, and – especially during his worsening
illness – songs of deep, universal spirituality. At the request of his daughter, Nora
Guthrie, The Klezmatics wrote new musical settings to many of these texts (garnering a
Grammy award in 2006 for their recording, Wonder Wheel). This talk will look at these
songs.
Marsh Dave
Dave Marsh, rock critic, historian, anticensorship activist, talk show host, and “Louie
Louie” expert, has written more than 20 books about rock and popular music, as well
as editing that many more. He co-founded and for four years edited Creem, the
legendary rock and roll magazine that helped launch heavy metal, glam and punk, and
spent five years as an associate and contributing editor of Rolling Stone, where he was
chief music critic, columnist and feature writer. From 1985-2002, he served as music
critic for Playboy.
For the past 25 years, Marsh has written and edited the monthly music and politics
newsletter, Rock and Rap Confidential. He has lectured widely on music, politics, and
censorship. As a book editor, he compiled 50 Ways to Fight Censorship (Thunder’s
Mouth, 1990), and was coeditor with Don Henley of Heaven Is Under Our Feet: A
Book for Walden Woods (Longmeadow Press, 1991), essays in honor of Walden Woods
and Henry David Thoreau. Marsh also edited the first two editions of The Rolling Stone
Record Guide, and Pastures of Plenty, the papers of folksinger Woody Guthrie.
In 2004, Marsh began hosting Kick Out the Jams, a weekly two hour radio talk show
about music and social and political issues on the Sirius Satellite Network. In 2008, he
began hosting Live from the Land of Hopes and Dreams, a politically based call-in
show on Sirius.
The nineteen-year-old Marsh dropped out of Detroit’s Wayne State University to edit
Creem in 1969. He departed in 1973 to become Newsday’s pop music critic, spent a
short spell as music editor of The Real Paper, returned to Newsday, and in 1975, joined
Rolling Stone as chief reviewer, feature writer and columnist. He and several others
started Rock and Rap (then Rock and Roll) Confidential in 1983. (Marsh edited an
anthology of material from the newsletter, The First Rock and Roll Confidential Report,
in 1985.) From 1987 to 1992, Marsh served as acerbic rock critic for the weekly
syndicated radio program, “Rock Today”.
Marsh’s first book, Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story (Doubleday) was
published in 1979. It made the New York Times best-seller list. He has also written
Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream (Bantam, 1986), Before I Get
Old: The Story of the Who (St. Martin’s Press, 1983), Elvis (Times Books, 1982;
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), The Book of Rock Lists (Dell, 1980), Sun City: The
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Making of the Record (Penguin, 1985), Rocktopicon (Contemporary, 1982), and
Fortunate Son, a collection of his journalism and criticism (Random House, 1983).
Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s, a sequel to Born to Run, appeared in 1987,
and became a national hardcover bestseller. (In 2003, Routledge published Born to Run
and Glory Days in a single volume with an epilogue, titled Two Hearts.) In 2005, he
wrote the 40,000 word text for Bruce Springsteen On Tour.
The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (Plume/NAL, 1989)
remains the world’s lengthiest act of rock criticism; Louie Louie: The History and
Mythology of the World’s Most Famous Rock’n’Roll Song; Including the Full Details of
Its Torture and Persecution at the Hands of the Kingsmen, J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I.,
and a Cast of Millions; and Introducing, for the First Time Anywhere, the Actual Dirty
Lyrics (Hyperion, 1992), may be the strangest.
Marsh’s other books include Merry Christmas Baby: Holiday Music from Bing to Sting
(Little Brown, 1992), cowritten with Steve Propes, The New Book of Rock Lists, created
with James Bernard, Forever Young (Da Capo, 2004) based on the photographs taken
of Bob Dylan in 1964 by Douglas Gilbert; and, as general editor, Mid-Life Confidential:
The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America with Three Chords and an Attitude
(Viking), a book about the experiences of the all-author rock band featuring Stephen
King, Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Barbara Kingsolver, and Marsh, among others; and The
Great Rock’n’Roll Joke Book (St. Martin’s Press, 1997). He also edited the oral history
series, For the Record for Avon Books, and wrote the first of its nine volumes with
Sam Moore of Sam and Dave.
Marsh’s most recent book is The Beatles Second Album (Rodale, 2007). He is currently
writing a book about why American Idol is evil, and completing a long-term project, O
Freedom!, the history of music and the Southern civil rights movement of the 1950s
and 1960s.
Marsh lives in Connecticut with his wife, Barbara Carr, and two cocker spaniels. He
serves as a trustee of the Kristen Ann Carr Fund, which funds sarcoma research and
services for teenagers and young adults with cancer, named in honor of his late
daughter. He is also a board member of the North American Alliance for Folk Music
and Dance; Ribbon of Highway, a Woody Guthrie tribute troupe; and serves on the
National Advisory Board of PROTECT, the National Association to Protect Children,
dedicated to effective child protection and anti-crime policy.
Abstract
Woody Guthrie: From the Popular Front to Popular Music
Woody Guthrie’s “career” as a professional entertainer began in the midst of the
“Popular Front” of the 1930s, a period when the political left made its first successful
attempt to exploit popular culture, including commercial forms such as the movies,
radio and recordings, as a tool for agitation and propaganda, organizing and moralebuilding. Guthrie proved particularly adept at writing songs for such purposes, which
makes him an iconic figure in what’s left of the Popular Front, particularly the labor
movement.
Yet Guthrie’s influence remains powerful in the world of commercial popular culture,
from which the labor movement and the Left in general have long been estranged. It’s
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an influence that began with the Weavers in the late 1940s and continuing in the work
of, for instance, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer and Kurt Cobain, as
well as dozens of others working in many nations and languages.
How do we account for Guthrie’s unique appeal to and utility for musicians and
songwriters who work outside the musical boundaries defined by the Popular Front and
his communist associates? What does this phenomenon tell us about the theories of the
Popular Front? What does it tell us about the nature of commercial music culture? In
what ways does this legacy strengthen and in what ways does it weaken popular culture
that aspires to political relevance in contemporary terms? How do we need to alter our
understanding of Guthrie’s work as a writer and agitator in order to keep it relevant in
an environment where communism has “failed” and capitalism is in continual crisis?
Minganti Franco
He teaches American Literature at the University of Bologna. Co-author of a popular
history of American literature (1991), he has published extensively in Italy and
internationally, on both academic journals and books edited by other scholars. His
research encompasses various aspects and cultural contexts of American literature. At
large, his work mainly focuses on the connections of literature with the transformations
in storytelling due to the interconnectedness with other branches of art, communication,
and entertainment – namely radio, cinema, television, videos, music, comics and the
computer. He is the author of X-Roads. Letteratura, jazz, immaginario (1994) and
Modulazioni di frequenza. L’immaginario radiofonico tra letteratura e cinema (1997),
and the editor of 1930s. La frontiera urbana nell’American del New Deal (1985), The
Beat Goes On. Cinquant’anni di controcultura (1996), Jazztoldtales. Jazz e fiction,
letteratura e jazz (1997), Hammett. Romanzi e racconti (2004), and with Giorgio
Rimondi, Amiri Baraka. Ritratto dell’artista in nero (2007).
Portelli Alessandro
Abstract
Songs to Grow On: The Politics and Poetics of Woody Guthrie’s Children Songs
Woody Guthrie’s children song are a corpus of experimental poetry and music in which
he reaches for the very sources of his poetic and musical imagination – the sheer music
of language and sound, the relationship between rhythm and work\play. At the same
time, they also express some of his basic social and political ideas: in Woody Guthrie’s
vision, children are full citizens, and his songs for and about them express the
affirmation of personal dignity (Don’t you push me down), the demand of rights (I
Want my milk and I want it now), and the sheer pleasure of singing and working
together. Also, these songs show Woody Guthrie as the avid listener he was all his life:
his children’s songs do not aim at teaching children anything, but show how much he
has learned from them.
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