Tag Archives: Bound for Glory

I Don’t Know How Far I’m Going to Have to Go to See My Own Self or to Hear My Own Voice

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When Mama would hide the books I’d walk back to the front porch, afraid to run away, but I’d use the porch for my stage, and the grass, flowers, and pickets along our fence would be my crowd of people; and I made up my first song right there:

 

Listen to the music,

Music, music;

Listen to the music,

Music band. - “Empty Snuff Cans” from “Bound for Glory”

 

It’s hard to leave the Guthrie Center after that; I felt like staying on that cold stage for … I don’t know. As long as necessary to cling to the feeling. But I also know the importance of leaving before the feeling’s gone. I left, going back to downtown Great Barrington, a numbness setting in after the adrenaline of knowing subsided.

I stopped at Yellow House Books, wandering through the stacks and shelves of used texts in a Victorian clapboard, leaving with a tomb from a former life – a giant vintage cookbook compilation with many of the books I used in a column I used to write, an artifact to connect me back to who I am, was, and will be. A few hours nursing Americanos in a coffee house helped, too, but left me wanting to head back to Woodstock early, skipping the Thursday night hootenanny at the Guthrie Center, despite that being the reason I came to town in the first place.

If hanging out in the center could emotionally exhaust me so much, there’s no way I could drive back after being in that building with voices and guitars. Over pizza and a beer, I found a cheap room for the night. I had a feeling I’d do this. Regardless, I hadn’t packed a single thing for the night. Easy enough to buy a toothbrush, toothpaste, some new socks for tomorrow, and be done with it. It’s not like I’m in a dire, desperate situation that requires traveling by freight train or living in a tent with a Hooverville. A $35 motel room won’t kill me. Neither will a lack of underpants tomorrow.
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There Once Was a Union Maid Who Never Was Afraid

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“Then more settlers trickled West, they said in search of elbow room on the ground, room to farm the rich topsoil; but, hushed and quiet, they dug into the private heart of the earth to find the lead, the soft coal, the good zinc. While the town of people only seventeen miles east of us danced on their roped-off streets and held solid weeks of loud celebrating called the King Koal Karnival, only the early roadrunners, the smart oil men, knew that in a year or two King Koal would die and his body would be burned to ashes and his long twisting grave would be left dank and dark and empty under the ground – that a new King would be dancing into the sky, gushing and spraying the entire country around with the slick black blood of the industry’s veins, the oil – King Oil – a hundred times more powerful and wild and rich and fiery than King Timber, King Steel, King Cotton, or even King Koal. – “Empty Snuff Cans” from “Bound for Glory”

(Since this week marks the 100th anniversary of Mother Jones being hauled to jail at age 86 for protesting mining conditions in West Virginia, seems like a good time to finally write about visiting her grave in Mt. Olive, Illinois, last July.)

July 3, 2012 On the eve of our nation’s birthday, I did the most American thing I could find: I drove by myself through rural Illinois to Davenport, Iowa, in search of Woody Guthrie at a Wilco concert with my friends Sam, Brianne, and Paul. I’ve made lots of drives north on I-55 through the sprawl of crops and wind farms. It’s necessary to get to Chicago, and to my in-laws in Michigan, friends in Peoria. And this time, a town on the Illinois-Iowa border. In nearly 15 years of making these drives, I’ve never followed the signs near Mt. Olive, indicating the Mother Jones memorial. Mostly because I had no idea what it meant or who she was beyond the brief biographies in my feminism books – badass old lady who gave what-for to people who needed it. Which, really, should be enough for me. Hell, Congress called her “the grandmother of all agitators,” so I have no excuse for slacking on my Mother Jones learning.

By this point in the Guthrie project, I knew enough to realize that Mother Jones was the original union maid, fighting for the same workers rights years before Woody was even born. Without Mother Jones, there might not have been a Woody Guthrie. And there would have been fewer miners and workers; her fight for safer, humane working conditions saved more lives than we can begin to fathom.  Continue reading →

I Stand Alone in My Back Door and That’s Something I Never Did Before.

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“She’d come to the office where Papa was, and she’d set down and turn through the magazines and papers, looking at all of the pictures. She liked to look at pictures of the mountains. Sometimes she’d look at a picture for two or three minutes. And then she’d say, “I’d like to be there.” – “Boy in Search of Something” from “Bound for Glory”

I have no idea how to be alone.

This is a relatively new development. Growing up without siblings, I never felt like I was missing anything, content to spend my time alone in my room with my books and records. The characters I met in songs and books, or concocted in my head, interested me far more than anyone I’d ever met. I was an unshy introvert – personable and friendly, but requiring my solo time, which people didn’t seem to understand.

Now, I consider myself a forced extrovert – an introvert by nature who contorted to extrovertism long enough to perfect it. It’s worked well for me. No doubt by ability to talk to anyone about damn near anything has served me well in this project, and in my life in general. But after all these months of crowds and events, coupled with having lived with my family since 1999, I’m ready for some alone time.

My friend Kate’s mother splits her time between St. Louis and a cottage in the Catskills a few miles from Woodstock, New York. When she’s in St. Louis, she lets artists and writers use her Woodstock house as a retreat. Months ago Kate brokered the details for a week-long stay for me at her mother’s. By myself. In the dead of winter.

It sounded like the most wonderful and terrible thing, being alone on a mountain for a week, finishing this project. So of course, I did it.

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The Radio Reported, We Listened With Alarm, the Wild and Windy Actions of This Great Mysterious Storm.

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Men fighting against men. Color against color. Kin against kin. Race pushing against race. And all of us battling against the wind and the rain and that bright crackling lightning that booms and zooms, that bathes his eyes in the white sky, wrestles a river to a standstill, and spends the night drunk in a whorehouse. – “Soldiers in the Dust” from “Bound for Glory.”

 

I was four and a half on May 4, 1977. A rather boring day, I built a blanket and pillow fort on the couch where I watched game shows all morning. It was laundry day, with my mother going up and down the steep stairs to our concrete slab basement with heaped plastic baskets.

The biggest excitement of the day? Waiting for her to invite me to join her for a little laundry bonding. So when she told me to hurry up and get to the basement, I thought the time had finally come for me to tip-toe peer into the sudsy drum that churned my muddy duds clean again.

Instead of going to the washing machine, she hustled me to the other side of the basement, a dark, webby storage corner. We huddled under a tent of blankets while my mother cried, asking me to pray with her for my dad, who was running his rural milk delivery route, to come home safely.

In the cold dankness, hearing my mother pray for my father, her sobs, and the howl and roar above us not five minutes after Bob Barker instructed his contestants to spin the big wheel for a chance at the Showcase Showdown, was when I learned just how fast a tornado can gnash large portions of my hometown. One minute it’s laundry and Barker’s beauties. The next, we’re praying for our lives.

The tornado was just shy of an F4, with winds over 200 miles per hour. One dead, thirty injured, 150 homes destroyed. 300 damaged in an eleven-mile path. In a town with 20,000 people. Two schools were so wrecked they had to close for the last month of classes.

We drove through town with my grandmother in her yellow VW wagon, and the wailed at the destruction. Under a bright blue sky with sun reflecting the flooded puddles, the new May verdant leaves from trees upended, sharing the ground with balls of pink fluff. Fresh green and cotton candy looks like a wonderland until you realize the pink fluff is the guts of fiberglass insulation, ripped from the soul of the homes when the storm turned them inside-out.

Three years later, it happened again. Once again, we huddled in the basement, our home and family spared. And again in 1982. Twice. The week of Thanksgiving in 1990.

Six years ago a wall of wind descended on St. Louis, leaving us and a million others without power during the hottest week of July. It happened so fast that the windows on the east side of our house were sunny while the ones to the west went black. That one happened so fast there wasn’t time to sound the alarms.

Hurricane Sandy didn’t scare me, because I’ve seen death drop from the sky with no notice. I knew Sandy was likely to hit New York nearly a week before my trip.

Not that this completely prepared me.

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I Fully Aim to Get My Soul Known Again as the Maniac, the Saint, the Sinner, the Drinker, the Thinker, the Queer.

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 I don’t know why I didn’t tell them I had a guitar up yonder hanging on that tree. I just reared back and soaked in every note and every word of their singing. It was so clear and honest sounding, no Hollywood put-on, no fake wiggling. It was better to me than the loud squalling and bawling you’ve got to do to make yourself heard in the old mobbed saloons. And instead of getting you all riled up mentally, morally and sexually  - no, it done something a lot better, something that’s harder to do, something you need ten times more. It cleared your head up, that’s what it done, caused you to fall back and let your draggy bones rest and your muscles go limber like a cat’s. – “The Telegram that Never Came” – from “Bound for Glory”

 

My husband knows everything I do, and he doesn’t mind.

He doesn’t mind that I’ve run around the country, chasing Woody Guthrie.

If he traveled for his work, would you tell him what a good, patient, loving, generous wife he had for letting him do his job? Probably not.

I get told that all the time. I do agree that he’s all those things, but it bothers me that men with those traits are still considered “special” when they should be considered “normal.”

He doesn’t mind that I’m fat.

Do I get pitying looks for having a spouse he’s chubbier, grayer, and sleepier than he was in 1998 when we met? No. So why should he?

He doesn’t mind that I’m a social butterfly, gregarious, and tend to fall into flirtation without even realizing it. When he does the, he’s considered charming.

He doesn’t mind that I have parts of my life that have nothing to do with him or our daughter.

How lucky am I to have such an understanding husband?

That’s not luck; that’s the way it should be. From both sides.

He doesn’t mind that I took a Saturday to indulge in the offerings of the West Village.

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Maybe We’ll Have All the Fascists Out of the Way by Then. Maybe So.

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“I’m not personally in the money-lending business. It would be against the law for me to lend you money without letting the governor know.”

 

“Th’ gov’ner? Shucks, me ‘n’ th’ gov’ner’s always goin’ aroun’ with our hands in each other’s pockits. Big friends.” – from “A Fast-Running Train Whistles Down” from “Bound for Glory”

 

Among other things you can’t do in the Kennedy Center: you can’t take pictures.

I wasn’t even trying to take a picture during the show. I’d arrived at my seat, after finally meeting Andie, my contact at the Grammy Museum who helped get me into so many events for this project. So many that upon meeting, we hugged like old pals.

But even that connection didn’t spare me from getting a tap on the shoulder as I raised my phone to take a photo of the auditorium as people filed in.

“No photography in the Kennedy Center,” the usher sneered.

I hate arbitrary rules.

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Some Rob You With a Six-Gun, Some With a Fountain Pen

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If you think of something new to say, if a cyclone comes, or a flood wrecks the country, or a bus load of school children freeze to death along the road, if a big ship goes down, and an airplane falls in your neighborhood, an outlaw shoots it out with the deputies, or the working people go out and win a war, yes, you’ll find a train load of things you can set down and make up a song about. You’ll hear people singing your words around over the country, and you’ll sing their songs everywhere you travel or everywhere you live; and these are the only kind of songs my head or my memory or my guitar has got room for. – “The Telegram That Never Came” from “Bound for Glory”

 

Robert Santelli has this panel discussion business down-pat: prompt musicians to tell their stories both in words and music. After he made me shrivel in my seat, he moved on to introducing the panel, who all told their stories of how they became familiar with Woody Guthrie’s music. For Noel Stookey, he was a part of the Beat scene at Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, where he learned about Woody from Ramblin’ Jack and Bob Dylan.

Ramblin’ Jack learned about Woody by calling him repeatedly while Guthrie was hospitalized with appendicitis in 1951, eventually showing up at his house and not leaving for a few years.

LaFave grew up in Oklahoma with the Guthrie lore, which he passed on to accordion player Radoslav Lorković, who joined the musicians on stage, giving extra spring to LaFave’s soft-sung take on “Oklahoma Hills.”

At the beginning of the program the audience was told that, because the discussion was being recorded for the library’s archives, we needed to be quiet. But I love to sing along to “Oklahoma Hills”! Ask Aimee. Folk music isn’t meant to be quietly enjoyed while ensconced in your seat. With everyone conscious of every move and noise they make, the song’s spark gets extinguished.

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Where the Beer Flows to the Ocean

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(Don’t forget – still fundraising to finish my research. I’m a smidge over halfway to my goal. Pledge if you can! Spread the word!)

“I been needin’ a little drink ta ease me on down ta Chicago.” I wiped my hand across my face and smiled around at everybody. “I shore thank ya fer thinkin’ ’bout me.” I took the bottle and smelled of the gasoline. Then I sailed the bottle over a dozen men’s heads and out the door.” – “Soldiers in the Dust” from “Bound for Glory”

 

Obviously, this blog ceased being chronological a long time ago. Events this summer came faster than I could write about them. Not a bad problem for a writer to have, although I’m not thrilled to have things so disjointed.

But sometimes, waiting works. I’ve been trying to write about my trip to Chicago to see Tom Morello on May 19, the night before the NATO convention and ensuing protests for three months, but have been in too much of a dead run capturing other events to do so.

Lucky me – I procrastinated long enough to make my Morello post relevant.

Gen X music nerds (hello) and guitar geeks know Morello as lead guitarist of politically-charged Rage Against the Machine. Here they are in 1999:

Current union supporters and people protesting on behalf of the 99% know him as The Nightwatchman – the personae he uses for his acoustic protest music. He’s been a fixture at Occupy camps and protests and union events.

When I interviewed Sarah Lee Guthrie last April, and saw her aunt, Nora, speak in early May, they both said the same thing about Morello: he’s the current embodiment of Woody Guthrie’s spirit.

Here he is two days before the NATO convention at the National Nurses United Rally in Chicago, after Chicago city and NATO officials almost denied the union their protest permit if Morello attended :

This one-man revolution? Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan claims Morello’s former band is his favorite. Last week, Morello said, “I don’t think so, Paul.”

I missed the nurses, but I still got a taste of the fervor. It was delicious.

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Hard Travelin’, Hard Ramblin’, Hard Gamblin’

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I never did make up many songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs of what all’s wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in that country was thinking.

 

And this has held me ever since. - “Boy in Search of Something” from “Bound for Glory”

It all boils down to those songs, which continue to inspire and, unfortunately, are often still relevant. In all the Guthrie tributes I’ve attended, not one sounded like a throw-back, nostalgic hootenanny. It’s all here and now.

Let’s review:

July 11 – Drove from Belleville, Illinois, to Salpulpa, Oklahoma.

July 12 – Drove the long way to Okemah. Met Woody Guthrie’s sister. Hung out with my busker pal, Peter. Stole stuff (and have since been busted. Thanks, Internet!). Drank beer with my elders. Had another Billy Bragg encounter. Drove back to Salpulpa. When I was back at my hotel, I had to do the math to understand that no, I hadn’t met Woody’s sister three days earlier; it just felt like it because so much had happened.

July 13 – Yelled at a reporter, drove the seven hours to St. Louis, went straight to Corey Woodruff’s “New Years Rulin’s” Woody Guthrie photo exhibit opening. Was a social butterfly until my exhausted husband, who was falling asleep at our table despite having led a normal, rational day, drug my ass home at midnight because honestly Robin, you have got to get some sleep because you’re delirious and can’t shut up.

July 14 – I should sleep in. Take it easy. Maybe entertain the notion of a really, really long shower to wash all those miles, 100+ degree heat, and Oklahoma dirt off me. Not that I hadn’t bathed in that time, but when you run at that rate, it all just digs in deeper.

I did sleep. But with it being Woody’s actual birthday, I had to write. So I wrote. A great big dump of my brain and my soul, trying to articulate why I’m doing this project. And I’m glad I did. That little bit of groggy afternoon writing has landed in some pretty amazing hands.

That wasn’t all I had to do. For months I’d had Woody’s birthday marked on my calender for “Just One Big Soul: Woody Guthrie’s 100th Birthday Party.”

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Ain’t Nobody That Can Sing Like Me

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“I’m with yuh, brother!” A lady walked up with a big black purse and a gallon jug of wine, ready to be broke over somebody’s head.

 

“I ain’t a-movin’, neither!” A little old skinny man was flipping his belt buckle. “Let ‘em come!”

 

“As the last two or three flat cars of men rolled down the street and kept the wild mob back for a minute, I grabbed my guitar up and started singing:

 

“We will fight together

We shall not be moved

We will fight together

We shall not be moved

Just like a tree

That’s planted by the water

We

Shall not

Be moved.

 

“Everybody sing!” Cisco grabbed his guitar and hollered out. “Stormy Night” from “Bound for Glory”

Even though I haven’t written about the Billy Bragg concert in Chicago last month, I covered his songwriting workshop. And I’ll get around to writing about the Chicago concert, because I have a lot to say about that night.

I’ll refrain from posting the photo of me in full-on jackass bray from my Billy Bragg meeting in Chiago. But I’ll continue to post this one all over the internet until I’m at 93 years old, because I love it.

My cousin-in-law commented that I look like a little girl on Christmas. I had some pretty great holidays as a kid, but I never got a five minute conversation with one of my favorite musicians. So this was Christmas morning times a thousand in terms of excitement.

I was most impressed that Bragg had taken the time to have actual conversations with the fans who hung out after the workshop that day, asking what brought each of us to see him. I told him a little bit about my project and he asked if he’d see me in Okemah. I was still trying to pull together the details of the trip at the time.

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