INTERVIEW WITH DR. DOUG MORRIS on “Woody Guthrie Celebrations and Sing-Alongs”

Dr. Doug Morris will host a “Woody Guthrie Celebration and Sing-Along” Wednesday, August 22, 7:00-9:00 p.m., in the Sandia Room, CUB.  For more information, contact:  doug.morris@enmu.edu

Q:  What should we know about Woody Guthrie?

dm:  His music is still relevant.  The relevance points to Woody’s genius, but it also points to our failures to address and overcome the many problems about which Woody sang and protested:  poverty; exploitation, abuse, and oppression of working people; injustice; racism; fascism; inequality; capitalism; eco-disasters; militarism and mass violence; and the systems, ideologies, and institutions that produce and perpetuate these unnecessary abominations, etc. 

Woody’s friend and mentor Ed Robbin said, here paraphrasing a bit, Woody believed what is important is (1) the struggle for working people to take back the earth, which is rightfully ours, (2) people should love one another, and (3) people should organize into One Big Union.  The One Big Union idea Woody borrowed from the “Industrial Workers of the World,” also known as the Wobblies, or the IWW.  The Wobblies also had a strong musical influence on Woody, especially Wobbly bard Joe Hill, with songs such as “Preacher and the Slave,” “Casey Jones,” etc.  Woody was known to carry in his pocket the Wobbly “Little Red Songbook:  Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.”

Robbin said Woody traveled the land trying to organize people, to get people together to fight for a better world, to put an end to discrimination, and to get people to recognize our common enemy, i.e. the tyranny of a system that makes a few people very rich and many people poor.  Woody named that system:  capitalism.  The relevance of that critique reemerged again recently with the global OCCUPY movements (or “moments”).   The OCCUPY movements put capitalism back on the table for critique, analysis, and challenge.  That is one of the key reasons the OCCUPY movement was so brutally repressed and maligned.  In the US there are certain taboos in terms of public discourse, one is critiquing capitalism and the other is critiquing US militarism.  We (the public) are not typically permitted to critically analyze capitalism and US militarism.   Woody was marginalized for his commitments to these critiques and for his commitment to struggle for more humanized and humanizing modes of social existence.  Understanding the history of repression is also relevant. 

The fear on the part of power is that people will gain a critical understanding of the systemic root causes of most of their problems and when people gain that understanding they will want to change the system.  The propertied class will rarely surrender their ostentatious privileges without a fight. The threat of OCCUPY is the threat of meaningful democracy (the last thing tyrannical systems will tolerate), and meaningful popular and participatory democracy is what Woody was calling for and singing about in tunes such as “This Land is Your Land.” 

One must know that Woody was singing that song to working people, i.e. the 99% in OCCUPY language.  It is, like many of Woody’s songs, a song about class struggle.  Woody understood that class is not determined by your income level but by your relationship to the means of production.  If you do not own the tools of production, if you do not own the material and ideological resources in the society, if all you do is sell your labor power to the system of capital, then you are in the working class, it does not matter if you are a college professor or a construction worker.  Woody said the idea behind the song is that those eight words, “This land is made for you and me” (i.e. not made for the exploiters who steal the wealth that workers create and exploit the wealth of nature), will stay with people and come bubbling up into “eighty jillion, all union,” i.e. One Big Union.  

Most folks have never heard what Pete Seeger calls “the good verses” from “This Land is Your Land.”  The schoolbooks only print the seemingly “safe verses,” and the song gets misinterpreted and misappropriated as a patriotic anthem.  It is a song for the people, not a song to celebrate abstractions.  Those three “good verses” explain well the heart and soul of the tune with the critique of private property, and anger in the face of poverty and destitution surrounded by the great real wealth of the country (the natural and human wealth), and the spirit and will to fight for freedom against exploitation and oppression. 

John Steinbeck described Woody in the Introduction to a collection of songs called “Hard Hittin’ Songs for Hard Hit People,” a book that was suppressed for roughly 25 years because of an unfriendly to popular democracy political climate in the US.  Steinbeck said something along the lines of the following:  “harsh voiced and nasal, a guitar hanging like a tire-iron from a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings.  There is, however, something more important for those willing to listen. It is the will of a people to struggle and resist, to fight back against tyranny, oppression, and exploitation.  I think we call it the American Spirit.”  That spirit to struggle and resist, and fight against exploitation, oppression, and tyranny was very much alive in the 1930s in unions and political organizations of the left.  If we do not rekindle that “American Spirit” the future looks very bleak as the two great threats to the future of humanity continue to escalate, climate change related catastrophes (more coming soon) and global militarism led by US power’s commitment (not US people’s commitment) to address international problems with violence. 

If Woody was still around today, he would surely note that it is the system of capital that is driving humanity over a cliff.  We can guess he would argue, because he was alert to reality, that capitalism is the root cause of global ecological destruction and militarism, the two great threats to the future of humanity.  Noam Chomsky said recently that if we do not address and overcome the root causes of climate catastrophe in the next generation or so, nothing else will matter anyway.  Perhaps that statement should be on everyone classroom door, and addressed at every meeting in the world of education.  People should have been listening more carefully to Woody 70 years ago!  The relevance continues, as does the struggle…

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of Woody’s birth and there have been countless celebrations all across the US that will continue through the rest of the year.  He is one of the more important figures in the history of US music, especially protest music/folk music, and he has influenced a seemingly endless array of musicians from Bob Dylan, to Phil Ochs, to Bruce Springsteen, to Joan Baez, to Tracy Chapman, to Billy Bragg, to Rage Against the Machine, Street Dogs, the Beatles, the Dropkick Murphys, Steve Earle, Melanie, to Utah Phillips, etc., etc., etc. 

He was, like all of us, his sets of contradictions.  Woody was a Dust Bowl troubadour, anti-imperialist, Merchant Marine and soldier in WWII, novelist, womanizer, anti-capitalist, victim of anti-communist witch hunts and the Huntington’s disease that killed him in 1967 and shut him down as a productive musician in his early 40s, an encyclopedic writer of songs, poems, anecdotes, columns, and essays.  He wrote more than 3,000 songs.  He was a radio host, organizer, storyteller, pro-union all-American, educator, class warrior on the side of the working class, i.e. on the side of everyone who is not an owner of the means of production (i.e. the overwhelming majority, i.e. most of us), an activist for peace and social justice, philosopher, journalist, anti-fascist, political campaigner for Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, working class hero, agitator, subversive , protest singer, etc. 

I’d highly recommend Will Kaufman’s book “Woody Guthrie: American Radical.”  I wrote a review of the book for Z Communications:  http://www.zcommunications.org/woody-guthrie-at-100-the-secret-and-the-fight-by-doug-morris

Q:  What led you to perform Woody Guthrie celebrations and sing-alongs?

dm:  The “American Spirit” captured by Steinbeck’s comments on Woody is part of it.  That “American Spirit” has been co-opted over the years so that too many people have either passively surrendered to the foreboding interests of power or actively serve the interests of destructive power.  In Woody’s time that “American Spirit” meant people were willing to struggle together in the interest of the people and against tyrannical systems.  The spirit is always present in humans, but sometimes it is dormant and sometimes it is more awake.  History teaches us that whenever there is large scale oppression there will be resistance; whenever there is large-scale exploitation there will be rebellion; and, whenever there is too much tyranny there will be revolutions.  It reflects what Rousseau and Chomsky call the human “instinct for freedom.”  Woody, in the best meaning of the term, was a revolutionary, with some spirit from Jefferson, Lincoln, Marx, Lenin, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Jesus, etc. 

So, there is always the question of how we can work collectively to develop the will, knowledge, and ability, as well as the self-confidence, support, and solidarity to resist destructive systems and overcome pathological institutions rooted in exploitation, oppression, and abuse while also working to realize in practice knowledge of a better world.  Woody had that spirit.  Sharing and singing his songs collectively might play a role in reawakening the spirit at a time when the spirit is urgently needed.  For example, regarding urgent need, the “International Energy Agency” suggested recently that we have roughly, in their estimation, until 2017 to address the root causes of climate change or “the door will be closed forever.”  That is five years to save the future from horror.  Should we continue teaching as though everything is OK?  Is that a moral and rational approach to education?  In short, the IEA is suggesting that in five years we will have reached a point of no return and what happens after that can only get uglier and uglier. 

We’ve experienced linear climate change but precipitous climate change is on the horizon. Activists have been warning people for at least 40 years, or more.  Murray Bookchin wrote warnings in the 1960s.  150 years ago Marx warned of capitalism’s imperative to destroy environments.  In fact, destroying environments under capitalism is not a sign of failure but a measure of success given the imperatives to always accumulate and expand, the structural determination to maximize profitability, market-share, and power, and the demand to exploit, oppress, and destroy.  At some point soon, people will have to start talking honestly about the dominant systems, ideologies, and institutions…if they care about the human future.  We can no longer delude ourselves or assume that our passivity, egoism, or apathy will not come back soon to haunt us.  Gabriel Kolko warns that a dark night of despair will descend upon humanity if we do not banish dogma, illusions, and dehumanizing fundamentalisms and start acting, sooner rather than later, with far greater and much better informed wisdom. Woody tried to alert people…

The sing-along part is also connected to the idea that when people live in an increasingly atomized and alienated society, singing together is a revolutionary act, to borrow an idea from Wobbly singer and storyteller Utah Phillips. Additionally, there is the Pete Seeger influence and Pete was a fellow-traveler with Woody.  In a world that is increasingly joyless and spiritless, collective singing can provide a joyful and spirited experience, and that in itself becomes a form of protest. 

Woody was one of Pete Seeger’s key mentors.  Pete said “it doesn’t matter that you always sing the right notes, it matters that you sing.”  Pete has always believed in the power of song to awaken the spirit of resistance and struggle. It is like the Rabbi Tarfon said “It is not incumbent upon us to succeed, but neither are we free to refrain from the struggle.”  It applies to singing and larger social struggles. 

 I always knew a bit about Woody but became more familiar with his music and politics when I joined the “Industrial Workers of the World” union back in the 90s.  Wobbly singers often sing some of Woody’s tunes, especially “Union Maid.”  Additionally, one is always looking for ways to make the political more pedagogical and the pedagogical more political.  The point is to ask how we can connect the realities of the world (i.e. the political) to pedagogy and pedagogy to the realities of the world in ways that awaken our sense and reality of agency so that we can intervene to carry out positive individual and systemic transformations.  As educators we are always looking for ways to connect with people, learn from people, share ideas with people, open up possibilities for folks to be human (i.e. to care for and nurture one another), extend critical knowledge and understanding of the dominant systems, ideologies, and institutions, deepen our comprehension of the processes and relationships that make history, stand on the side of substantive justice, freedom, equality, and democracy, etc.  Woody attempted all of that. 

As noted, Woody was a public educator in the wider sense of what it means to be a public educator/public intellectual.  In his role as public educator/public intellectual he believed in the power of music and the power of words to provide mirrors on reality, open windows into better realities, and offer tools to transform reality.  Woody said he would not sing songs that degraded people.  He said he would fight until his last breath and last drop of blood against songs that made people feel they were born to lose or bound to lose.  Woody believed that the land/earth belonged to the people.  Like Rousseau we can guess that Woody would proclaim:  “the fruits of our labor belong to us; the fruit of the earth belong to everyone, and the earth itself belongs to no one.  

Woody’s music and commitments open up multiple opportunities for public education in these wider senses.  And that gets back to Ed Robbin’s comments about Woody and Woody’s work to assist people in gaining a deeper understanding of the dominant systems, ideologies and institutions that make life miserable and insufferable for all too many people (and those numbers will be growing in the coming years if we do not carry out necessary structural/systemic transformations) and to organize people to struggle to create decent systems and institutions, i.e. humanized and humanizing systems and institutions. 

About two years ago I was reading about Woody and noted that 2012 would mark the 100^th anniversary of his birth.  So, I started listening to more of his music and then started singing and playing his songs and sharing them in small settings with friends, comrades, and family.  My music background is in jazz, but more recently I developed an interest in folk music as an idiom for performance.  I am admittedly not a great singer, but like that great crooner and philosopher Iggy Pop if I am not carrying the tune I will still try to find a way to get it across the street. Joe Klein in his biography of Woody said “listening to Woody is like biting into a lemon:  bitter and exhilarating.  I knew that I could bring the bitter element (i.e. not a great voice) and in order to create the exhilaration it seemed like audience participation would be a key element. 

Then there is Woody’s politics.  Discussing his politics is complicated, but we can say broadly that his politics are rooted in his two favorite philosophers, Jesus and Marx.  As noted, such politics, sometimes called “radical,” but in the good sense of “radical,” (i.e. getting to the systemic roots of problems) are more relevant than ever.  And, as noted, the relevance is sort of a blessing and a curse.  The blessing is we can still use the songs in the ongoing struggles to build a decent world, and the curse is that the dominant systems, ideologies, and institutions are stronger than ever and continuing to produce the the poverty, and abuse, and exploitation, and oppression, and killing about which Woody often sang.

Q:  Where have you shared these Woody Guthrie celebration and sing-along performances?

DM:  It should be said that Woody seemed to carry his guitar everywhere (without a case frequently, and often the guitars were borrowed and sometimes not returned) and he would sing anywhere, on buses, on subway cars, on stoops, in shelters, in bars, in coffee shops, etc., etc.  So, not quite living up to Woody’s example, these celebrations have been shared in churches, coffee houses, living rooms, porches, basements, union halls, “Rebel Theater” at Penn State, on a beach in Rhode Island, academic conferences (e.g. “The Rouge Forum” conference in OH over the summer:  http://www.rougeforum.org/   “The Rouge Forum” is an international group of educators dedicated to creating a world in which people can realize their full intellectual, imaginative, and productive potential under conditions of substantive democracy, equality, solidarity, freedom, and justice).  A few of the performances have been geared around raising funds, for example, for the “American Friends Service Committee,” and the Immokalee workers.