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Blues singer/songwriter Jimmy LaFave and other
musicians look to show audiences there's more to
Woody Guthrie (pictured) than "This Land Is Your
Land."
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Texas bluesman Jimmy LaFave says it's a shame a lot of Americans don't know more about Woody Guthrie. He wrote "This Land Is Your Land" and many people think he was a Communist, and that's about the extent of Guthrie knowledge.
"He was totally the opposite," LaFave says. "He was very spiritual, he wrote a lot of religious songs. He was in the Merchant Marines and was torpedoed twice during the war. He and the Almanac Singers did nationwide war broadcasts in support of the troops. He was very patriotic, he loved America, but he got blacklisted like a lot of people back then did.
"I think it's nice that it's finally coming out that Woody Guthrie wasn't this Godless Communist but an incredible human being."
The sad fact is that LaFave's offhand statistic about the majority opinion on Guthrie is probably close to right. The miracle of Guthrie's existence in the first half of the 20th century has been largely neglected by the very masses the Folk singer and social activist championed during his lifetime.
You can't fault his family for their father's tarnished image. Son Arlo went into the family business and has made a respectable name for himself as a singer/songwriter/cultural observer in Woody's formidable mold. Daughter Nora, meanwhile, has tried to keep the legacy alive through the Woody Guthrie Archives -- established by Arlo and Nora's mother Marjorie in the late 1950s after Woody's hospitalization for Huntington's disease -- where she and a staff of volunteers are desperately trying to catalog and preserve the mountains of work her father produced on ancient and disintegrating scraps of paper. One of her greatest achievements is the resurrection of Woody's lyrics set to contemporary music, first with a pair of excellent collaborative albums from Wilco and Billy Bragg and then with a handful of individual tracks from artists like Jay Bennett and Slaid Cleaves.
And yet even with all of this deserved attention, Woody Guthrie remains bound in most Americans' minds to a single song and a single contentious period in his life. Too many aspects of his amazing life and career have been forgotten or never even brought to light. In a perfect world, Guthrie would be taught in school as a part of this country's rich and wonderful musical and social heritage.
"It's amazing all stuff he's written," says LaFave, a self-avowed Woody freak. "It's like music is just the tip of the iceberg. He wrote two novels, and he wrote 'Woody Says,' which is like a newspaper/magazine column. There's a great book called Born to Win which I love, which even has erotic poetry and children's songs and this incredible thing about love and how God is love and all the light that hits the planet is controlled by love. It's heavy duty stuff.
"He went from this Dust Bowl hobo character you always see portrayed to this Beat Generation/Jack Kerouac poet, doing all this stream of consciousness ramblings and philosophies on everything from war to sex to religion."
All of these facts and feelings have guided LaFave to assemble "Ribbon of Highway/Endless Skyway: A Tribute to the Spirit of Woody Guthrie," a fascinating musical/spoken word concert that will enlighten and delight even the most knowledgeable Guthrie fans.
"There's a Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in his hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma, and it goes for four or five days," LaFave says about the germ of the Ribbon of Highway concept. "And the last thing we do each year is this tribute to his music where we do a lot of his songs and in between read a little bit out of his books or just say something about his life. It's pretty well just thrown together, but it seems to be a lot of people's favorite part of the festival. We always say, 'We ought to take this on the road. People really like this.' So it came up there again, and me and my agent were talking and I said, 'Why don't we talk to a few people from around the country and maybe we could make it a whole tour?'
"So in the Northeast, where Ellis Paul is well known, make sure he's on the bill. Out in California, we've got a Folk singer named Joe Raphael who's just put out a whole record of Woody songs. So we just found different people for different legs of the tour. Next time we may have a whole different cast, because there are so many singer/songwriters who love Woody Guthrie that wanted to do it but there wasn't time."
The Ribbon of Highway show will follow a script of sorts, although LaFave admits that a great deal of flexibility is built into the presentation. Rather than offering a simple "let's-take-turns-singing-Woody-songs" approach to the show, LaFave has expanded the annual Okemah concert to include writings from Woody's journals, some of them never experienced by the public before these shows.
"I went back through his books and found a lot of narrative and put it in between all the songs like we do in Okemah and came up with the script for it," LaFave says. "Once that was done, we can use it time after time. We found more stuff we can use, so we have it all cataloged when someone comes on board and says, 'I want to do a song about the war,' I have Woody's writings on what he thought about war to say something before the song. Eliza Gilkyson is doing this song, 'Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,' and I found, in this book of unpublished writings that Dave Marsh had put out, a letter that Woody wrote to FDR. Some of it's a little bit loose, but it works, we think. Let the people speak."
The song/narrative/song idea actually has its origins in a series of concerts that took place shortly after Woody's death in 1967.
"There were a couple of famous concerts where Will Geer -- 'Grandpa Walton,' that actor, he and Woody were big buddies and lived together for a time -- put on shows where they did the same thing," LaFave says, "and then Arlo and Dylan or somebody would sing a song. So it's not a totally original idea. We just did our own version of it."
Ribbon of Highway will feature a rotating cast of musical interpreters on its trek across the country. Tuesday's Southgate House show will feature LaFave and Gilkyson (who play every show), with Paul and Cleaves (who will be featured in 75 percent of the tour) and a flexible backing band. Other legs of the tour will offer Kevin Welch, Michael Fracasso and possible appearances by Arlo Guthrie.
Part of the tour proceeds will benefit a number of worthy Woody Guthrie enterprises sorely in need of exposure and funds.
"We wanted to draw attention to the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York City," LaFave says. "There's thousands of things they're still cataloging, writings of his and thousands of songs that have never been heard. Nora's up there with her staff, and it's a nonprofit and they need people to make donations. We have a poster that we're selling during the show that helps benefit the archives.
"The other thing is the Woody Guthrie Coalition that puts on the festival in his hometown, because that's a free festival. People come from all over the world. If you're really into Woody, you'll come to that festival. We've had Jackson Browne and Pete Seeger come play for free ... of course, all the musicians play for free."
As LaFave notes, Woody Guthrie might be bigger now than he was even 10 years ago, thanks in large part to the efforts of his children, particularly Nora, whose work in the archives has gone well beyond the simple preservation of his work. LaFave will be working soon on a project under her auspices where he'll take 50 or so of Woody's unpublished lyrics and distribute them to sympathetic songwriters to contemporize and bring to life in the studio, in the same fashion as the two Wilco/Billy Bragg projects.
"The ones she's given me are just brilliant," LaFave says. "There's stuff in there that just amazes me. He was more like the Aristotle or Plato of America instead of a guy who wrote one song and then they said he was a Communist. John Steinbeck said that Woody was the American spirit. He was more American than anyone I know."
THE RIBBON OF HIGHWAY/ENDLESS SKYWAY tour hits the Southgate House on Tuesday.
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