Woody Wilson Guthrie - The Man Who Took Oklahoma with him.

We have a new baby boy in our family, named Reed Michael Hill. He was born on June 14th, Flag Day, at 9:52 and weighed 8lbs 2 ounces. Reed had a tough start. His mother, Jill, would have to receive a grade of A+ on handling the delivery. I drove back home, which I can no longer do. My back is so painful, it is easy for me to get disoriented. I never could get the cruise control to work right. To be honest with you, this was the first time I drove Marcella's SuperCharged Mazda S6. I ended up exiting the tournpike at the wrong place and ended up driving the long way home. Forgot that they have a new cut-off that takes you straight from the tournpike to the University of Oklahoma.

One time, Nathan was stranded on that road, after he picked up a friend who had been in a psychiatric unit to get her medications re-adjusted. Their car stopped, so we jumped it and followed them home. My back is such, that I really cannot even open the hood and look under it. My days of tearing lawn mowers up and fixing them are over. Too hard on my lower back.

When I got home, Sassie, the greatest Blues Dog in the World, was waiting for me on the sofa. We went to bed, but, even with strong, Rush Limbaugh, pain killers, I couldn't sleep. Those things are like candy to my back. So, Sassie is sleeping beside me, while I am at the computer. I need to pull myself away from this computer for several days to give my back a vacation.

I think we are making inroads, on getting Jesse "Eddie" Davis, ready to smash the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame, the next time the committee meets. I need to go up and talk to Byron Berline, one of the world's greatest fiddlers, who lives in Guthrie. He has played with "The Roling Stones," and bunches of other recording artists. He helps sponsor a music "shindig" (get together) in October. We have not gone there, but maybe this time. I'm not much on sitting and listening to artists play. I would rather find a group of musicians playing under the trees and sit in. A violin and fiddle are the same thing, except, when it is played in the orchestra, it's called a violin; when it's played with Bluegrass bands and Country bands, it is called a fiddle. I had to make that distinction quite emphatically, in one of my graduate level courses. The fiddle is tuned the same way as a mandolin, only it is played with the end, pressed against your neck or ribs and is played with a "horsehair bow." The mandolin has 4 sets of strings, with another one tuned at the same pitch. 440 pitch is the standard pitch, though some people tune their twelve string down a half step, to ease off the pressure on its bridge, where the strings come over on the sound board.



Anyway, the meanest Prof wised-off about me and a violin, because he knew, ... well everyone knew, I played the guitar, and no one else could. He got a laugh, so at the break, I went over and sat down with him, back in the days I was drinking coffee by the gallon, and killing my guts.

"So, what did you think of my comment about you and the violin?" None of the other students would dare sit with him and was blown away that I would even violate that unwritten rule.

"Well, Prof," I laughed. "I could tell right off that you don't know a darn thing about music, either Country, Bluegrass, and roots music. You're an obvious orchestra man. You see, Prof, Country musicians and Bluegrassers never call a violin, a violin. They call it a fiddle." He laughed and didn't lower my grade.

Bob Dylan is a leach but won't admit it. He hung around Woody in New York in his final year or so of life. So did another musician named Jack Scott. Of the two, Jack will admit that he borrowed heavily from Woody. They called, Scott, "Rambling Jack Scott" because he hitched rides and hoboed with Woody for years. Woody had a profound influence on Pete Seeger as well. Guthrie took up causes, for the people and would write lots of music, many of them to tunes that are already in Public Domain. I'm wondering if any of Guthrie's music is Copyrighted. And don't forget, "You Can Get Anything You Want, at Alice's Restaurant," Arlo Guthrie.

In his final years, Guthrie was dying of Huntington's disease, and his singing ability morphed into droning and elongation of final consonents. Dylan picked his style up from those Guthrie years. His "chorea," caused him lots of problems, and he even spent a couple of years in a psychiatric hospital. Incredulous as it may be, Woody's mother had a mental break down and was hospitalized for the duration of her life long before Woody's health problem reared its ugly head.




Born in Okemah, Okfuskee County, many counties in Oklahoma have Indian names, in 1912. He was born into a hard life and his songs tell of the trials and tribulations during those dust bowl years. He left his first wife, and then married a gal in Texas. The marriage failed, and his Texas wife, is still bitter over it. In his final years, he hitched up with another gal, who really helped him in his schedules. I am the only member of my original family members, who still lives in Oklahoma. Prof Cec, likes to call where I live, podunk; but, even here, I can almost magically reach each one of you with my music knowledge. I hope to post some songs with me playing with them. My son will be coming over, and for sure, he will play and sing some songs for you to listen to.

Now, we're going to do some stuff about Jack Scott. He was named a "National Treasure" in the Clinton administration, which he was very proud. Kris Kristofferson said this about Scott, "He gets up on stage and piddle with his guitar by tuning the thing for 10 minutes. Good God, get the hell out there and sing a song."

Scott is a son of a doctor, whose name wasn't even close to Scott, and when his parents attended one of his concerts in Europe, his fans were blown away, that a person in the US could actually chose their own life style. Scott was a better guitar player than Guthrie and Dylan. He is an accomplished musician, who can yodel, do the Merle Travis pick, the thumb as the melody pick, or simply, open picking or flat picking, where he used a pick to play the chords or pick out the melody. (Here you might want to google, blind, Doc Watson, the fastest flat picker on an accoustic guitar in history.) I choose the later, thank you.

Enough said about Scott, because we will cover him in depth later. As far as I know, he is still alive. Ya' wanna read Woody's biography. Well, here it is. Click on it and see what you get, while I pull up a picture of ol' Woody. And, by the way, I will be adding more to this as I find pertinent (important) discoveries as I split the atoms in cyberspace. Hee, Haw!

Go to, ... woodyguthrie.org

Note the designation .org. Discuss that with Prof Cec. If you don't get a satisfying explanation and class discussion, then I will hammer him.



By the way, Woody never was "bought and paid for by any music company." Once he had enough of the New York "big wigs" scene in music, he and Jack would head off to some other cause. If they ran out of money, they would simply find a full house of eaters, and get up and sing for 30 minuts and then pass the hat around. In their "lingo" that was and is called "buskin." Look it up. Bonnie Raitt and "The Dixie Chicks" lived that way for years. Actually, many people make more, untaxed claimed money that way than they would with a record deal. Now, Bonnie is a killer. Slide guitar will blast you up against the wall, and straddle ya' on a carpenter's horse. She is an artist.

MORE TO COME.

Buffalo Skinners - Woody Guthrie
Buffalo Skinners
Traditional - Woody Guthrie


Come all you old time cowboys and listen to my song
Please do not grow weary, I’ll not detain you long
Concerning some old cowboys who did agree to go
To spend a summer pleasant on the trail of the buffalo

Well, I found myself in Griffin in the spring of '83
When a well-known famous drover come a-walkin’ up to me
Said: How d’ye do, young fellow! How’d you like to go
To spend a summer pleasant on the trail of the buffalo

Well, me out bein’ of work right then to that drover I did say
This Goin’ up on the buffalo road depends upon your pay
If you will pay good wages, transportation to an’ fro’
Think I might go with you on the trail of the buffalo

‘Cause I pay, he said, good wages and transportation too
You’ll agree to work for me until the season through
But if you do get homesick an’ you try to run away
You’ll starve to death out on the trail and also lose your pay

With all his flatt’rin’ talkin’ he signed up quite a train
Some ten or twelve in number, some able-bodied men
Our trip it was a pleasant one as we hit the westward road
‘til we crossed ol’ Boggy Creek in ol’ New Mexico

There our pleasures ended and our troubles all begun
A lightnin’ storm had hit us and made the cattle run
Got all full of stickers from the cactus that did grow
And outlaws watchin’ to pick us off in the hills of Mexico

Now the workin’ season ended, and the drover would not pay
You went an’ drunk to much, you’re all in debt to me, he said
But the cowboys never had heard of such a thing as a bankrupt law
So we left that drover’s bone to bleach on the plains of the buffalo

More Pretty Girls Than One
Traditional (Means Public Domain)

More pretty girl than one
My mama told me last night
She gave me good advice
Better stop your rambling round, pretty boy
And marry you a loveing wife

Chorus
There's more pretty girls around
There's more pretty girls around
As I travel from town to town
There's more pretty girls than one.

Look down that lonesome road
Hang down your little head and cry
For thinking of those pretty little girls
And hoping I never will die

Look down that lonesome road
Before you travel on
I'm leaving you this lonesome song
To sing when I am gone

There's more pretty girls than one
There's more pretty girls than one
For every town I rambled 'round
There's more pretty girls than one

(I sing this song as part of my reportoire.)


Pete Seeger

You don't even have to look Pete up. I've done the work for you. I downloaded two bios on Pete, then when I read them, they were identical. So, ... it's obvious that the sites are using the same material. But, you can do some work, after all.

Look up some of the Seeger sites and figure out, if Pete's Bio should be below Woody's are above Woody's. Believe me, it won't be hard to tell. Also, find some pictures of Woody and Pete together.

I learned something from the Bios. I was not aware that he wrote "If I Had a Hammer." When I learned to play the guitar, it was during the Folk Music years of the early 60s and those 50s. But something happened in 1964, that changed the USA scene, if not the world music scene of music. What happened? Was it legitiment. just in passing, or was it a total uphevel of the world music scene?

See if you can find out what happened during 1963 that was important in the history of the United States.

As I study Pete Seeger, I have purchased some CDs of all of Woody's work. Much of the music is primitive. Woody's take on "The House of The Rising Sun," is primitive and raw. My kids would be embarrassed to get up and perform that song, as Woody did.

Pete was a student of the music, obviously. How do we know that? How about the Thai culture? Do you have an archive of old, and original Thai music? Can you bring some of it to class and share it? I would love to hear it, if it is posted. If Mr. Cecil, cannot acquire some of these old, Woody Guthrie songs, I can send one over the sea,... er, the ocean.

Is it important that we hang on to our culture? What happens if we don't honor our culture and not leave archives behind. I know that I have messed up. I should have went down and interviewed the store owner, who lived 3 houses down. I didn't do it. There is one lady left, that I can talk to.

The town I live in, used to have 2 lumber yards, a store, a bank, a railroad station, a gas station, which Marcella and I live in. It's been remodeled, and of the 4 original houses in this hamlet, ours is probably the best and has the most history. I'll take a picture of it, and post it, so you will automatically know that it was an old gas station.

History? Is part of history and culture, music? Is it important that we stay in contact with our past culture? Lots of questions, I know, but check out what Pete did for two years that served him well.

Musician, singer, songwriter, folklorist, labor activist, environmentalist, and peace advocate, Seeger was born in Patterson, New York, son of Charles and Constance Seeger, whose families traced their ancestry back to the Mayflower. Seeger grew up in an unusually politicized environment. His father, Charles, had been a music professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where his pacifism won him so many enemies that he quit teaching in the fall of 1918.

At thirteen, Pete Seeger became a subscriber to the New Masses. His heroes were Lincoln Steffens and Mike Gold, and he aspired to a career in journalism. In 1936 he heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Folk Song and Dance Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and his life was changed forever.

Seeger spent two unhappy years at Harvard and left before final exams in the spring of 1938. He made his way to New York, where he eventually landed a job with the Archives of American Folk Music. Seeger spent 1939 and 1940 seeking out legendary folk-song figures such as the blues singer Leadbelly and labor militant Aunt Molly Jackson. By 1940 he had become quite an accomplished musician, thanks in no small part to his enormous self-discipline and Puritan rectitude.

On March 3, 1940, a date folklorist Alan Lomax once said could be celebrated as the beginning of modern folk music, Seeger met Woody Guthrie at a "Grapes of Wrath" migrant-worker benefit concert. In 1940 the duo helped form the Almanac Singers, a loosely organized musical collective that included Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Sis Cunningham, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and others.

The Almanac Singers initially recorded labor songs like "The Talking Union Blues," which they created as an organizing song for the CIO. The Almanacs also recorded pacifist tunes like "The Ballad of October 16," in retrospect an embarrassingly shrill attack on Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and the effort to prepare for the war against fascism.

With the entry of the United States into World War II and the creation of the U.S.-Soviet alliance, the Almanacs suddenly attained respectability. They appeared on a coast-to-coast radio broadcast, the William Morris Advertising Agency offered to help with publicity, and the group was invited to sing in some of New York's poshest nightclubs. The allure of success posed a problem for Seeger and the Almanacs that has been a particularly nettlesome one for him and artists on the Left: What concessions can or should an artist make to a mass audience without loss of artistic integrity and political radicalism?

By the time Seeger was drafted in 1942, however, critics had called attention to the Almanacs' ties, and the FBI had already begun to fill what is no doubt a very fat file on the tall, skinny balladeer. While on his first leave from the Army, Seeger also married Tashi Ohta, who virtually all of their friends agree played a crucial role in organizing Seeger's career and managing his finances.

Seeger was apparently not entangled in the sectarian squabbling that contributed to the Communist Party's weakness at the end of WW II. He had joined the Party in 1942 and would depart about 1950, but like many artists within the Party orbit, he was often viewed as unreliable.

But regardless of Seeger's feelings about the Party, it didn't take him very long to realize that amidst the paranoia and reaction of the Cold War, the union movement had no interest in associating itself with singing radicals. In 1948 Seeger accompanied Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace as he toured the South, an experience that seemed particularly depressing and alienating. Soon the People's Songs collective Seeger had established in 1945 fell apart. On September 4, 1949, Seeger's car was attacked and his wife and three-year old son were slightly injured by shattered glass at the infamous Peekskill, New York, riot. Seeger's creativity has always seemed nurtured by adversity. Amid the siegelike climate of the late '40s, he and Lee Hays co-wrote "If I Had a Hammer," one of the most optimistic paeans to the possibilities of constructive social change. By 1950 Hays and Seeger, along with Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert, formed the Weavers and enjoyed instant success with highly sweetened versions of "Goodnight Irene" and other folk tunes.

Just as quickly as the Weavers topped the charts, however, their career was torpedoed by blacklisting, Red-baiting, and numerous cancellations of their performances at the last minute. Seeger spent the fifties defining and nurturing his own audience. He still performed occasionally with the Weavers, but he mainly supported his family with appearances on the college circuit and at Left summer camps. He also recorded five to six albums per year for Folkways Records.

In 1955 Seeger was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and became one of the few witnesses called that year who didn't invoke the Fifth Amendment. In a dramatic appearance before the committee, Seeger claimed that to discuss his political views and associates violated his First Amendment rights.

The following year, which saw Seeger compose "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", Seeger, Arthur Miller, and six others were indicted for contempt of Congress by an overwhelming vote in the House of Representatives. In 1961 he was found guilty of contempt and on April 2 he was sentenced to ten years in prison. The following year his ordeal ended when the case was dismissed on a technicality.

Seeger had cultivated a folk music revival in the 1950s, and the movement gathered momentum from 1958 into the early 1960s. ABC decided to cash in on the craze with a weekly television show, Hootenanny, but enthusiasm for the program waned when it was discovered that Seeger had been blacklisted and would not be permitted to appear.

Pete Seeger spent a considerable amount of time in the South during the civil rights marches of the 1960s. It was his variation of an old spiritual, which Seeger called "We Shall Overcome," that has become an anthem of the crusade for equality in America.

The Vietnam War deeply and personally offended Seeger, who used his network television return on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour to air a scathing attack on Lyndon Johnson's war policies, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy." The song was cut by network censors, but Seeger made a second appearance on the program and sang the song without interruption.

Like many Old Leftists, Seeger was not entirely comfortable with the cultural radicalism of the 1960s. He disliked the generational tensions fostered by the movement (he once recorded a song called "Be Kind to Parents") and repeatedly advised young radicals to avoid divisions along generational lines.

Amidst the mud and despair of Resurrection City, an effort by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s followers to carry out his dream of establishing a poor people's community in Washington and focusing the nation's attention on the problems of the poor, Seeger began to question the validity of his activism. In the 1970s and 1980s he continued to perform benefits for causes too diverse to list, but increasingly Seeger focused his attention on environmental issues.

When Pete Seeger and his friends launched the sloop Clearwater into the Hudson River in 1969, he was in effect fulfilling a lifelong love of the outdoors and a longstanding desire to do something to clean up the environment polluted by irresponsible corporate and public water usage.

Pete Seeger has become a highly visible and much beloved figure in American life. He has issued some one hundred records, written and collaborated on numerous radical songbooks, articles, and technical manuals on playing the banjo. Fifty years after the Popular Front, Seeger is one of the last links with the optimistic and expansive culture of Depression-era America.

--Richard Taskin

Pete Seeger wrote, "Where Have All The Flowers Gone." A good song. He helped right, "If I Had a Hammer." He sang with the Almanacs, and then sang with "The Weavers."

Now, this is your extra "bonus" work.
Look at the pictures on this page.
Which is Woody Guthrie?
Which is Pete Seeger?
One of them is Junior Brown. See if you can research him and see what kind of musician he is. He's not in Oklahoma.
The other is Roy Clark. He does live in Oklahoma and teaches at a Jr. College. See what you can find out about him. How is he and Buck Owens, musically related for the rest of their lives?