This is a book on Woody Guthrie that attempts something interesting, interesting perhaps especially to readers of biography, memoir or ‘life writing’.
The book collects three distinct studies: a mini-biography of Woody Guthrie, followed by thematic overviews and, finally, discussion of three selected recordings. The mini-biography is preceded by a provocative critique of Hal Ashby's biopic of Guthrie, Bound for Glory, which was released in 1976 when, as Briley points out, David Cannadine's Guthrie vied for attention with Sylvester Stallone's Rocky (p. 36). His criticism is that Ashby's film ‘de-radicalizes’ Guthrie, and this claim sets the pattern for Briley to present a suitably politicised Guthrie, at odds to a subtle extent with accounts focussed on Guthrie's personal life. The biographical chapters then follow, five in all, focussing on, first, Guthrie in California, with particular reference to the newspaper, the People's Daily World; then Guthrie in New York, with particular reference to another paper, the Daily Worker; then Guthrie's time at the Bonneville Power Administration, his experience during World War II and, finally, his views on the war in Korea, before he was incapacitated by Huntington's Chorea.
Five thematic chapters then follow: on Guthrie and Christianity and Christian Socialism, on the outlaw tradition (Pretty Boy Floyd, Tom Joad et al.), on labour unions at this most interesting period, on race and on gender. The latter in particular attends to the ambiguity of the chapter's title: ‘advocate for equality and sexual libertine’. Three sets of recordings are finally reviewed: inevitably the Dust Bowl Ballads recorded by Alan Lomax in 1940, the album Struggle that Moses Asch released in 1976 but had recorded 30 years earlier, and finally, recorded slightly later than Struggle also by Asch, the neglected Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti of 1947. As if that were not enough, and as though to balance the opening chapter on the Ashby film, a final chapter discusses Guthrie's influence on three prominent musicians, their selection no surprise: Guthrie's son Arlo, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
In method Briley's book follows Ed Cray's Reference Cray2004 biography in its close attention to the Woody Guthrie archives. However, in its political emphasis, Briley's approach claims some distance from Cray and Joe Klein's ground-breaking Reference Klein1980 biography (Klein Reference Klein1980) – and indeed the view of Guthrie's daughter Nora, conveyed by telephone to Briley – in favour of the approach taken by Will Kaufman in Woody Guthrie: American Radical (Reference Kaufman2011). At any rate, Briley is a dependable guide, clearly having put in his own time at the Guthrie archives and having mastered several strands of literature: the footnotes are a veritable course of study in relevant aspects of American history.
So much for another book on Woody Guthrie, appropriately for Popular Music's 39th volume: the journal's second volume included Dave Laing's commendatory review of Klein's biography. What sets this book apart is the ‘personal exploration’ of its title. The book is an account of Guthrie in the manner described above, but overlaid with a secondary account of Briley's own life and views. Briley's life follows close to 40 years after Guthrie's: Guthrie born 1912 (he died in 1967) and growing up between Oklahoma and Pampa in Texas and Briley born in 1948 and ‘brought up in the small Texas Panhandle farming community of Childress – about ninety miles southwest of Guthrie's adopted home of Pampa’ (p. 5).
Comparisons and contrasts then follow. At times, the connections are rather slight, especially following the biographical chapters: given Guthrie's complex views of World War II, Briley thinks of his own views on the 1960s counterculture in 1967 (p. 107). It has to be said that Briley's stable life – 38 years spent as teacher of History and academic administrator at a small, independent prep school in Albuquerque, New Mexico (p. 11 and see Briley Reference Briley2011) – is quite a contrast with Guthrie's peripatetic, sometimes chaotic musician's life among emergent forms such as radio and recording. Where I think the book is more successful is where Briley gives himself space, and sometimes offers specific details from his own life, so setting up a suggestive chain of historical understanding: these anecdotes and vignettes are to be found especially in the thematic overviews. For instance, on religion, with the issue turning on Briley's humanist scepticism towards even Guthrie's Socialist extraction from the Gospels, Briley has a fascinating anecdote about being taken, while in junior high school, to the evangelist Oral Roberts for the faith-based healing of his asthma after which ‘I never again suffered from asthma’ (pp. 140–1). Elsewhere, concerning race, there is a disturbing but truthful anecdote about Briley's mother offering to an African-American labourer working on their house ‘a Flintstones drinking cup that had been a peanut butter jar’ (p. 7): when the labourer leaves, Briley's mother throws the cup in the bin commenting, ‘You just can't wash it out’. Raised in a ‘racist, sexist and homophobic’ environment’ (p. 216), then ‘married with a family and transgender son’ (p. 216), Briley learned ‘tolerance and understanding’ (p. 216), seeing Guthrie as part of that self-education, and recruiting an imaginary Guthrie for a sympathetic attitude towards the LGBTQ community (p. 216) and queer thinking (p. 308). So do these and many other vignettes allow Briley the opportunity to comment on his position in relation to Guthrie and the way that he became, across his life, connected to Guthrie's world-view. It's a risky approach but, firmly grounded in the detail of Guthrie's life and reception academic and otherwise, Briley strikes a balance, so that I even wondered if the book would benefit from slightly less Guthrie and slightly more Briley.
Briley writes as a historian and suffers from that discipline's besetting affliction, which is to treat musical works as a collection of lyrics, culled for prosaic detail expressive of social and political circumstance: the recordings don't sound at all. However, it has to be conceded in turn that Guthrie's is a degree zero of musicality: voice for words and melody, guitar for chords, occasional but limited instrumental and vocal embellishment. Guthrie's songs have been resurrected in a distinguished lineage of cover versions: the 1988 Folkways recording A Vision Shared: a Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly took the songs into a variety of styles. Even better, Nora Guthrie has offered her father's considerable and largely unrecorded lyrics and writings to various musicians, motivating the collaboration of Billy Bragg and Wilco as Mermaid Avenue and in which Note of Hope, overseen by Rob Wasserman, is a superbly diverse collection. Briley is of course right to single out Arlo Guthrie, Dylan and Springsteen – all found on A Vision Shared – but his several footnoted references to Bragg and Wilco suggest that there was more to be said about Guthrie's enduring presence.
Continuing Briley's chain, I shall end with a small anecdote of my own. Like many listeners who came to Woody Guthrie via Bob Dylan, I knew Dylan's 1965 Highway 61 Revisited long before I knew Guthrie in any detail: it was acquired while an undergraduate student, alongside Blonde on Blonde. ‘Desolation Row’ ends Dylan's album and begins with the line ‘They're selling postcards of the hanging’ which idly I assumed to be a particularly memorable case of the surreal imagery found elsewhere on the record. Little did I realise that there really were postcards of lynchings, and that some were produced for the hanging of Laura Nelson and her son Lawrence in 1911 in Okemah, Oklahoma. Based on the testimony of Woody's brother Claude, Joe Klein suggested that Guthrie's father Charley was among the Klansmen involved (Briley p. 184). In fact, Woody Guthrie produced a lyric called ‘Don't kill my baby and my son’ which he didn't set to music and record, but which Joel Rafael has, following the practice of setting Guthrie's words alluded to above. At any rate, historically, there I was – to evoke David Lodge's ever-useful distinction – hearing Dylan's arresting opening line as metaphor, but the content of which proved to be lethally metonymic, hard realism (Lodge, Reference Lodge1977).
Briley's book confirms that, in establishing history, the perspective of the historian himself is not irrelevant, as historical evidence passes through the filter of the historian's perspective. Briley doesn't make too much of it, however, even as Guthrie's work came to him through such historical processes and, clearly and decisively, affected who he is. Be that as it may, his book is an interesting exercise in life writing, and I commend it to readers of Popular Music.
