Here’s an interesting article about the same musician: https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-07-21/why-woody-guthries-guitar-was-a-fascist-killer.html
Relevant paragraph:
Woody Guthrie’s guitar didn’t kill fascists because it fired bullets. It killed by neutralizing the fascists. Music, like culture, has the power to defeat right-wing extremists and their antidemocratic ideas rooted in xenophobia, racism, homophobia and sexism. Guthrie fought using ideas, language, music and the shared desire to build a better future together.
People should listen to the entirety of Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land rather than the part that’s excerpted that makes it sound super patriotic rah rah America.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Not to forget the verse about property rights:
So… he climbed the wall, checked the other side, and decided that the inside area was “for you and me” because the inside of the wall didn’t say otherwise?
Yup.
He did not believe in expensive private property rights.
This land is your land.
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…is what I would say if I didn’t always twist the lyrics to praise the compact disc 💿
How I sing the song. Warning: Cringe
💿 My pit and your land,
💿 your pit and my land,
💿 from err’r correction
💿 to the sampling theorem
💿 From the Red Book’s premise
💿 to the bitstream coders
💿 CD was made by Sony and Philips.
💿 My laser’s gliding
💿 on the spiral pathway,
💿 my cradle keeps it
💿 pointed the right way.
💿 Plastic is never
💿 made ideally
💿 but wobbles are no problem for CD.
💿 There may be dust bits
💿 that try to fool me,
💿 disks can be tainted,
💿 varying light intensity
💿 But the extra data
💿 carry everything
💿 I need to get the music error-free
💿 Audiophiles
💿 are total dickheads,
💿 claiming they can hear
💿 the “discrete DAC steps”
💿 But Shannon proved that
💿 a low-pass filter
💿 Makes samples match the input perfectly
💿 My pit and your land,
💿 your pit and my land,
💿 from err’r correction
💿 to the sampling theorem
💿 From the Red Book’s promise
💿 to the bitstream coders
💿 This was made by Sony and Philips.
Scotland and Norway have the right to roam, where there are land owners but they do not have the right to keep you off their land. As far as I’m concerned that’s the bare minimum for a decency, even though it’s a long shot from communism.
But Guthrie was a communist. This was before Stalinism and a lot of the bad connotations given to communism since - I doubt he would have embraced much of what have happened in the name of communism. But he was a union man.
Well, Guthrie was actually alive at the same time as Stalin so we don’t actually have to speculate on that. In reality, Guthrie praised Stalin, even going so far as praising the Soviet invasion of Poland, and criticizing the US for providing supplies to Finland during the Winter War. It actually wasn’t that uncommon for left-wing people in the West to support Stalin at the time, though some, for example, Pete Seeger, later changed their views. Guthrie never did, even during the height of the Cold War, when McCarthyism meant he got blacklisted, he was still saying stuff like, he hoped the communists won in the Korean War, and he never apologized for or recanted his views on Stalin.
At the height of McCarthyism, I think anyone would be a fool to believe anything told by the American government or official narratives.
Unlike Pete Seeger, who died in 2014, Guthrie died in 1967 with Huntington’s disease so severe he hadn’t been able to talk for a good while when he died. It’s also a fact that Huntington’s disease affects your mental state, and Guthrie did to some degree go crazy before he died. He got the disease from his mother, and her reaction to the illness is the origin of the family tragedies that made it so natural for Guthrie to write about his hard travelling.
There’s also accounts Guthrie was a real jerk in the final years, which again can be attributed to Huntington’s disease.
As for Korea, America had no fucking business there.
The comments I mentioned were long before Huntington affected him in his later years. Like, I’m talking about his comments on events as they were happening, when he was fully cognizant, and singing and writing smack dab in the middle of his career. You can’t just put your own positions into his mouth and write off everything he ever said to the contrary to Huntington’s. It’s both demonstrably false and also not really cool for you to do, like, he’s entitled to having his own views regardless of losing his mind to illness later on.
Woody Guthrie was ditched by his deadbeat, KKK member dad at 14, and grew up into the Great Depression. Those circumstances don’t tend to produce moderate politics. Everything I’ve seen about him suggests he saw things in very black and white terms, with the communists (including the USSR and Stalin) being the only real alternative to the racism and poverty he saw under capitalism and fascism. You can say that wasn’t the right perspective but that was his perspective.
You are, of course, right about Korea, but I brought it up because at the time it was a pretty controversial and fringe view, that he was willing to standby even under threat of persecution.
For sure, the American left were blue eyed in regards to what was happening in the Soviet Union during McCarthyism. I just find it hard to judge them too harshly for that, considering their experience of being prosecuted at home for no good reason, and their first hand experience of how American capitalists wage a full-on war against organized labour.
My way into Guthrie’s thinking is through the songs he wrote, and what emerges through that is a man who absolutely has his heart and brain in the right place. I have no doubt he had his shortcomings as a human, as we all do.
That’s fair. I only wanted to set the record straight.