In another of those weird confluences of time and fate, I've been listening again to the Mermaid Avenue albums around the time of this Independence Day. The estate and children of Woody Guthrie commissioned Billy Bragg, Wilco, Natalie Merchant, and Corey Harris to commit the late Woody's unfinished songs to wax (or vinyl, or plastic, as it were) during several studio sessions in 1997 and 1998. I can't think of a songsmith more fitting to ring in another year of our Strange American Democracy than Mr. Woody Guthrie. Was he a Socialist? Yes. A drunk? Okay. Generally an Odd Bird, and beautiful for the oddness? Absofuckinglutely.Huntington's had more than a bit to do with the last, and maybe something to do with the former. Who's to say?
Most know Guthrie as the author of "This Land Is Your Land" and nothing else. The fact is that he spent his entire life crafting songs of rebellion, songs of unity, songs of putting democracy's tools in the hands of those folk who make democracy work. He also wrote offbeat odes to Hollywood actresses ("Ingrid Bergman"), gutwrenching love songs ("Remember The Mountain Bed," "When The Roses Bloom Again," and "At My Window Sad And Lonely"), strange quasi-Christian tunes ("Blood of the Lamb" and "Christ For President"), and ditties about the invisible people who have to clean up nasty-ass hotel rooms after people like us defile them ("Hot Rod Hotel"). He was a people's poet, the man who influenced Dylan and Baez and Arlo (natch) and pretty much everyone who's put pen to paper and guitar in the name of a cause since Black Monday, 1929. Think of him as the Bob Marley of our American Situation. It's not a stretch. He painted these words on his guitar, for chrissakes: "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS." Show me a person who doesn't respect that, I'll show you a person I'd rather punch than reason with. Ironic, no?
There's a great documentary the BBC put out detailing the creation of the Mermaid Avenue tapes called Man In The Sand. Check it out if you're interested. Hell, check it out if you're not interested. We owe it to ourselves as Americans to understand that which has--and those who have--come before us. The film and the albums are a hell of an intro. Besides being the most transcendently beautiful, utterly American albums in recent memory, they are a document of what our parents and theirs went through during the first part of the so-called "American Century," the Twentieth. Not so strangely, there is an echo of our modern future in Woody's Depression-era lyrics...
Take this snippet as an example, from "Stetson Kennedy":
"I ain't the world's best writer, ain't the world's best speller,
But when I believe in something I'm the loudest yeller.
If we fix it so you can't make no money on war, well
We'll all forget what we was killin' folks for."
Or this bit, from a piece Woody wrote for the People's World:
"Look like the ring has been drawed and the marbles are all in. The millionaires has throwed their silk hats and our last set of drawers in the ring."
Tell me that the man had an agenda, tell me his politics were neither red-blooded nor American, and I'll tell you you're not seeing clearly this sunshiney morning. But don't tell me that his words don't ring too fucking true in this current day and age. This was a man who served during the last clean war, WWII. He knew no Halliburtons, no Rumsfelds, no Bushes, no Wolfowitzes, no Nixons or Vietfuckingnams. Maybe we need another Woody, somebody with a love for this country so deep and objective, a love loved in spite of and for our shortcomings and blemishes, a love for the idea of America. In closing, a note on America and that love taken from a larger piece:"Because I seen the pretty and I seen the ugly and it was because I
knew the pretty part that I wanted to change the ugly part,
Because I hated the dirty part that I knew how to feel the love
for the cleaner part,
I looked in a million of her faces and eyes, and I told myself there
was a look on that face that was good, if I could see it there,
in back of all of the shades and shadows of fear and doubt and
ignorance and tangles of debts and worries,
And I guess it is these things that make our country look all lopsided
to some of us, lopped over onto the good and easy side or over
onto the bad and the hard side..."
That middle bit chokes me up. Excuse me. Ahem. Right, so... Follow this link here for the full lyrics to "This Land Is Your Land." I guarantee it's not the same song you belted out in your fourth-grade pageant. If you feel the love, the fire, the anger, drop a comment and tell me how the same heat is relevant in our current global climate. Peace.
