Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon

Welcome back to the court of Robert Evans bastard guy podcast.

Yeah, that's right. I got a gavel, see? Take that, our engineers. They're not going to be happy. Who let you get a gavel? I got sent this by the judge. Again, it works exactly like vampires made me. And it's lovely. It's a beautiful gavel. Look at it. Yeah, I can also buy that from like Toys R Us or whatever Children's Store has survived. It would mean nothing at all in your hand, Sophie. You haven't gone through the extensive training and preparation to become a United States municipal judge like I have.

Cool. So cool. Welcome back to behind the bastards. I really hate that you have power of any kind. I know. I know tremendous power, unaccountable power. I'm now eligible for the Supreme Court, although I think technically anyone is. I actually think you would be a no.

Yeah, it'd be a great Supreme Court judge. You'd be better than 90% of the time, and then 10% of the time, you'd be like, I think that everyone should have a personal nuke. You'd be chaos monster. But here's the thing, I think you'd be better. You're not gonna be any more home invasions, Margaret. You're better than the nine we have, you know? That's very true. That's probably true. Well, speaking of someone who would have been better on the Supreme Court, Woody Guthrie,

That's who we're talking about in part two of these episodes. Mark is dad, though. Not his Klansmen of father. Before we jump into this, though, I want to plug something really fast if that's OK. I just want to plug a series that our colleague and my dear friend, Jamie Loffes, has been doing on her podcast, 16th minute of fame ever heard of it about the manosphere. I think the one of the bastards audience would really enjoy it. Jamie has worked very hard on it. The writing is incredible.

So check that out on 16th minute of fame. The Manosphere, if you're not aware, is like the kind of colloquial term for this network of far-right, generally like masculinity influencers, all of whom have fed into the Trumpest movement in groups like the Proud Boys. It's a very important social phenomenon that explains a lot of why we are where we are right now, and Jamie does a great job of breaking it down. So check that out on 16th minute. Robert is interviewed on one of the parts.

Ooh. Sure. I've only heard part one so far. Yeah, I am. I am. Well, speaking of part two, let's do the part two of these episodes, huh? Yes, sir. I also haven't heard part two of this one yet. Let's kill it. Let's murder it. Let's bury it in the woods in a tree stump, under a tree stump, so that nobody finds it and then cash in at Social Security for years. I don't know what I'm doing here, Margaret. Great.

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Part two, so Woody Guthrie had wed Mary in 1933, and by 1936, when he quit Texas for California, which is what you have to legally call it when you're talking about the 1930s, she'd had one child with him and was pregnant with another.

He kind of abandons her, not entirely. He doesn't break up with her and she eventually moves to California with him, but he does just kind of bounce to go try and find a living in the West. This is a thing a lot of guys are doing and a lot of people have to do. It's also not a thing that the family's thrilled with.

The specific project that he left for was a dam that was being built outside of Reading, California in a place called Happy Valley. I have lived in and around there. I can assure you it is not a particularly happy valley now, and it wasn't one then either. In fact, the name was kind of like ironic, like because it was a shanty town that was miserable. So like Greenland.

like Greenland. Yes, it's a I guess probably a better place now, although I can't really in good conscious recommend anyone go to Reading. So yeah, anyway, that's where Woody heads up to and he's there for a little while. It's in this shanty town with like about 5000 other work seekers who are all like

you know, showing up to try and queue in lines and get jobs every day, right? And there were a lot of spaces like this around the country. You know, there were a lot of these government work camps basically, right, which is where Woody is. And there were also in areas like Sacramento and Seattle, these things called Hooverville's. And Hooverville's were essentially large campsites built by homeless workers and their families as they migrated around searching for work during the Great Depression.

Well, it's actually in the US, they're called vacuum towns, Vacuumville. That was good. That was good, Margaret. Thank you. That was good. Thanks, I'll be here all day. Electrolux cities, I don't know. I just think it's funny because the old catchphrase was nothing sucks like an Electrolux, and I've never heard an advertisement that was more clearly made before the internet. You couldn't get away with that today. Or you could, but it would be a different product. Although in England, we put the D in bread campaign only a couple of years ago. That's pretty funny. Yeah, that's not bad.

I'm never going to get over that. Oh, man. So Hooverville's were named kind of, it was an attack on President Herbert Hoover, right? Like that's why they get their name because he was this, this will not sound familiar to anything that's about to happen. He was this corrupt Republican president whose policies which benefited the incredibly wealthy fed into the Great Depression and like allowed for the kind of deregulation that made it much worse and were seen as having largely led the country into economic calamity.

And so they named these massive homeless, camps for like homeless families, basically Hooverville's. The largest and longest lasting, I'm not sure if it was absolutely the largest, but it was the longest lasting and among the largest Hooverville's was outside of Seattle. And it stood from 1931 to 1941. As an interesting side note, it was operated on land next to Elliot Bay South, which I believe is where Frasier's condo was meant to be located in the TV series. That doesn't mean anything. I just thought it was interesting.

So what do you miss out on the big west coast Hooverville's? But he was in a wreck, you know, Reading is people who are heading up to Seattle or coming back down from Seattle. He's talking to them. There's a big one in Sacramento. He's talking to them and he's in this work camp in Happy Valley. That's kind of similar Hooverville, right? And he's supposed to be up there working on this big dam project, but he does a lot better.

better. And it's a lot more stable for him to just busk for music, right? And so that's what he actually spends most of his time doing. Now, I say he's better at this than he is at laboring. He's not great at it. And he's only able to send the occasional very small money order back home to his wife and two kids. So he is not the idea is I'm coming out here to support my family.

But he's not able to support Mary. She and her now two kids are utterly dependent on her parents, which was a very embarrassing situation for her. Mary later said, I know it upset my dad a lot, my mother too. Woody wasn't doing the manly thing.

I think it's both worth saying that that's her impression and the family's impression of this. This is not an uncommon position for people to be in. I don't know that Woody was doing very well back in Texas, so it's unclear to me.

you know, what the right thing to do here was. Ultimately, Woody, like a lot of people, was put in a very difficult situation of trying to do something he hoped would allow him to support his family. And it didn't work very well for a while, right? I mean, it was the Great Depression. It was the Great Depression, yeah. We see a lot of this now where like people are like, oh, I'm failing under capitalism. I must personally be a failure. And you're like, no, times are really hard right now.

Well, and we also won the show like we've had like guys like Steven Seagal who as a guest. Yes. Yes. For the pod. Like absolutely abandoned his family to start his Hollywood career. That is a story we've told a few times. Woody is his family feels like he's doing that at the start. That's not actually what he does here, right? Because he's not actually like cutting ties with them, but they're not able to do this all the time today.

like my neighbors come to the United States. They're not abandoning their family to try and... But they're usually not going out there to play guitar. That's fair. Yeah, I think that's kind of part of why... He's not really doing the work that a lot of these other guys were. He's doing some of that, but that's not how he really makes most of his bread.

So in short order, would he left Reading for Glendale, which I've also done, and I can tell you good call, much better place to be than Reading. He vaguely knew that he had an aunt in the area, and as was often the case, he just sort of, they're not like sending letters usually back and forth. They certainly don't have phones or whatever. You're usually just like, I was told once by a relative that I have an aunt in Glendale, I'm just going to show up and figure out where she is.

And hopefully she'll take me in. And social ties were such that when he shows up on her doorstep, she's like, all right, he is 25 years old when he makes it to the Los Angeles area. After several months of stress and internal recriminations, because what he's not thrilled with himself either, he had wanted to be doing better. He knows how little he's sending back to his family. He's not happy about this. He gets a lucky break courtesy of his cousin Leon, who everyone else either called Jack or Okey Guthrie. And Okey is like a

It's kind of a pejorative term for someone from Oklahoma. Yeah. Both was used as an insult and also is like a term of pride by people from Oklahoma, right? The Guthries are all Okies, right? So calling him Okie Guthrie must have been a little bit confusing to like Woody, who is also an Okie. Uh-huh.

Jack and his family had left home back at the start of the Depression and moved to Sacramento. Like many Guthrie's, he was musically talented and so was his wife, and they built a reputation for themselves as good musicians and performers. He suggested teaming up with Woody to try and start an act in Los Angeles. This was not the obviously good idea that it would later seem, as Ed Gray explains in the book, Ramblin Man.

Jack was a western singer, his songs were heavily influenced by popular music. Woody was a country singer, his music born of an older oral tradition. In practice, they could neither sing nor play guitar together. Indeed, Woody privately despised the trickly sentiment of Jack's sagebrush serenades. Jack the guitarist used the jazz-influenced chords of popular music and played up the neck of the instrument. Woody disdained chords beyond the minimal tonic, subdominant, and dominant. So this is not a great pairing. And Woody's a little bit of like...

He's a little bit of a snob, right? He's like, oh, your music's all popular and jazzy. You're not doing the cool punks. It's not only punk, but it's very similar in attitude to that kind of guy. I mean, he's doing folk punk before it's folk punk. He's doing folk punk. Yeah. At least he's about to be starting to do folk punk. It's interesting because country western, I had never occurred to me that those were separate categories.

Yes, because I mean, it's this mix of these songs that are like folk songs that are we would call Western because they're like songs about the West and about, you know, being a cowboy or whatever. And songs that are like Western songs that are made for like the different kinds of like floor shows and entertainment, you know, radio and whatnot. It's popular at the time. Like those are kind of different beasts.

So in better times, these guys probably would never have worked together, but desperation made some kind of collaboration necessary. And they developed a fairly successful act, and were able to book recurring gigs on the radio through a station called KFVD.

Woody found himself increasingly drawn to folk music with a sense of class consciousness, like Gobo Reeves' 1934 tune, Hobo's lullaby. And here's Woody Guthrie singing a portion of Hobo's lullaby, which is again a song by another guy, and this is a folk song. It's also kind of punk, as you'll catch from this section. Oh, I used to listen to it while riding trains. My friend played on guitar.

I know the police cause you trouble They cause trouble everywhere But when you die and go to heaven You'll find no policeman there Okay, that's good That's a good little bar

So, I would also be remiss because that's pretty cool. If I didn't expound on the fact that Racism 2 was a recurrent part of Woody's act and often on his mind while living in Echo Park and fighting on behalf of poor white people because he's like an activist, you know, helping like rent strike type stuff, right? Like he is an advocate for like poor downtrodden white people living in Los Angeles. He also is drawing cartoons of people he called jungle blacks and monkeys.

And that's bad. He wrote poems so racist that I don't even feel like I should describe them on the air to you. They're bad. Oh, God. Yeah. Found a good LA weekly article on the subject by an author named Johnny Whiteside. And I'm going to read a quote from it now.

Broadcasting on Pasadena's KFVD, Guthrie often indulged in on-air employ of Abonics and was stunned when a black listener characterized the singer as unintelligent after hearing Guthrie perform songs with titles like Run, Inward, Run, and Inward Blues. Fortunately for Guthrie, recordings of these tunes do not survive. Later, Guthrie said, A young Negro in Los Angeles wrote me a nice letter one day, telling me the meaning of that word, the inward, and that I shouldn't say it anymore in the air. So I apologized.

He next tore all the inward songs out of his songbook. So you can take that however you want, right? The fact that he is singing that kind of stuff on the air and like just writing poems about it, not great, but he's also not unable to change or immune to criticism. So he's willing to like listen to this criticism that a black man gives him and be like, Oh, you know what? That is kind of fucked up. And that ain't nothing for the son of a Klansman, right?

when you're, you know, again, that's kind of up to your personal take. When we talk about like, how do you judge people, you know, to what extent do you judge them based on their time or based on some sort of concept of objective morality? One thing that always matters to me is where do they start versus where did they end up, right? Because

Someone who was raised in a slave-holding household and becomes an abolitionist, but is still racist is a lot more impressive to me than a guy who just like is an outwardly racist because he grew up in the 1990s, but like crosses the street when he sees a black guy, right? Totally. Because one of those is a person who like went on a journey, recognized a bad thing about themselves and made changes, you know? There's people that like,

will never get my pronouns right who I suspect would kill someone who tried to hurt me. And there's other people who would absolutely always get my pronouns right and be super respectful and would be like, oh, no, a bad thing is happening if they watch me get murdered in front of them, you know? Yeah.

I'm not trying to be like, it's there for okay. I'm not trying to reason I included this because it's pretty bad and you should know that about the guy. Yeah, no, I'm not trying to, yeah, but this is not a part of his entire life or his whole creative life. He writes anti-racist songs later in life. It does seem like he makes a change and I do think it's worth noting this is a guy who was raised by a Klansman in the 30s, 20s and 30s.

So, you know, again, you can figure out morally wherever you want to figure that out, but I don't think it's worth kind of looking at the whole sweep of the personal journey the man went on there. In 1937, Woody's wife Mary and two children moved to Los Angeles to be with him. Jack wound up leaving the act and show business for a while, but Woody paired up with Maxine Chrisman, whose family was friends with his cousin and had taken Woody in too. He dubbed Maxine, Lefty Liu,

The two played songs by other artists that spoke to the poor and downtrodden, like Hobo's lullaby, but they also started playing Woody's original compositions, like the Talking Dust Bowl Blues. This song really embodies what people were starting to love about Woody. His music had a wartsand all description of life during the Depression and the struggles of the hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to move west during the Dust Bowl. He sung about relatable nuts and bolts issues that are still familiar to a lot of people today

If you were a poor punk kid who, like, lived on a semi-permanent road trip for a while, basically, and had the experience of trying to coast by turning your car off on downhill runs because you can't afford gasoline, here's Woody Guthrie singing about the same thing. Way up yonder on a mountain curve is the way up yonder in the Piney Wood, and I give that rollin' for the shove and eyes gonna coast as far as it could. I'm in coastin', pickin' up speed.

was a happy in turn. I didn't make it. Man alive I'm telling you the fiddles and the guitars really flew. That Ford took off like a flying squirrel and it flew halfway around the world. Scattered wives and children's all over the side of that mountain. Oh man.

I don't know. I love his talking blues. Yeah. I love his talking. I love the way he says children. Like it just tickles the hell out of me. It reminds me of the good parts of living in fucking middle of nowhere, Oklahoma. Like I do like that about him. And you know what I like even more Margaret? Is it the sponsors of the show? Yes.

They're all great. They're all great, and they've all had the experience of having to coast in their Ford truck to save gas money, too. Look, it's hard times for everyone, even large brands. They've probably driven stuff off of the road before. Yeah, absolutely. We could talk about what truck drivers are forced to do in order to make their times. Anyway, whatever. We're done.

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slotted him in front of the kids, tried to burn her house down. Audio represents the unborn on the iHeartRadio Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Margaret. Yes. I do find it fun how much of like his Dust Bowl songs are very relatable to like punk life today. Yeah. Totally. Hate the cops fucking coasting in my car, you know, camping out on the woods and shit like. Did he do Big Rock Candy Mountains as someone else? In my head, he did Big Rock Candy Mountains, but I didn't double check on that. I mean, he might have just sung it.

I'm fairly certain I've heard a version of the song by him. Harry McClintock was the guy who first recorded and wrote it. Yeah. One of the first people I ever wrote trains with, I haven't written trains nearly as much as I'm going to make it sound like when I do these episodes, but was this folks singer named Ryan Harvey?

And so that's why I have a lot of these associations with riding trains in particular, but we used to sit around and sing Big Rock Handy Mountains, but changed the words very slightly to be like modern anarchy. You didn't have to change much. And my favorite was, and the Hensley Vegan Eggs was my favorite one. That's good. Oh man, that's funny. You're like, wait a second. Yeah, the police dogs can't sniff your weed. Yeah, totally.

So Woody had attained a degree of local fame by 38, 39, right? 1938 to 1939. He's doing reasonably well. In fact, he and lefty Lou were so beloved that the radio station where they played received thousands of fan letters over the course of just a few months. They were doing okay in terms of money, but not great because again, he has a lot of fans, but their broke ass dust bowl refuge.

Yeah. So he's not getting rich off these people, right? And he's also not very interested in getting rich. He seemed to feel like he had a responsibility to reach and provide relief for his people, suffering in government work camps and embarrassed by their situation, from a write up by the Library of Congress, quote,

He also sang at government camps that gave these people some measure of dignity, health and safety. Joining him was Will Gere, an actor and earnest left winger who helped would he better understand the injustice of an economic system that would allow Americans to live in such poverty. And this is where he starts getting pilled on socialism, right? And eventually becomes a communist. He will call himself a card-carrying communist as we'll talk about he never actually has a card and he could have gotten one.

But what he's a little bit of a fabulous, right? He lies a little bit. Not in the way that is massively meaningful because he was a communist and very committed, but he's a little bit of a tall, tall spinner. So yeah, and it's to his credit that he's, again, rather than focusing on making money off of this growing fame, he's giving a lot of free shows to provide relief for his people, right? He is very dedicated to his people in a way that I think is pretty admirable.

Woody's popularity and by now fairly mature class consciousness started to make him more connections with the radical political set, including various left-wing writers, journalists, and socialist and communist activists. He began writing songs that spoke not just of left-wing politics, but of the rage of the working class and increasingly his own hatred of the people that maintained the system that kept his people downtrodden.

In 1939, he wrote one of his most famous songs, the Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd, about an Oklahoma Outlaw active in the early 1930s, who regular listeners will know was my cousin. Now, my great-grandmother knew him as a girl. I grew up hearing songs about him from her.

And my family, they're very, as I talk about often, very conservative people, but my great grandma particularly would always tell us, you know, you got outlaw blood in you, right? Like it was something she was very proud of. In a way that's a little weird if you heard the way these people tended to talk about other like urban crime, right? Outlaw crime was very different to them. And I'm talking particularly my relatives who were survivors of the Great Depression.

Outlaws are very different than modern criminals in their eyes, right? I'm not saying that's actually a fair, but their conception of these people is extremely different. And a big part of why is not just Woody, but songs like this, that Woody made who turned these guys who were bank robbers and gangsters into Robin Hood figures, right?

And Floyd was a fairly easy one to turn into a Robin Hood character, because he kind of was at least a little bit that guy. There's a debate as to like how much of that sort of character was real and how much of it is kind of myth-making that Floyd did, but some of it's certainly true. Floyd was born in Georgia, but had moved with his family to Aiken's Oklahoma in 1911. And his career as a criminal had started early when he was arrested at age 18 for stealing $3.50 worth of, I think, stamps from a post office.

A few years later, he robbed a payroll in St. Louis, so he goes from stamp theft to armed robbery fairly quickly, and he does three years or so in prison for that. After he's released, he becomes a Kansas City area bank robber. One thing you get about Floyd is he doesn't seem to have ever considered not being a criminal.

Just immediately like, no. He found this thing that works. Well, I guess it didn't really work. That's the other weird thing about it. No, but he never really thinks about doing anything but being an outlaw. He quickly gains, he starts robbing banks in Kansas City, and he earns the nickname Pretty Boy, which eventually becomes Pretty Boy Floyd, because people thought he was very good looking. He hated this nickname, so he's going to pull up a picture of the man. You could decide yourself how good looking he was. It's just a picture of Luigi.

Americans do love their sexy criminals. Yeah. Yeah. Not my type, but you know, the standards were not as high back. He's got like a soft gaze. It's got a nice, you know, like, yeah, prominent nose. Good jawline. Yeah, he's not bad looking. Certainly not. Yeah. Nice hair. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's better looking a pretty Guthrie if we go to AB real quick.

Yeah. He is a hardened criminal. He killed at least one federal agent. He also killed the sheriff of Mckintosh County. Other members of his gang killed several police officers and other criminals as well. There are multiple police officer murders that he is also a suspect in that we don't fully know. Did he kill all those cops? But he killed a number of cops.

You know, like he shoots a lot of police. In the early Depression years, he took to robbing banks in Oklahoma, where in addition to taking money for himself, he would destroy mortgage documents in order to free poor farmers from debt. Hell yeah. Now, we don't fully know if this happened, right? It's not the kind of, how would you prove it for one thing, right? People told stories about it. I will tell you that everyone I knew in the towns in Oklahoma, like where he had been active,

And again, including my family members who knew him would tell you that this is what he did. I don't know. It's not provable. It's one of those things where it would make sense for him to do it even if he was not really morally a Robin Hood character. Right. Because if you're destroying people's mortgages,

they will hide you from the cops. I could tie this back to Italy in the 1870s, Malatesta and all these other anarchists in Italy in a Benavento province would go and their idea of how to do propaganda of the deed was to go and they'd march on these small towns and they would destroy the tax and ownership records. And they were like, and then everyone would come out and be like, you have freed us. The priest came out of the church and was like, these people have been sent by God to free us.

And then they all got arrested. But yeah, they actually only spent like a year in jail because everyone was going so crazy in Italy at that point that they were like, you know, we better just let these people out. Yeah, we can't go too hard on these people. Everyone really likes them for some reason. And so that's like.

There is a specific point and if you're going to be a criminal, if you go hard enough and make everyone like you, there's a certain safety in that. One of my favorite Floyd stories is that he had a gang and his gang decided they wanted to rob a bunch of people on like Black Wall Street at one point, which was very well armed. And Floyd was like, well, you guys can go do that. I'm not fucking with that.

And sure enough, they got fucking shot to pieces. So he was a smart man. My other favorite story about him is I mentioned in my high school AP English class that he was a cousin of mine, and my teacher who was in her 50s or something, he said, he shot my grandfather in the leg.

Oh, what grade did you get in that class, buddy? No, no, she was like, it's okay. Again, because she was raised in this same culture. She was like, it's okay. Like pretty boy said, no move and my grandpa moved. He didn't kill him. He just shot him in the leg a little. Again, there's a lot of tolerance for these specific sorts of outlaws in that part of the South. Like it's that you probably wouldn't find today. Just to be clear, anyone listening, but you probably wouldn't find today. You will not find today.

So again, fascinating character. And yeah, I can't say how much of the whole Robin Hood thing is true, but I think a lot of the Robin Hood image that he has comes from Woody. Although it's also worth noting he is part of why it takes so long for him to get caught because he's like one of the last gangsters to get caught and killed by the government. His death is generally agreed to have heralded the end of the gangster era. Okay.

Yeah, because I think 34 is when he's gunned down. And there's a lot of stories of him hiding with little old ladies and lying to the cops. And then when he leaves, there's $100 bill under the plate where she'd fed him dinner or something like that. So in 1939,

You know, about five years after his death, when memories of this guy are still very strong, Woody writes the song that is very much responsible for crystallizing this image of Pretty Boy Floyd as this kind of like bandit outlaw king of the American South. And we're just going to listen to that song because it's Christmas and it's a song about my cousin. Hell yeah.

If you'll gather around me children a story I will tell About pretty boy Floyd and outlaw Oklahoma knew him well It was in the town of Shawnee a Saturday afternoon His wife beside him in his wagon as in to town they rode

There a deputy sheriff approached him in a manner out of the road. Folger words of anger and his wife she overheard. Pretty boy grabbed a log chain and the deputy grabbed his gun.

In the fight that followed he laid that deputy down. Then he took to the trees on timber to live a life of shame. Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name.

But a mini-starving farmer, the same old story told How the envelope paid their mortgage and saved their little homes Others tell you about a stranger that come to beg a meal Underneath his napkin left a thousand dollar bill

It was in Oklahoma City. It was on a Christmas day. There was a whole carload of groceries come with a note to say. Well, you say that I'm an outlaw. You say that I'm a thief. Here's a Christmas dinner for the families on relief.

Guess is through this world I've wondered I've seen lots of funny men Some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen And is through your life you travel Guess is through your life you roam

You will never see an outlaw. Drive a family from their home. I love the way that song ends. It's beautiful. Anderson likes it too. Some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen.

That's why I hear all over the place. It's a great fucking, this is one of his more famous songs. But it's a damn good line. I enjoyed that thoroughly. I also like that. Look, I've seen a lot of outlaws. I'm not saying, I'm not defending the things they've done, but it's not the outlaws I see forcing people to be homeless. That's the banks.

Yeah. So I disagree with my family about a lot, but our shared pride in our cop killing ancestor is not one of those things. Anyway, as is off in the case, for people who come to Los Angles for the music industry, Woody wound up having to take his family back home to Texas and then leave them again to move to New York City in 1940, chasing what had become for him a dream of folk stardom.

By this point, he'd become a little bit of a legend, enough that the Library of Congress had him sit down and record his Dust Bowl songs for posterity. He laid down tracks with Pete Seeger and became an influential part of the urban folk revival of the time. In a letter to Alan Lomax, another influential pillar of the urban folk revival, he described his thoughts on what folk music ought to be, and I'm interested for your thoughts on this, Margaret. Ken.

A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it, or it could be who's hungry and where their mouth is, or who's out of work and where the job is, or who's broke and where the money is, or who's carrying a gun and where the piece is. That's folklore, and folks made it up because they've seen that the politicians couldn't find nothing to fix, or nobody to feed or give a job a work. That's good. It's so interesting to me because I

If you'd say folk music in different places, you mean something so completely different, right? American folk music is this like Woody Guthrie kind of vibe thing, whereas in almost any other country, you're looking at stuff that's a little bit more like

technically interesting, like musically. I don't know. I have a lot of thoughts about like folk and folk instrumentation and music and all that, but I think what he's describing is great. And specifically that thing that it's like, this is the stuff that people make up. It's not fancy. And it's also how poor people without really any other idea of how to have a voice

Talk about, in a lot of ways, the kind of issues that today we ascribe to like the job of journalists, right? Who was hungry and where their mouth is? Who's carrying a gun and where the peace is, right? Yeah, yeah, totally. It's gossip. Yes, yes, it's gossip and it's agitation, right? You look at a lot of folk songs and a lot of folk stories, and that's the first safe place to attack the wealthy and the powerful, right? Totally. A little bit, you know? Totally.

Oftentimes, you know, there's also plenty of folk stuff that reinforces some of those things, but it is where you see a lot of subversive stuff. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about like populist and popular stuff is it can really go either way. Yeah. But it's like, yeah, still on some fundamental level interesting. Yeah.

Now, it's worth spending some time on just how radically folk music changes. As you noted, in other countries, it's very different. And part of why it's different in the US is Woody Guthrie. He changes what folk music is in the United States in a fundamental way. In an article for The New Yorker, David Hajdu writes, quote, folk music, including country blues and other vernacular styles, was supposed to be anonymous. A collective art passed along orally from singer to singer, generation to generation,

sometimes cultured a culture. From the vantage point of today, when kids with their first guitar start writing songs before they learn to play other tunes, it is difficult to process how exceptional it was for a folk artist such as Woody Guthrie to have created a vast repertoire of deeply idiosyncratic works. Many Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood songwriters of the 30s and earlier were as skilled in prolific as Guthrie, but they were working in a different vein, writing to order for professional singers.

Guthrie brought the authorial imperative to vernacular music in America. I think that's also very interesting. Just to keep going with all the weird family connections, my great grandfather was a 10-pen alley songwriter. He wrote music that he didn't own the copyright to. He wrote the B-sides for more popular musicians.

Yeah, that makes sense. I'm not surprised that that's your family connection. Yeah. So by this point in time, Woody was what you would call a left-wing radical, although not again a card-carrying one. He played benefits for and was associated with the American Communist Party, but he never got around to joining, and you'll find several different theories as to why. The leading one that you'll hear is that he liked his independence a little too much to be a joiner.

Now, this sounds good, especially to people like you and me, but it leaves out a crucial fact, which is that Woody was his heir is equivalent of like a tanky, right? Totally. I mean, it also leaves out the fact that like he vocally took claim to have a card, like claim to be a member of the party, right? And that it was the best thing he'd done what he hadn't. Again, he wasn't immune to the worst impulses of the American left during this period.

He had been enthusiastic about FDR early on, but once the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed and the USSR locked into a treaty with the Nazis, he attacked Roosevelt as, quote, Churchill's lap dog for his anti-Nazi stance in support of Great Britain during the early months of the war. He argued that the developing world war was a capitalist fraud.

When Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland together, Guthrie supported Stalin to an extent and with such vociferousness that biographer Will Kaufman called it shocking. In Ramblinman, Ed Kray goes into more detail about a left-wing anti-war song he wrote called, Why Do You Stand There in the Rain? Based on the title of a New York Post article. And I'm going to read from that section from Ramblinman here.

Just days before, some 6,000 delegates of the American Youth Congress had gathered in Washington to advocate jobs and peace. At the invitation of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the delegates gathered in front of the South Portico of the White House and a cold drizzle to listen to a half-hour speech by the President. FDR threw down the gauntlet.

aware that the Young Communist League had taken firm grip on the once broadly based popular front AYC, the Soviet Union. As everyone who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship and as absolute as any dictatorship in the world. It has allied itself with another dictatorship and has invaded a neighbor, Finland, so infinitesimally small that it could do no conceivable harm to the Soviet Union, a neighbor which seeks only to live in peace as a democracy and a liberal, forward-looking democracy at that.

Roosevelt heard the booze and hisses through the cold rain. People's world columnist Woody Guthrie knew where he stood. He chided the president and song. Now the guns in Europe roar as they have so oft before, and the warlords play the same old game again. They butcher and they kill. Uncle Sam foots the bill with his own dear children standing in the rain. Why do you stand there in the rain? Why do you stand there in the rain?

He's a strange carrying on, the White House Capitol on. Tell me, why do you stand there in the rain? Then the president's voice did ring. Why this is the silliest thing, I have heard in all my 58 years of life. But it just stands to reason as he passes another season. He'll be smarter by the time he's 59.

So he's being real shitty to Roosevelt there specifically about his support of England in the war that is developing and very defensive of the USSR and invading a much smaller neighbor and invading Poland. And it's one of those things where

This is both like horrifying given what we know happens. You have to, to an extent, while still saying he was wrong, look at his level of knowledge and what had actually happened previously.

World War I was the touchstone here. In World War I, the US did enable further butchering. We were arming and profiting off of a hideous war that we had no business sticking our noses into. He's pissed about that. There's a lot less information about what was going on in the Soviet Union. I will also say more than enough that he should have known.

Yeah, I mean, the internationalist newspaper stuff was pretty. Yeah. Sometimes they were better at knowing what was going on around the world than like a modern leftist is today. Yeah. But he's holding the party line. They got told very specifically, like, I mean, this is the problem with the commenter in the comments international. Yes. Is that someone in the American Communist Party during this era is literally taking orders from Russia. Yeah.

And that's one of the parts that we don't want to talk about with the Red Scare, because the Red Scare is bad, right? But when they're like, oh, these foreign agents acting under a foreign national, they were. They were literally taking direct propaganda, direct orders from Moscow, well, not from Moscow, but from the Communist Party in the Soviet Union.

They were really wrong on some things as a result of that because it turns out Hitler's not an ally of international communism. It turns out, no, no, that goes very badly, very quickly. And Woody had been describing himself as an anti-fascist at this point,

But also, I think he probably would have said that, well, the Communist Party knows its business. If they think that's what they've got to do to secure themselves, what matters is the survival of communism, which at that point had weathered a number of attacks from the international capitalist community during the Russian Civil War.

And I'm not saying that because I think that's a good argument. I'm saying I think that's how he would have made. I'm pretty firmly on the stance of stall and bat, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop-packed inexcusable. But also, I always emphasize inexcusable on behalf of the Soviet leadership. I've got nothing but respect for the guys who wound up dying by the millions to stop the Nazis. Absolutely. Totally on the right, those guys. And ladies.

So it is impossible to look at this situation without saying commonalities between more modern failures of the left to condemn dictators seen as anti imperialist for very flawed reasons. I might suggest that we also not forget at the time one of the complicating factors here is.

how the US government deals with what it considers communism and what things it considers communism, right? Because that's important too. Woody had an extensive FBI file, and in 1941, after he joined the merchant Marine, one of his shipmates was cited as saying Woody, quote, followed the Communist Party line and that they were very pro-Russian and advocated racial intermarriage.

So again, that is what the guy who informs on him and the FBI considers evidence of his communist sympathies is he thinks that black people and white people should be able to get married. So keep that in mind too. The Communist Party was absolutely right about racial politics in the United States during this era. Yes, 100%. And they were one of the only non-black organizations. It was actually heavily black, but one of the only not majority black organizations that was right about this.

Yes, yes. And so when we talk about criticizing him, don't leave out the fact that he's also very much correct about this. Right, totally. After the war, he would be accused by the California State Senate's far-right Committee on Un-American Activities for being Joe Stalin's California mouthpiece.

which wasn't one point true, but also for being a member of a factionalist sabotage group, which was absurd. Woody never sought or attempted to do anything but sing songs and write articles for socialist papers. He was not sabotaging anything.

I have a feeling the reason he didn't get a card as he was like, I don't want to be on that list. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I mean, that may have been it. I think he also just might have been too lazy. Yeah. They want to pay the fees, whatever. He's an artist. He's not good at signing papers. Yeah. Marjorie Guthrie, who is his second wife, he starts a family with her after he divorces his first wife, Mary, and moves to Coney Island, sums things up this way.

I don't know what happened prior to my time, but from my time in Coney Island, he was not welcomed by the party because he didn't want to follow a party line. You couldn't tell Woody what to think. And so we were not members of the party in Coney Island. And again, I include that because she was his wife. She knew him, but also that isn't entirely true because he certainly followed the party line on some very fucked up things.

But actually, that's still like even when we talk about the way that people have arcs, right? One of the things I've read a lot about the UK communists at this era, where a lot of the communists left the Communist Party once they realized that they were just being mouthpieces for Stalin, you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean, and again, there was a degree to which

The fact that there's so much disinformation being pumped out about the Soviet Union, and there's so much bad, like certainly more reasonable than for someone to doubt a lot of the official narratives coming out and to doubt a lot of the information that makes Stalin look bad from their position in the United States, right? Again, I think enough that a man is obviously intelligent as Woody should have been better informed.

But he's not the only one who makes this mistake, and it's a more understandable mistake than it is now, as we all say, without forgiving it. So, yeah, however you want to mark this down morally for Woody, the US shouldn't be getting into this capitalist war. They're all cooking this World War two thing up. That attitude ends for Woody on June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union. This is Operation Barbarossa.

Woody ran to his friend Pete Seager after this, like, breaks and told him, well, I guess we're not going to be singing anymore of them peace songs. Woody was not the only man forced to change his tune rapidly due to world events. Winston Churchill. Well done.

Winston Churchill, who was one of the world's loudest anti-communists, was forced by sheer necessity to make temporary amends and even express support for the cause of Soviet soldiers. When Woody heard this, he told a friend, Churchill's flip flopped. We got a flip flopped, too.

Who doesn't flip-flop, though, Margaret? The consistency with which our sponsors provide high-quality goods and services? That's right. Our sponsors have never once changed their opinion, which is why today, tomorrow, and forever, they advise you to vote Millard Fillmore for president.

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slaughtered them in front of the kids, tried to burn their house down. Audio represents the unborn on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

We're back. Our sponsors are all old hair tonics from the 1800s. Anyway, vote Fillmore. Much of the woody that we know, the famous woody Guthrie, you know, you brought up, as soon as I said, what do you know of them, that the picture of him with a guitar that has a this machine kills fascist sticker slapped across it? Yeah. By the way, that sticker was like put out by the US government. Huh, that makes sense.

Yeah, it was a prop again. Strange bedfellows. Good piece of prop. There were a lot of machines we were using to kill fascists. Perfectly unreasonable to put some stickers on them. Wait, did they? Oh, that was like a... The government was putting that on machines to raise morale, and he took one of those and was like, I'm putting this on my guitar.

I think it's something like that. I read it in that article and I think L.A. Weekly by the fellow who was writing about Woody's history with racism. This thing was a product of the government. That makes so much sense. I never quite understood that. I always really liked that when people carve into their AK's wooden stock, this machine makes folk music. There's been some good ones of that coming out of Syria.

So he changes his opinion very rapidly. And once the Nazis invade the USSR, he starts getting much more patriotic. And again, he had been making anti-Nazi music and been anti-Nazi prior to this. And if you're saying, well, that's incoherent for him to be against the war and whatnot, yes, lots of people have incoherent politics.

But his politics get a lot more cohesive after Operation Barbarossa, an article for OklahomaHistory.org notes, in New York he appeared on numerous popular radio shows before joining the merchant marines with Cisco Houston during World War II. Guthrie was on three torpedoed ships, and the day Germany surrendered he was drafted into the US Army.

He was on ships that were hit by torpedoes three different times. Yes, he is. And the merchant marine is effectively a part of the military during a war, right? He is a combat veteran. He's on three ships that get hit. Now, he's not in the army very long. It basically immediately gets out because the war ends. But yeah, he does his bit. When we play songs of his where he's talking about wanting to fight the fascists, he goes and does it.

He is doing an important, dangerous job where he gets shot at. So you cannot, yeah, he's very willing to put his skin in the game. Yeah, one blown up ship. If you quit after one blown up ship, no one's mad. You did your part. Nobody will call you a coward. Yeah. I don't know that. Yeah. And so from late 1941 to the end of the war, Woody Guthrie wrote several iconic anti-fascist anthems, including Reuben James about a US destroyer that was torpedoed and sunk by the Nazis in 1941.

As you might expect from Woody in the kind of songs he wrote, this song focused on the lives and deaths of normal men at war. The refrain went, tell me what was their names, tell me what was their names. Did you have a friend on that good Ruben James? It's a good song. But if you want my personal favorite war years Woody Guthrie's song, nothing beats this particular banger. So if he's gonna put it up now.

For the very boy, we'll show these fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do. Well, I'm gonna tell you, fascists, you may be surprised.

People in this world are getting organized. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You're bound to lose.

Marching for some fields where a million faces died, you're bound to lose. You're bound to lose. Oh, I'll be facing bound to lose. Yes. Oh, I'll be facing bound to lose. Yes. Oh, I'll be facing bound to lose. Yes. Oh, I'll be facing bound to lose. Yes. Oh, I'll be facing bound to lose. Yes. Oh, I'll be facing bound to lose.

You're bound to lose You're bound to lose

Ah, banger. It's so good. Yeah, it's a real banger. I enjoyed that immensely. Yeah, one of my favorites. So near the end of Woody's wartime experiences, he would record the first official version of a song that he'd been working on since 1940, This Land Is Your Land, which would go on to be undoubtedly his most famous work of music. It is definitely the one Woody Guthrie song everyone's fucking hurt. Like you basically can't get through school without hearing This Land Is Your Land. Has it been so easily recuperated?

Yes, and in the decades since 1944, it's also been criticized for what many people interpret as an era of imperialism and support for manifest destiny, which is definitely present in the version of the song that is commonly sung. Given this, I think it's interesting to actually look into why Woody wrote the song and what its original lyrics were.

This land is your land was initially something of a folk music diss track. It was a response to Irving Berlin's God Bless America. This is a song Berlin wrote in 1918 after being drafted and re-released in 1941 as something of a cash grab. The lyrics, if you aren't familiar, go like this. God Bless America, land that I love. Stand beside her and guide her through the night with a light from above.

Woody fucking hated this song, and it's good he did because it's a fucking dogshit song. He considered it far too sweet a hymn for a nation that had just sent millions of its citizens into a depression. This land is your land was meant to be a retort, discussing the real America that Irving had tried to conceal. The original title was God Bless America For Me. Joe Riley writes of this first version of the song, quote,

It was more of a question than affirmation. In fact, it was a sarcastic retort. Woody later changed the refrain to, this land was made for you and me, and the song to, this land is your land. The verses he ultimately emitted from the final draft of the song include this banger.

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me. The sign was painted, said Private Property, but on the backside it didn't say nothing. This land was made for you and me. And the squares of the city and the shadow of the steeple near the relief office I see my people, and some are a grumbling and some are wondering if this land still made for you and me.

And that's a banger. That's very much not an imperialist song. That's more him talking about like this, the people that this country ought to be for are the ones being harmed by the system that governs it, right? Like that's the original point of the song.

That said, this is not a case of it being recuperated by someone else who changes the lyrics because they think that they can tweak it. They don't like Woody's original version. Woody changes it, right? And he changes it. He removes that verse about the relief office because late in the war, he decided it was too pessimistic. And he replaces it with lines like, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me, which is not all that different from like some of the stuff Irving had been right. Totally.

The song becomes a massive hit. It is practically a new national anthem. And Woody does not initially bother to copyright it because, you know, that's not uncommon for him, right? He's generally neglected to do that. Alas, for Woody, the post-war optimism faded quickly. I mean, in it...

So the first horrible thing that happens to Woody after the war, because things go downhill for him quickly. In February of 1947, there is an electrical fire in his home and his little girl, Kathy Ann, dies. Oh, God, he has bad luck with fire. He like I said, he a horrible luck with fire. Now, he and Marjorie have three other kids, but yeah, like that's obviously

really fucks him up. And like that same year, 47, and then in 48, he gets repeatedly attacked as a communist, both in the state committee of un-American activities in California and in the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities. Now, they were attacking him for being a communist, and he was, but he was not un-American. No one was more American than Woody fucking Guthrie, right? He suffers as a result of this. He gets blacklisted.

he had written an autobiographical novel at this point called Bound for Glory that had been set to be turned into a major Hollywood production, but that deal and others like it fell apart. As unions were forced to take anti-communist stances in this new, more paranoid era, Woody stopped getting hired to play the events that had largely supplemented his income.

Rather than fold, as many did and denounced the things that he believed, Woody spoke out constantly against J. Edgar Hoover, writing at one point, quote, the roaches crawl across my page tonight and make a noise that makes more sense than all that Hoover writes.

He became less dogmatic on the Moscow line as well, although he never stops being a communist. He starts writing that his goal was to quote, get this thing called socialism nailed and hammered up just as quickly as he can and praises Eugene V. Debs, former chairman of the socialist party as quote, appear cross between Jesus Christ and Abe Lincoln, which again is not really something that the Moscow party once you say.

Despite the consequences to his career, he continues to seek and sing his mind. Quote, fascism is being afraid. Fascism is fear-bossing you. Fascism is worse than all of these things, and fascism is more closer to you than I can make you see. I'm trying to wake you up and tell you that you're sleeping with something 10 times more dangerous than a poison-fang snake in your bed. If fascism does come and if it does kill me well, then you add me alone onto the hundreds of millions, which fascism has already dusted under.

and it don't scare me so very much. That rules. It's a good line. It might kill me. It's killed millions of people before. I'll be in good company. That's hard. I like that. That's hard. This is unfortunately, Margaret, where the story gets awkward. No, is he going to heel turn again? He keeps dancing.

More complicated than a heel turn about to do a bad thing there is a mitigating factor that's pretty significant okay okay, but it's a pretty bad thing. Woody is at this point and always on the verge of being broke but also a famous and influential musician and we know what comes with that right which is the temptation to be a sex best yeah.

Yeah, and Woody does not commit like rape, but he does sexually harass someone very badly. And this is a very ugly story. The gist of it is that things with his second wife Marjorie go downhill as his career does. She is the family moneymaker. She actually makes a very good living teaching dancing. She's an extremely accomplished dancer.

And his career is not doing well. This leads to fighting, and Woody eventually moves out in Rinso Room for himself. He starts writing letters to his old music partner Lefty Lu's sister. She is 28 years old, he is 36, so they're not like crazy far apart, but the bigger issue is she had never insinuated that she was into him, right? He is just writing her letters about wanting to fuck her, apropos of nothing. Oh fuck.

Now, Woody had just kind of assumed that because they knew each other, right? They were like friendly, but she gets divorced. And he just kind of assumes, well, I'm getting divorced too, that must mean she wants to fuck, right? And his letters to her take on an era of obsession. He writes at least 12 long letters, suggesting they move out together, hit the road, and start having sex. These letters include long rambling descriptions of the kinds of sex Woody wanted to have, and more. And I'm gonna quote from Ramblin Man here.

Into the envelopes, Guthrie stuffed pages torn from New York's tabloids with muddy magenta circles slathered around stories of grizzly murders. The packet, sometimes two or three a week, frightened Mary Ruth by their intensity, the sexual proposals, and the suggestion of violence. She drove to Los Angeles to show them to her sister, who knew Guthrie best of all. You have no idea how horrible it was, her older sister Maxine said. She, in turn, called the police.

Now, the police get involved because they think Woody might be a budding serial killer, and given the kind of stuff he's sending, not an unreasonable thing to be afraid of. And given the fact that the feds are hounding him, I get why Woody is like, this is them going after me for my politics, but it really isn't. He's writing very upsetting things. Now, there's another part to this story, which does not make the things he's writing less fucked up or upsetting, but he is losing his mind.

Okay. He is losing his mind in a degree that is very soon to be clinically diagnosed, right? In episode one, I mentioned that Woody's mother went insane when he was quite young and was institutionalized, right? This traumatized him and at the time we didn't have an explanation for what she was going for. They just said madness, right? We now know what she had because Woody has it and it's diagnosable by the time he gets it and it's called Huntington's Disease.

Oh, yeah, his mom and Woody gets it and he is starting to suffer the effects of Huntington's by the late 40s. This is a neurodegenerative disorder that Huntington's disease news describes as characterized by uncontrolled movements, loss of cognitive ability and psychiatric problems.

the middle stages of the illness are associated with psychosis. Some patients experience delusions, which they tend to be convinced are accurate. It also comes with these obsessive delusions, which might explain the whole heme thinking that this was something that was reciprocated. This is a heel turn. This is just a degeneration. This is a very tragic degeneration.

You know, I don't know how again, you want to parse it out morally, but like he is diagnosed like he is losing his mind. He is going to spend most of the rest of his life in an institution. So this is not just a case of like a powerful man in music being a sex pest, right? This is a man who was not like this before so far as we know, absolutely declining in becoming like increasingly delusional.

And like famous men sex-pesting is fans. Famous men sex-pesting is like for everyone in your orbit, you just assume they want to fuck you, which I guess he's like doing to this. No, yeah, the degeneration thing, that just makes sense. It's just, yeah, he probably always had a crush on her and then.

like he becomes convinced that there is something going on there that there's not. Right. But the fact that it was out of the blue to her means that he probably kept his fucking mouth shut about the fact that he had a crush on her. One would assume, right? So it's not great. He is ultimately charged in 1949 with sending obscene material through the mail. He avoids prison time but is sentenced to therapy. And he and his therapist do not have a good relationship. His therapist does not like him.

but he's not diagnosed with anything quite yet. So his therapist is just like, he's kind of an asshole, which I can't blame the therapist for because he's being an asshole. If you don't know the mitigating factor of the family mental illness that destroyed his mother and is destroying him, would he eventually refuses court mandated therapy and his lawyer manages to narrowly get him out of a six month sentence? His lawyer who is at one of his shipmates, right? He and this guy are torpedoed together and this lawyer who's a very good friend who was like, I'm not gonna let my, my war buddy go to a fucking jail.

Woody was mostly angry when his sentence gets like cut off. He's kind of pissed because he had been planning a Christmas Eve show for the inmates that he doesn't get to do now. So there's still that piece of him in there, right? By the mid 1950s, Woody was disabled with Huntington's badly enough that his second wife, Marjorie, who again, he has separated from had to take charge of his affairs. And it does say something that this person who he was not nice to at the end

had enough affection for him still that she makes sure he's taken care of, right? Which included she registers a copyright for this land is your land for the first time, right? And for a number of his other songs, and she's doing that because like, we're going to need some way of taking care of him, you know, and this makes sense, right? One of the fun side effects of this is that his family is going to wind up in a lawsuit with Donald Trump about this land is your land because Trump kept trying to play it.

It is now in the public domain, but it wasn't for a while. So that same year, in 1956, he was involuntarily committed to Greystone Park, a New Jersey mental institution. Over the next five years, he lost the ability to play music or even to type.

But, and again, this really says something about the amount of love there was still for him. He is not cut off or alone. His family visits him regularly. They take him out and he stays with them for weekends and holidays. He's taken out and taken to shows and trips by his friends and by fellow artists.

Bob Dylan, who at this point is not particularly famous, starts visiting Woody at the Asylum in 1961, and Dylan starts working with other performers over the 60s. They play shows, they take Woody to some of these shows where they're playing his music to this new generation of newly radicalized Americans.

And Woody lives long enough to see his music honored and sold out shows by some of the, you know, like Bob Dylan, some of the most beloved up-and-coming musicians of the 60s. So he does go out knowing that his music doesn't just live on, but has like influenced this new generation of people who are going to become incredibly famous and influential musicians in their own right.

which as far as being an artist goes is about as much as you can hope for. Totally. Yeah. Especially for someone who's at the beginning, not the very beginning of recorded music, but like pretty close to it. Yeah. Yeah. He dies in October of 1967.

At that point, he is unable to communicate by any means besides pointing at cards that said yes or no. But he left behind, again, a pretty incredible legacy. Two novels, hundreds of articles, more than a thousand songs and poems, 500 illustrations, and a central role in the folk music revival that changed American music forever.

We've listened to a lot of Woody Guthrie's music in these episodes, and while I do hope you all take the opportunity to listen to more, I want to leave you with a quote of his that I think is quite relevant for our times, which Ed Cray picked out to open his 2008 biography of the man. About all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine.

I like that. I also like this quote from Bob Dylan, who was asked in 1963 to sum up his feelings on Woody Guthrie and 25 words for a book on the man. As History.com notes, Dylan, quote, responded instead with a 194-line poem called Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, which took us its theme

the eternal human search for hope. And where do you look for this hope you're seeking? Dylan asks in the poem before proceeding to a kind of answer. You can either go to the church of your choice, or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital. You'll find God in the church of your choice. You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital. Cool. Yeah. Anyway, that's Woody Guthrie. That was awesome.

I knew so little about him. I know about some of his music and it's been super influential, but that's awesome. It was one of those, again, it's a messy story, but honestly, it was better than I would have guessed. Great pick for the non-bastard holiday episode. A relevant kind of guy to know about for the kind of times we're heading into. Speaking of somebody people should know about,

I adopted a second dog. Hello. This is Anderson sister Truman. She's learning how to be a dog, but she's a good girl. She's already a good podcast dog, which is a hard level for a dog to reach. Especially a hurting dog. Yeah.

Yeah, you're a good girl. Yeah. Yeah, I guess just to say, happy holidays, everyone. Happy holidays. Yeah. Happy holidays. And I don't know. Listen to some Woody Guthrie. Yeah. We'll be back in the new year. The first week of the year, we'll have a couple of Q&A episodes. We'll have some Q's, we'll answer some A's. It'll be a good time. Any final thoughts, Magpie? Anything you want to plug?

Well, if you want Christmas every week, I have a podcast called cool people do cool stuff where I talk about cool people do cool stuff. And then either this week or next week, depending on when everything gets released, I also will be covering the history of the song Bella Chow, because I got excited by this recording last week of part one. And I thought I'm going to do a song too.

It will be the week after. We'll be releasing that. So next Monday, you all can hear me talk about the History Bellachow. Awesome. All right. Merry Christmas, Andor, whatever you want to have happy, happy. Well, that'll do it. That'll do it for 24, 24, 24. Yeah, more or less. More or less. All right. Yeah. Be well. Bye-bye.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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