Tag Archives: Nora Guthrie

Got No Fear in Life. Got No Fear in Death.

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I walked along, the day just leaving out over the tops of the tall buildings, and sifting through the old scarred chimneys sticking up. Thank the good Lord, everybody, everything ain’t all afraid. Afraid in the skyscrapers, and afraid in the red tape offices, and afraid in the tick of the little machine that never explodes, stock market tickers, that scare how many to death, ticking off deaths, marriages and divorces, friends and enemies; tickers connected and plugged in like juke boxes, playing the false and corny lies that are sung in the wild canyons of Wall Street; songs wept by the families that lose, songs jingled on the silver spurs of the men that win. Here on the slummy edges, people are crammed down on the curbs, the sidewalks and the fireplugs, and cars and trucks and kids and rubber balls are bouncing through the streets. I was thinking, “This is what I call bein’ burned an’ a-livin’; I don’t know what I call that big high building back yonder that I left.” – “Crossroads” from “Bound for Glory”

 

New York City’s not nearly as intimidating the second time, especially when taking the same flight as before and staying in the same hotel, knowing how to go about getting a cab with a driver who knows how to get to said hotel. It lowers the adventure factor, but after seven months of traveling, I’m nearing my adventure quota.

It’s the last weekend in October, and this trip should be simple. Two concerts in the same location - Pace University on the Lower East Side – on two different nights. Plenty of time to travel, get lost, get found, explore, and sleep, when I’m not immersed in Justin Townes Earle and Joe Pug.

My mother wasn’t quite as convinced that I was going to be murdered to death this time in New York. I’d like to think it’s because I turned 40 a week earlier and in that time have kept myself and the person I made with my body alive and well.

No, that wasn’t it. This time, she was convinced I was going to be decimated by the hurricane slowly climbing the eastern seaboard in a grim race with the blizzard creeping east over Ohio.

“Please tell me you’re going to cancel this trip,” she sighed into the phone the day before I left.

I’m no fool, Mama,

I know the difference

Between tempting

And choosing my fate.

Of course I’m not canceling. Not even an option. I grew up in Tornado Alley. With my mother. Fleeing for cover with a few seconds notice? Second-nature. The hurricane and blizzard are days away and trackable.

Woody Guthrie arrived in New York City during one of the worst blizzards in the city’s history. He did just fine.

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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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Seen a Billion, Jillion Faces That are New York Town to Me

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Brooklyn. Saturday, September 22.

“Walk out on ‘em?”

“Goddammit! I jes’ had ta walk out, Will! Couldn’t take that stuff!”

“Goin’ ta keep pullin’ them one-man walkouts till you’ve ruined all of y’r chances here in New York. Better watch y’r step.”

“Will, you know me. You know dam good an’ well I’d play fer my beans an’ cornbread, an’ drink branch water, ‘er anything else ta play an’ sing fer folks that likes it, folks that knows it, an’ lives what I’m a singin’ ’bout. I’m all screwed up in my head. They try ta tell me if I wanta eat an’ stay alive, I gotta sing their dam old phony junk!”

“You’d just naturally explode up in that high society, wouldn’t you, But, money’s what it takes, Woody.”

- “Crossroads” from “Bound for Glory”

Brooklyn College, September 22. Another Woody at 100 tribute concert, formatted much like the first show in Tulsa last March: a pack of artists of all levels of success and ages, playing a couple of Guthrie’s songs, collaborating. Judy Collins opened on acoustic guitar with her classic take on “Pastures of Plenty,” much like we’d heard it that afternoon.

I’d never heard of Mike + Ruthy from Woodstock, New York, before the show. A darling young couple with a newborn at home, they channel Guthrie’s spririt and Carter Family stylings on “Union Maid,” “Vigilante Man,” and “Dust Bowl Blues” before presenting their reworking of his little-known “My New York City.”

It’s Guthrie’s love song to his adopted hometown, the town that has so often been neglected in the glossy version of his biography. We know Woody in Oklahoma. Woody in California. But this was Woody’s life for many years, the place he chose to be. The place he stayed. His train was a subway, not a westbound freighter.

Among the audience and performers, the love for their adopted son bleeds strong. The audience shared Dave Marsch’s sentiment from earlier in the day with a surprising number of tears. Is this New York City? Brooklyn? Toughest city in the country, brought to tears over a death too soon nearly a half-century ago?

If so, I really do want to stay.

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This Dusty Old Dust is Blowing Me Home

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Dust didn’t blow me home. It was the threat of tidal waves that did it.

I split on one of the last flights from La Guardia Sunday night, a hurried and frightened end to seven months of chasing Woody Guthrie’s legacy around the country. It ended just as  haphazard and wild as everything else on this trip. More so, even, if that’s possible.

A request: I don’t know how many people got this URL from scribbled pieces of paper ripped from my notepad through the course of my travels, since I never got around to getting real business cards. I’m thrilled to have forged friendships with some of you already. Others, I miss.

The guy who talked to me before Saturday’s Justin Townes Earle show – I want to hear about the Dylan concert, and find out how a native New Yorker has such a heartland soul. You left so fast after the show, and I chased after you – chased! I never chase people. Maybe you left so fast to get away from the motormouth writer. But I want to hear your stories.

Heather in Washington, DC, who brokered a more-than-fair Craigslist ticket deal: I want to hear your Old Crow Medicine Show stories, and find out what brought a couple my age into the AARP Meeting at the Kennedy Center.

The ladies who sat with me at that night’s hootenanny – I want to sing folk songs with you and conduct covert ticket deals in stairwells any day of the week.

Foofie and Rebecca, I want to know you’re safe from the storm.

My table mates at the Old Town School of Folk Billy Bragg show: my dog is still out of control. Please teach me.

The great-grandparents from Oklahoma City I met at Woodyfest who bought me beers – I want to know if your great-grandbaby made it. You have weighed on my heart since I met you.

People who came here via Kickstarter, I owe you everything.

Everyone. If you met me in my travels and you’re reading this because we crossed paths, please email me. robindawn@gmail.com. Or leave a comment. Not because I want to suck what I can from you for this project, but because I’m starting to grieve.

Starting to realize that maybe not every day will find me stranded in an airport, waiting for the storm of the century, sitting beside a pediatrician who just happens to work at a free clinic for the children of migrant workers in Michigan, willing to talk about what she sees every day, and how it all fits into this picture. Continue reading →

If an Atom Bomb Hits New York It’ll be New York No More

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“What will be your first selection, Mr. Guthrie?”

“Little tune, I guess, call’d New York City.” And so I forked the announcer out of the way with the wiry end of my guitar handle and made up these words as I sung:

 

This Rainbow Room she’s mighty fine

You can spit from here to th’ Texas line!

In New York City

Lord, New York City

This is New York City, an’ I really gotta know my line! – “Crossroads” from “Bound for Glory”

 

Although the good folks at the Grammy Museum had set me up with a free ticket for Saturday night’s Woody at 100 tribute concert, I was a bit panicked about the first-come, first-served nature of the day’s symposium at Brooklyn. Even more panicked about the transportation issue.

Let me repeat: don’t be fooled by the TV and movies. Cabs aren’t ever-present. Turns out, they’re illegal in all the boroughs except Manhattan. I learned this late Friday night while trying to figure out how to get myself to Brooklyn College the next morning. Not confident in my ability to not flub public transportation, I arranged a car service. Which I hate. It’s a plain car that costs twice as much as a cab. Basically paying to not be seen in a bright yellow vehicle that exclaims, “Hey! I don’t have a car of my own!”

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California Stars

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By Robin Wheeler

“California’s mortally loaded down with stuff to ride along an’ look at, ain’t it?”

 

“Long on climate out here! But still, it costs ya like th’ devil ta soak up any of it! the boy who was driving said.

 

“All you folks one family?” I asked them. - “Extry Selects” from “Bound for Glory”

Woody made friends when he went to California. Lots of kind people who made brief but loving appearances in his time of need, never to be seen again.

I hope the latter’s not the case with the friends I made in California. Some will be, of course. Many won’t. Reading “Bound for Glory” and Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” drives home just how amazingly connected we are today. Meet someone half a country away? Swap email addresses, phone numbers, friend each other, follow each others’ digital footsteps. It doesn’t guarantee a life-long connection, but it’s certainly potential for more than Woody had with his lumberjack, fellow train-jumpers, family in the orchard.

We grow up learning that friendship is supposed to last forever. This must be a new concept. Or a very old one that predates the wonders of human mobility of the past two centuries. One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned – am still learning – is the finite nature of friendship. I’m trying to accept it as it comes to me, nurture it as I can, and accept its fleeting tendencies.

While I was in California for the John Steinbeck Festival, I gobbled up the connections that came to me with no expectations beyond those days.

In order of appearance, here are the friends I had during my California trip.

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“The Scribbling Really Did Stay” – Billy Bragg on Songwriting

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By Robin Wheeler

I shook hands with the lumberjack and we went our opposite ways. I never did get a real close look at him in the clouds; and when he walked away, his head and shoulders just sort of swum away in the fog of the morning. I had made another friend I couldn’t see. And I walked along thinking, Well, now, I don’t know if I’ll ever see that man again or not, but I’ll see a lot of men a lot of places and I’ll wonder if that could be him. “The House on the Hill” from “Bound for Glory”

While strangers might not have been so friendly (or interesting) in the hotel bar on Friday night, my decision to do some time in there was a good one in the long run. The emotional prophylactic of that sterile environment prepped me for the heart-bursting level of emotion that was Saturday.

Saturday morning, none of the issues that plagued my travel attempts to Lincoln Square on Friday night reappeared. Pretty sure the universe really wanted me to stay put that night. Arrived at the Old Town School of Folk with plenty of time to stake out a good spot for Billy Bragg’s workshop: “Why Write a Song?: Protest Music in the Digital Age.” Not that there was a bad spot; the audience was kept at around 100 people, hosted in an acoustically-perfect room, going 90 minutes instead of the allotted 60.

All that for $35. And I never would have known about it had I not called the box office, begging for concert tickets two weeks ago. Sometimes it pays to be a pest.

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Watching “Man in the Sand” on the Eve of Billy Bragg’s Woody Guthrie Tributes

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There’s no reasonable excuse for me taking 11 years to watch “Man in the Sand,” the documentary about the making of “Mermaid Avenue.” It’s been on Netflix streaming for years. The 3-CD “Mermaid Avenue” re-release that I bought in April includes a DVD of the film.

I love music documentaries. Why haven’t I watched the one about the music I love the most? Because I’m avoidant. That’s the only excuse I can conjure. Fear that it’ll disappoint, or ruin the myth.

But today, I’m watching it, since I’m leaving for Chicago early in the morning. On Saturday I’ll be seeing Billy Bragg performing Woody Guthrie songs at the Old Town School of Folk. That morning? A songwriting workshop with Bragg.

I need to brush up.

In the first few minutes of the movie, Nora Guthrie narrates that she asked Bragg to do this project to “look for the man behind the myth with me.” And then she utters what has become my favorite words from Woody: “My dad would only say, ‘All you can write is what you see.”

Okay, I’m in.

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Shoes

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By Robin Wheeler
I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time on Thursday, May third. Late afternoon, as the tide rolled in at Santa Cruz, after I traveled 2100 miles.
I started in a parking lot on top of a short cliff, stretched away from the boardwalk with its rides and barking sea lions. I could hear them across the water when the ocean retreated.
“You know it’s always been my dream to see a boardwalk,” Clara Jane told me when I described the scene to her on the phone. My daughter’s an 8-year-old Midwesterner; she didn’t know what a boardwalk was until she read about them a month ago. I’ll bring her next time.

The water was a long way down and a hike across deep sand marked with char left from beach fires and a giant peace sign made from flowers sprouted in the sand, given body from twigs and shell fragments.

Close enough that I could hear the power of the waves and smell the bright saline air. So tired from over 12 hours of travel, but I’ll never have a first time at the Pacific Ocean. I climbed. Down the twisting, sand-covered metal steps, kicking off my sensible vegan Mary Jane mules and plunging my tired skin into the cold sand.

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“All You Can Write is What You Can See”

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By Robin Wheeler

My friend and Oklahoma travel partner Aimee Levitt published some excellent Woody Guthrie coverage culled from our trip for St. Louis’ Riverfront Times. Makes for an excellent primer for those wanting to learn more about Guthrie. And it’s just damn good writing.

I’ve already written my professional and somewhat unbiased takes from the University of Tulsa’s Woody 100 symposium and the first This Land is Your Land tribute concert. I’m still trying to process and convey the emotional impact of the weekend in Oklahoma.

Right. Who comes away from an academic symposium all emotional? I do. It’s a powerful thing, being in a room with so many people who care about the exact same minutia you do. We’re all conductors of energy, and by the end of the day it felt like we could stage a populist revolution, Okie-style. And I wish we had. But we were pretty tired. The will was there, though.

With our brains full, Aimee and I skipped the final panel – an artists’ roundtable – and made a last-ditch trip to the Gilcrease Museum, which was hosting a Guthrie-related exhibit. I hadn’t done much research on it. Not that it would have been difficult, since the museum has the collection online.

I had no idea what to expect, which made it all the more amazing.

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