“And there on the Texas plains right in the dead center of the dust bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen plenty to make up songs about.” …
“I never did make up any 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.”
His optimism and pride in his people to make it through, to change the world for the better can be seen in his ideals and became the undercurrent of all his music. On page 230 Woody gets caught up in a discussion in a box car over religion. He puts in his “three cents worth”.
“All of this talking about what’s up in the sky, or down in hell, for that matter, isn’t half as important as what’s right here, right now, right in front of our eyes. Things are tough. Folks Broke. Kids hungry. Sick. Everything. And people has just got to have more faith in one another, believe in each other. There’s a spirit of some kind we’ve all got. That’s got to draw us all together.”
So how did he get there? Why did he care so much? This book is Woody Guthrie’s search for these very same answers which allows us to see for ourselves.
Woody’s young life begins from modest means in Okemah, Oklahoma, and as one tragedy after another befalls his family they eventually fall apart till he’s left alone to fend for himself at a young age.
Everything begins ideally enough. His father had carved out a comfortable living in real estate, and Woody’s life began in a big house with his Mother and older brother and sister. His Mother burns the house down one day but no one will outright blame her. They move into an old stone house built into the edge of a cliff, “one that won’t burn down” but a tornado comes through and smashes it to pieces. They loose everything. His father tries his luck in oil boom and gets bullied out by the high profile land dealers. They fall deeper and deeper into debt. His sister dies from a tragic accident when the gas stove explodes in their shack. His mother goes crazy and has to be institutionalized. At the end his father goes off to another oil boom town and his brother and himself are left to support themselves.
Woody Guthrie’s convictions are evident even in his childhood. Chapter VII is a childhood narrative reminiscent of Mark Twain. Woody and the other kids from the town had built a club house and formed a gang. As more and more kids moved into town on the heels of the oil boom they sought admittance and the original members were denying them full citizenship and voting rights in the club. They formed a rival gang. Woody joins the other side and they declare war. Woody writes the declaration on page 116:
“We told you why we are fighting this war. It is because of your leaders mostly. Most of us kids is new here in town and we ain’t got no other place except at your gang house. You made us work but you didn’t let us vote or nothing like that when it was time.
The only way out is to let all of us kids own the gang house together. We was always fighting the other way. One gang against the other one. It will always be this a-way unless we change it, and you don’t want us to change it, but we aim to anyhow. Both gangs has got to join up together and be one gang.
We will come to see you at eight o’clock, and if you still try to keep us split up, we will start a war.”
What follows is the most entertaining tale of a childhood battle with slingshots, armored tanks constructed out of barrels, and an all out assault on the club house. The battle is decided as they devise an ingenious “cannon” creating a massive slingshot from an old tire stretched between two trees. The two gangs become one. Woody denounced his membership with the original gang because they wouldn’t admit everyone, joined the other side, fought for equal rights and justice even as a little boy. This very same struggle follows him through his life but never again was there such a clear cut victory as occurred in his childhood.
The next part of Guthrie’s life starts out as he’s twelve years old sleeping in the old club house collecting junk around town to trade at the junkyards to feed himself. His brother finds him in the delirium of fever wandering around town and takes him back to his apartment to take care of him. Years fast forward and Woody wanders the boom towns working odd jobs to make a living. At seventeen he ends up in Pampa helping his father run a tin shack hostel of sorts. His mother dies in the hospital. He gets several jobs around town but he begins looking for something else. On page 174 Woody writes:
“And then a couple of months wheeled past, and I found myself walking all around with my head down, still out of a job, and asking other folks why they had their heads down. But most people was tough, and they still kept their heads up.
I wanted to be my own boss. Have my own job of work whatever it was, and be on my own hook.”
He went through the library studying every “’ology,’ ‘osis,’ ‘itis,’ and ‘ism’ there was,” but he never found anything that interested him. He started painting and learned to play the guitar. He would make money painting signs for shops and playing for tips in Saloons. At some point he gets an invitation from his rich aunt in Sonora, California to live with her. His trip out to California bumming rides and hopping freight trains begins his next and is the most defining part of his story.
Along his journey to California he ends up stuck in Tucson when the freight train he was riding gets held up. Not having eaten in two days he ventures out in search of work to get some food. An old hobo advises him to stay out of town, to ask around the shanty outskirts if he wishes to get something to eat but Woody has to go see for himself. Half-starved, he wanders into the nice part of town, knocking on every church door he can find offering to work in exchange for food. Most don’t even come to the door. The housekeepers shoe him off the property. His last shot is the cathedral like monastery at the center of town. The head priest at the monastery can only offer him consolation, not any food because today is not the day they prepare meals for the poor. Woody heads back to the poor part of town and is fed by the first house he approaches. They even give him a meal to take with him back on the train. Woody gives it away.
He travels on to California meeting other hobos in search of work riding the freights and dodging the railway bulls. When Woody finally reaches his aunts house he walks up to the front door of the stately mansion in disbelief. Again he hasn’t eaten in days and his whole entire journey has been to make it here but when the butler opens the door and assures him that he is at the correct address he takes off down the street and back on highways, off to drift some more.
The rest of the novel Woody travels around the country, hopping the rails and thumbing rides. He followed the migrant workers who were searching for work and wrote their songs. From page 256:
“Everywhere I went I throwed my hat down in the floor and sung for my tips.
Sometimes I was lucky and found me a good job. I sung on the radio waves in Los Angeles, and I got a job from Uncle Samuel to come to the valley of the Columbia River and I made up and recorded twenty-six songs about the Grand Coulee Dam. I made two albums of records called “Dust Bowl Ballads” for the Victor people. I hit the road again and crossed the continent twice by way of highways and freights. Folks heard me on the nationwide radio programs CBS and NBC, and thought I was rich and famous, and I didn’t have a nickel to my name, when I was hitting the hard way again.”
He made friends with another guitar player the Cisco Kid and the two of them played up and down skid row in Los Angeles. They make a living together for a while till he wanders back out back on the road.
The final episode finds Woody Guthrie poised to get a gig in the Rainbow Room, a high class club located on the 65th floor of the Rockefeller building. It would pay him seventy five dollars a week and it was his chance to live the easy life. He auditions for the job with a song he makes up on the spot. This is the final verse, printed on page 293:
Well this Rainbow Room’s a funny place to play
It’s a long way’s from here to the USA
An back ta New York City
God! New York City
Hey1 New York City
Where I really gotta know my line!
Ironically enough they give him the job. They think he’s comical, and as the director is planning his clown costume for the shows he excuses himself for the bathroom and walks right out the door and back out onto the streets strumming his guitar the whole time and singing for the crowds out on the streets. Woody puts it best himself on page 299:
“Folks joined in like one voice in the dark. I could vision on the screen of fog rolling down a picture of myself singing back yonder on the sixty-fifth floor of Rockefeller’s Center… And I knew that I was glad to be loose of that sentimental and dreamy trash, and gladder to be edging my way along here singing with the people, singing something with fight and guts and belly laughs and power and dynamite to it.”
He wanders through the night, takes one last look at Rockefeller Center, and he knows that he should turn around get that job. Instead he jumps on barge headed out to anywhere and doesn’t look back.
Bound For Glory is a true working class novel. Woody Guthrie immersed himself in the common man because he was one. He gave up fame and fortune time and time again because he didn’t want to write stupid songs about moons and cow trails. He wanted to sing the songs of resistance, the song of the working man’s plight because it was America’s working poor that he loved, and the beauty of their struggle that he felt deserved to be sung. Woody had a message to tell America and he would keep on working till they heard him. One last quote from page 295 sums it all up.
“…I’ve been picked up, throwed down, and picked up; but my eyes have been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been the messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls.”
Anyone interested in Working Class studies should read this book and then search out his music.
Working Class Lit 