Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part Two – How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon

Release Date: December 26, 2024

In the gripping second part of the Behind the Bastards series, Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts delve deep into the life of Woody Guthrie, a seminal figure who transformed folk music into a powerful tool for social change. Host Robert Evans, alongside co-hosts Sophie and Margaret, navigates through the tumultuous journey of Guthrie, highlighting his artistic evolution, political activism, and personal struggles.

1. Woody Guthrie's Early Life and Economic Struggles ([04:27] – [10:21])

Robert Evans sets the stage by discussing Guthrie's early adulthood, emphasizing his move from Texas to California during the Great Depression. Guthrie's marriage to Mary was strained as economic hardships made it difficult for him to support his growing family. "He is the idea is, I'm coming out here to support my family, but he's not able to support Mary," Evans explains ([04:47]).

2. Life in Happy Valley and Hoovervilles ([06:39] – [07:54])

Guthrie found himself in Happy Valley, a shanty town akin to the infamous Hoovervilles, which were large homeless camps named in derision of President Herbert Hoover's policies ([06:41]). Evans notes, "Hoovervilles were named kind of. It was an attack on President Herbert Hoover," highlighting how these camps symbolized the widespread despair of the era.

3. Partnership with Jack Guthrie and Musical Differences ([12:13] – [14:40])

Guthrie's collaboration with his cousin, Jack Guthrie, a western singer influenced by popular music, marked a significant yet challenging phase in his career. "They could neither sing nor play guitar together," Evans remarks ([12:13]). The clash in their musical styles—Jack's jazz-influenced chords versus Woody's minimalist approach—eventually led Woody to focus more on folk music with a strong social consciousness.

4. Transition to Socially Conscious Folk Music ([14:40] – [16:56])

Woody's shift towards folk music is characterized by songs that speak to the struggles of the working class. Evans cites "Talking Dust Bowl Blues" as a prime example: "He sung about relatable nuts and bolts, issues that are still familiar to a lot of people today" ([19:35]). However, this period was also marred by Guthrie's internal battles with racism, as he struggled with ingrained prejudices from his upbringing. A poignant moment is captured when Guthrie reacts to a black listener's criticism: "He apologized. He next tore all the N-word songs out of his songbook" ([15:52]).

5. Woody’s Racial Views and Evolution ([15:52] – [17:40])

Margaret and Robert engage in a candid discussion about Guthrie's initial racist tendencies and his subsequent efforts to change. "This is not a part of his entire life or his whole creative life. He writes anti-racist songs," Margaret asserts ([16:56]). They explore the complexities of judging historical figures by contemporary moral standards, acknowledging Woody's progress despite his troubled past.

6. Association with the American Communist Party ([27:44] – [48:30])

Guthrie's political affiliations became increasingly radical as he aligned himself with socialist and communist activists. Evans explains, "Woody becomes a communist. He will call himself a card carrying communist" ([27:44]). Despite not officially joining the party, his activism and music resonated with left-wing ideologies, which later subjected him to scrutiny during the Red Scare era. "He was accused by the California State Senate's far right Committee on Un American Activities for being Joe Stalin's California mouthpiece" ([48:31]).

7. Woody's War Efforts and Songs ([52:39] – [62:27])

With the onset of World War II, Woody transitioned to writing anti-fascist anthems. Evans highlights his active participation in the Merchant Marine, enduring three torpedo attacks ([52:39]). Guthrie's wartime songs, such as "Reuben James," emphasized the human cost of war and his staunch anti-fascist stance. "Tell me what was their names? Tell me what was their names?" he poignantly sings ([60:24]).

8. "This Land Is Your Land" and Its Evolution ([62:04] – [64:59])

Arguably Guthrie's most famous work, "This Land Is Your Land," was born as a response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." Initially titled "God Bless America for Me," the song critiqued the disparity between the idealistic view of America and the harsh realities faced by its citizens. "The verse about the relief office... it's very much not an imperialist song," Evans clarifies ([62:27]). Over time, the song was sanitized and adopted as a national anthem, diverging from Guthrie's original intent.

9. Personal Struggles, Mental Illness, and Decline ([65:28] – [78:00])

Post-war, Guthrie's life took a tragic turn. In 1947, an electrical fire claimed his daughter, leading to severe personal and mental health struggles exacerbated by Huntington's disease. Evans narrates the harrowing events where Guthrie's obsessive letters led to legal troubles: "He eventually refuses court mandated therapy and his lawyer manages to narrowly get him out of a six month sentence" ([68:05]). Despite his declining health, Guthrie's influence persisted, with figures like Bob Dylan visiting him and celebrating his legacy ([75:18]).

10. Legacy and Conclusion ([75:18] – [79:28])

Guthrie's enduring legacy is underscored by his vast repertoire of songs, poems, and illustrations. His influence on the folk revival and artists like Bob Dylan cemented his place in American music history. "You cannot. Yeah, he's very willing to put his skin in the game," Evans concludes, reflecting on Guthrie's relentless commitment to his art and beliefs ([62:27]).

Notable Quotes:

• "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux." – Robert Evans ([07:30])

• "About all a human being is anyway is just a hoping machine." – Woody Guthrie ([75:20])

• "You can either go to the church of your choice. Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital. You'll find God in the church of your choice. You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital." – Bob Dylan ([76:51])

Final Thoughts:

The episode presents a multifaceted portrait of Woody Guthrie, balancing his artistic genius and political fervor with his personal demons and moral failings. Evans and his co-hosts provide a nuanced exploration, encouraging listeners to grapple with the complexities of historical figures who wielded their talents as weapons for change.

For Listeners:

If you haven't listened to this episode yet, "Behind the Bastards: Part Two – How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon" offers a comprehensive and engaging look into the life of one of America's most influential folk musicians. Dive into the rich discussions, insightful analyses, and hear firsthand the transformative power of music in social activism.

Subscribe to Behind the Bastards on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or your preferred podcast platform to stay updated on new episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

Transcript

[Sophie]

Call Zone Media.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome back to the Court of Robert Evans Bastard Guy podcast. Yeah, that's right. I got a gavel. See? Take that. Our engineers, they're not going to be happy.

[Margaret]

Who let you get a gavel?

[Robert Evans]

I got sent this by the judge again. It works exactly like vampires made me. And it's lovely. It's beautiful. Gavel. Look at it.

[Sophie]

Yeah, I can also buy that from, like, Toys R Us or whatever children's store has survived.

[Robert Evans]

It would mean nothing at all in your hands, Sophie. You haven't gone through the extensive training and preparation to become a United States municipal judge like I have.

[Sophie]

Cool. So cool.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome back to behind the Baskets.

[Sophie]

I really hate that you have power of any kind.

[Robert Evans]

I know, I know. Tremendous power. Unaccountable power. I'm now eligible for the Supreme Court, although I think technically anyone is.

[Sophie]

I actually think you would be a. No.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'd be a great Supreme Court judge.

[Margaret]

You'd be better than Supreme Court, like, 90% of the time. And then 10% of the time, you'd be like, I think that everyone should have a personal nuke.

[Sophie]

Yeah, you'd be chaos monster. But here's the thing. I think you'd be better.

[Robert Evans]

Any more home invasions, Margaret?

[Sophie]

You're better than the nine we have.

[Robert Evans]

You know, that's very true.

[Margaret]

Quite a bit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Well, speaking of someone who would have been better on the Supreme Court, Woody Guthrie. That's who we're talking about in part two of these episodes. Yep. Margaret's dad, though not. Not his Klansman father.

[Sophie]

Before we jump into this, though, I want to plug something really fast, if that's okay. Uh, oh, I just want to plug a series that our colleague and my dear friend Jimmy Loftist has been doing on her podcast, 16th minute of fame. Ever heard of it? About the manosphere? I think the bastards audience would really enjoy it. Jamie has worked very hard on it. The writing is incredible. So check that out on 16th minute of fame.

[Robert Evans]

The manosphere, if you're not aware, is like the kind of colloquial term for this network of far right generally, like masculinity influencers, all of whom have fed into the Trumpist movement and groups like the Proud Boys. It's a very important, like, social phenomenon that explains a lot of why we are where we are right now. And Jamie does a great job of breaking it down. So check that out on 16th minute.

[Sophie]

Robert is interviewed on one of the parts.

[Margaret]

Ooh, sure. I've only heard part one so far.

[Robert Evans]

I am. I am. Well, speaking of part two, let's do part two of these episodes, huh?

[Sophie]

Yes, sir.

[Margaret]

I also haven't heard part two of this one yet.

[Robert Evans]

Let's kill it. Let's murder it. Let's bury it in the woods, in a tree stump, under a tree stump so that nobody finds it, and then cash in at Social Security for years. I don't know what I'm doing here. Margaret.

[Sophie]

Great.

[Anderson]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Anderson]

After Meta AI gets you caffeinated, you're ready for some beats.

[Sophie]

Hey Meta.

[Robert Evans]

Play hip hop music.

[Anderson]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

Store or Google Play PK Part 2. So Woody Guthrie had wed Mary in 1933, and by 1936, when he quit Texas for California, which is what you have to legally call it when you're Talking about the 1930s, she'd had one child with him and was pregnant with another. And he kind of abandons her. Like, not entirely. Like, he doesn't, like, break up with her and like, she eventually moves to California with him, but he does just kind of boun to go try and find a living, you know, in the West. And this is a thing a lot of guys are doing and a lot of people have to do. It's also not a thing that the family's thrilled with. The specific project that he left for was a dam that was being built outside of Redding, California, in a place called Happy Valley. I have lived in and around there. I can assure you it is not a particularly happy valley now. And it wasn't one then either. In fact, the name was kind of, like, ironic, like, because it was a shanty town that was miserable.

[Margaret]

So, like, Greenland?

[Robert Evans]

Like Greenland, yes. It's a, I guess, probably a better place now. Although I can't really in good conscience recommend anyone go to Reading. So. Yeah, anyway, that's where Woody heads up to, and he's there for a little while. It's in this shanty town with, like, about 5,000 other work seekers who are all, like, you know, showing up to try and queue in lines and get jobs every day. Right. And there were a lot of spaces like this around the country. You know, there were a lot of these government work camps basically. Right. Which is where Woody is. And there were also in areas like Sacramento and Seattle, these things called Hoovervilles. And Hoovervilles were essentially large campsites built by homeless workers and their families as they migrated around searching for work during the Great Depression.

[Margaret]

Well, it's actually in the US they're called vacuum towns. Vacuumville.

[Robert Evans]

That was good. That was good, Margaret.

[Margaret]

Thank you.

[Robert Evans]

That was good.

[Margaret]

Thanks. I'll be here all day.

[Robert Evans]

Electrolux cities. I don't know. I just think it's funny because the old catchphrase was, nothing sucks like an Electrolux. And I've never heard an advertisement that was more clearly made before the Internet. You couldn't get away with that today. Or you could, but it would be a different problem.

[Margaret]

No. Although in England, they had the we put the D in bread campaign only a couple years ago.

[Robert Evans]

That's pretty funny. That's not bad.

[Margaret]

I'm never gonna get over that.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man. So Hoovervilles were named kind of. It was an attack on President Herbert Hoover. Right. Like, that's why they get their name. Because he was this. This will not sound familiar to anything that's about to happen. He was this corrupt Republican president whose policies which benefited the incredibly wealthy, fed into the Great Depression and, like, allowed for the kind of deregulation that made it much worse and were seen as having largely led the country into economic calamity. And so they named these massive homeless camps for, like, homeless families, basically, Hoovervilles, the largest and longest lasting. I'm not sure if it was absolutely the largest, but it was the longest lasting and among the largest. Hoovervilles was outside of Seattle, and it stood from 1931 to 1940. As an interesting side note, it was operated on land next to Elliot Bay south, which I believe is where Frazier's condo was meant to be located in the TV series. That doesn't mean anything. I just thought it was interesting. So Woody missed out on the big west Coast Hoovervilles, but he was in and around. You know, Redding is people who are heading up to Seattle or coming back down from Seattle. He's talking to them. There's a big one in Sacramento. He's talking to them. And he's in this work camp in Happy Valley that's kind of similar to Hooverville. Right. And he's supposed to be up there working on this big dam project, but he does a lot better, and it's a lot more stable for him to just busk for music. Right. And so that's what he actually spends most of his time doing. Now, I say he's better at this than he is at laboring. He's not great at it. And he's only able to send the occasional very small money order back home to his wife and two kids. So he is not. The idea is, I'm coming out here to support my family, but he's not able to support Mary. She and her now two kids are utterly dependent on her parents, which was a very embarrassing situation for her. Mary later said, I know it upset my dad a lot. My mother, too. Woody wasn't doing the manly thing. And I think it's both worth, like, saying that that's her impression and the family's impression of this. This is not an uncommon position for people to be in. And I don't know that Woody was doing very well back in Texas. So it's kind of unclear to me, you know, what the right thing to do here was. Ultimately, Woody, like a lot of people, was put in a very difficult situation of trying to do something he hoped would allow him to support his family. And it didn't work very well for a while. Right.

[Margaret]

I mean, it was the Great Depression.

[Robert Evans]

It was the Great Depression. Yeah.

[Margaret]

We see a lot of this now where, like, people are like, oh, I'm failing under capitalism. I must personally be a failure. And you're like, no, times are really hard right now.

[Robert Evans]

Well, and we also, on this show, like, we've had, like, guys like Steven Seagal, who, as a guest. Yes, yes. Friend of the pod, like, absolutely. Abandoned his family to start his Hollywood career. Is a story we've told a few times. Woody is. His family feels like he's doing that at the start. That's not actually what he does here. Right. Because he's not actually, like, cutting ties with them. But they're not.

[Margaret]

Migrant laborers do this all the time. Today, like, migrant laborers come to the United States. They're not abandoning their family to try and.

[Robert Evans]

But they're usually not going out there to play guitar.

[Margaret]

That's fair.

[Robert Evans]

I think that's kind of part of why. Because he's not really doing the work that a lot of these other guys were. He's doing some of that, but that's not how he really makes most of his bread.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So in short order, Woody left Reading for Glendale, which I've also done, and I can tell you, good call. Much better place to be than Reading. He vaguely knew that he had an aunt in the area, and as was often the case, he just sort of. They're not, like, sending letters usually back and forth. They certainly don't have phones or whatever. You're usually just like. I was told once by a relative that I have an aunt in Glendale. I'm just gonna show up and figure out where she is and hopefully she'll take me in. And social ties were such that when he shows up on her doorste, she's like, all right. He is 25 years old when he makes it to the Los Angeles area after several months of stress and internal recriminations. Cause Woody's not thrilled with himself either. He had wanted to be doing better. He knows how little he's sending back to his family. He's not happy about this. He gets a lucky break courtesy of his cousin Leon, who everyone else either called Jack or Okie Guthrie. And Okie is like a. It's kind of a pejorative term for someone from Oklahoma.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Both was used as an insult and also as like a term of pride by people from Oklahoma. Right. The Guthrie's are all Okies. Right. So calling him Okie Guthrie must have been a little bit confusing too. Like Woody, who is also an Okie.

[Margaret]

Uh huh.

[Robert Evans]

Jack and his family had left home back at the start of the Depression and moved to Sacramento. Like many Guthrie's, he was musically talented and so was his wife. And they built a reputation for themselves as good musicians and performers. He suggested teaming up with Woody to try and start an act in Los Angeles. This was not the obviously good idea that it would later seem. As Ed Cray explains in the book Ramblin Man, Jack was a western singer. His songs were heavily influenced by popular music. Woody was a country singer. His music born of an older oral tradition. In practice, they could neither sing nor play guitar together. Indeed, Woody privately despised the treacly sentiment of Jack's sagebrush serenades. Jack the guitarist used the jazz influenced chords of popular music and played up the neck of the instrument. Woody disdained chords beyond the minimal tonic subdominant and dominant. So this is not a great pairing. And Woody's a little bit of like. He's a little bit of a snob. Right. He's like, oh, your music's so popular and jazzy, you're not doing the cool punks. You know, it's not really punk, but that's. It's very similar in attitude to that kind of guy.

[Margaret]

Right. I mean, he's doing folk punk before it's folklore. He's doing folk, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Right. Yeah. At least he's about to be starting to do folk punk.

[Margaret]

It's interesting because country western. I had never occurred to me, that those were separate categories.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Cause, I mean, it's this mix of these songs that are like folk songs that are. We would call Western. Cause they're like songs about the west and about, you know, being a cowboy or whatever. And songs that are like western songs that are made for, like, the different kinds of, like, floor shows and entertainment, you know, radio and whatnot that's popular at the time. Like, those are kind of different beasts. So in better times, these guys probably would never have worked together. But desperation made, you know, some kind of collaboration necessary, and they developed a fairly successful act and were able to book recurring gigs on the radio through a station called kfvd. Woody found himself increasingly drawn to folk music with a sense of class consciousness, like Goble Reeb's 1934 tune Hobo's Lullaby. And here's Woody Guthrie singing a portion of Hobo's Lullaby, which is, again, a song by another guy. And this is a folk song. It's also kind of punk, as you'll catch from this section.

[Margaret]

Oh, I used to listen to it while riding trains. My friend played on guitar.

[Unknown]

I know the police cause you trouble. They cause trouble everywhere. But when you die and go to heaven, you find no policeman there. So go to sleep. You wear.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, that's good. That's a good little bar. So I would also be remiss because that's pretty cool, if I didn't expound on the fact that racism, too, was a recurrent part of Woody's act and often on his mind while living in Echo park and fighting on behalf of poor white people. Cause he's like an activist, you know, helping rent strike type stuff, right? Like, he is an advocate for, like, poor, downtrodden white people living in Los Angeles. He also is drawing cartoons of people he called jungle blacks and monkeys. And, like, that's bad. He wrote poems so racist that I don't even feel like I should describe them on the air to you. They're bad.

[Margaret]

Oh, God, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Found a good LA Weekly article on the subject by an author named Johnny Whiteside, and I'm going to read a quote from it. Now broadcasting on Pasadena's kfvd, Guthrie often indulged in on air employ of Ebonics and was stunned when a black listener characterized the singer as unintelligent after hearing Guthrie perform songs with titles like Run Inward Run and Inward Blues. Fortunately for Guthrie, recordings of these tunes do not survive. Later, Guthrie said, a young Negro in Los Angeles wrote me a nice letter one day telling me the meaning of that word, the N word, and that I shouldn't say it anymore on the air. So I apologized. He next tore all the N word songs out of his songbook. Huh. So you can take that however you want. Right. The fact that he is singing that kind of stuff on the air and, like, just writing poems about it, not great. But he's also not unable to change or immune to criticism. So he's willing to, like, listen to this criticism that a black man gives him and be like, oh, you know what? That is kind of fucked up. And that ain't nothing for the son of a Klansman. Right?

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

You know, again, that's kind of up to your personal take. When we talk about, like, how do you judge people? You know, to what extent do you judge them based on their time or based on some sort of concept of objective morality? One thing that always matters to me is where did they start versus where did they end up? Right. Because someone who was raised in a slaveholding household and becomes an abolitionist but is still racist is a lot more impressive to me than a guy who just, like, isn't outwardly racist because he grew up in the 1990s but, like, crosses the street when he sees a black guy.

[Margaret]

Right, Totally.

[Robert Evans]

Because one of those is a person who, like, went on a journey, recognized a. A bad thing about themselves and made changes.

[Margaret]

You know, there's people that, like, will never get my pronouns right, who I suspect would kill someone who tried to hurt me, and there's other people who would absolutely always get my pronouns right and be super respectful and would be like, oh, no, a bad thing is happening if they watch me get murdered in front of them, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm not trying to be like.

[Margaret]

It's therefore. Okay. Like, I'm not trying to.

[Robert Evans]

That's the reason I included this, because it's pretty bad. And you should know that about the guy.

[Margaret]

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not trying to. Yeah, but.

[Robert Evans]

But this is not a part of his entire life or his whole creative life. He writes anti racist songs. Later in life, like, it does seem like he makes a change. And I do think it's worth noting, like, this is a guy who was raised by a Klansman in, like, the 30s, 20s and 30s, you know, so, you know, again, you can figure out morally wherever you want to figure that out, but I don't think it's worth kind of looking at the whole sweep of the personal journey the man went on there. In 1937, Woody's wife Mary and two children moved to Los Angeles to be with him. Jack wound up leaving the act and show business for a while. But Woody paired up with Maxine Chrisman, whose family was friends with his cousin and had taken Woody in too. He dubbed Maxine Lefty Lou. The two played songs by other artists that spoke to the poor and downtrodden, like Hobo's Lullaby. But they also started playing Woody's original compositions like the Talking Dust Bowl Blues. This song really embodies what people were starting to love about Woody. His music had a warts and all description of life during the Depression and the struggle struggles of the hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to move west during the Dust Bowl. He sung about relatable nuts and bolts, issues that are still familiar to a lot of people today. If you were a poor punk kid who like, like lived on a semi permanent road trip for a while basically, and had the experience of trying to coast by turning your car off on downhill runs because you can't afford gasoline, here's Woody Guthrie singing about the same thing.

[Unknown]

Way up yonder on a mountain curve it's way up yonder in the piney wood and I give that rolling Ford a shove and I was going to coast as fur as I could. Commenced coasting, Picking up speed was a hairpin turn. I didn't make it. Man alive. I'm telling you, the fiddles and the guitars really flew. That Ford took off like a flying squirrel and it flew halfway around the world. Scattered wives and childrens all over the side of that mountain.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man, I don't know.

[Margaret]

I love his talking blues.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I love his talking. I love the way he says children. Like. It just tickles the hell out of me. It reminds me of the good parts of living in fucking middle of nowhere, Oklahoma. Like, I do like that about him. And you know what I like even more?

[Margaret]

Margaret, is it? The sponsors of the show. Yes, they're all great.

[Robert Evans]

They're all great. And they've all had the experience of having to coast in their Ford truck to save gas money too. Look, it's hard times for everyone, even large brands.

[Margaret]

They've probably driven stuff off of the road before.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, absolutely. We could talk about what truck drivers are forced to do in order to make their times. Anyway, whatever, we're done.

[Anderson]

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[Robert Evans]

So you say, hey, Meta, how do I make a latte? To make a latte brew two shots.

[Anderson]

Of espresso after Meta AI gets you caffeinated. You start walking to work and you need a soundtrack.

[Robert Evans]

Hey Meta Play hip hop music with.

[Anderson]

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[Anderson]

Sending message after work you head to meet some friends.

[Margaret]

Hey nice glasses.

[Anderson]

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[Robert Evans]

Evans here and I know everybody loves a great deal, but I also know most of us aren't willing to crawl through a bed of hot coals just to save a couple of bucks. Saving money has to be easy to be worth it. No hoops, no bullcrap, no sending anything in through the mail. So when Mint Mobile said it was easy to get wireless for 15 bucks a month with the purchase of a three month plan, I had trouble believing it. But it turns out it really is that easy to get wireless for 15 bucks a month. The longest part of the process is the time spent on hold, waiting to break up with your old provider. To get started, go to mintmobile.com behind there you'll see that right now all three month plans are only 15 bucks a month, including the unlimited plan. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. Find out how easy it is to switch to Mint mobile and get three months of premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com behind that's mintmobile.com behind $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three month plan only speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details.

[Unknown]

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[Paris Hilton]

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[Robert Evans]

This podcast is sponsored by Better Help. There's some dark stuff going on in the world right now, but it's also the holiday season. This is my favorite time of the year. I love going out to Christmas markets. I love going on cold hikes, and when the weather gets crummy, I like staying inside and watching movies. But when you're cooped up inside, sometimes in these long, dark winters, it can be easy for some of the stuff in our heads that's dark and less pleasant to bubble up and trouble us. Therapy is a great way to bring yourself some comfort that never goes away. It can help you work through some of those problematic things in your head. It can help you learn positive coping skills and how to set set boundaries. So if you're thinking of starting therapy, you should consider giving BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and you can switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Find comfort this December with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com behind Margaret Yes, I do find it fun how much of like his Dust bowl songs are very relatable to like punk life today. Yeah, totally hate the cops, fucking coasting in my car, you know, camping out in the woods and shit.

[Margaret]

Like, did he do Big Rock Candy Mountains or is this someone else in.

[Robert Evans]

My head he did Big Rock Candy Mountains, but I didn't double check on that.

[Margaret]

I mean, he might have just sung it.

[Robert Evans]

I'm fairly certain I've heard a version of the song by him. Harry McClintock was the guy who first recorded and wrote it.

[Margaret]

Yeah, one of the first people I ever rode Trains with. I haven't ridden trains nearly as much as I'm gonna make it sound like when I do these episodes. But was this folk singer named Ryan Harvey. And so that's why I have a lot of these associations with riding trains in particular. But we used to sit around and sing Big Rock Candy Mountains, but change the words very slightly to be like modern anarchy. You didn't have to change much. And my favorite was and the hens lay vegan eggs was my favorite line.

[Robert Evans]

That's good. Oh, man, that's funny.

[Margaret]

You're like, wait a second.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And the police dogs can't sniff your weed.

[Margaret]

Yeah, totally.

[Robert Evans]

So Woody had attained a degree of local fame by 38. 39. Right. 1938 to 1939. He's doing reasonably well. In fact, he and Lefty Lou were so beloved that the radio station where they played received thousands of fan letters over the course of just a months. They were doing okay in terms of money, but not great because again, he has a lot of fans, but they're broke ass Dust bowl refugees. So he's not getting rich off these people. Right. And he's also not very interested in getting rich. He seemed to feel like he had a responsibility to reach and provide relief for his people suffering in government work camps and embarrassed by their situation. From a write up by the Library of Congress, quote, he also sang at government camps. That gave these people some measure of dignity, health and safety. Joining him was Will Gere, an actor and earnest left winger who helped Woody better understand the injustice of an economic system that would allow Americans to live in such poverty. And this is where he starts getting pilled on socialism. Right. And eventually becomes a communist. He will call himself a card carrying communist. As we'll talk about. He never actually has a card and he could have gotten one. But Woody's a little bit of a fabulous. Right. He lies a little bit. Not in a way that is massively meaningful because he was a communist and very committed, but you know, he also. He's a little bit of a tall tale spinner.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah. And you know, it's to his credit that he's again, rather than focusing on making money off of this growing fame, he's giving a lot of free shows to provide relief for his people. Right. He is very dedicated to his people in a way that I think is pretty admirable. Woody's popularity and by now fairly mature class consciousness started to make him more connections with the radical political set, including various left wing writers, journalists, and socialist and communist activists. He began writing songs that spoke not just of left wing politics, but of the rage of the working class and increasingly his own hatred of the people that maintained the system that kept his people downtrodden. In 1939, he wrote one of his most famous songs, the Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd, about an Oklahoma outlaw active in the early 1930s, who regular listeners will know was my cousin. Now, my great grandmother knew him as a girl. I grew up hearing songs about him from her and my family. They're very, as I talk about, often, very conservative of people. But my great grandma particularly would always tell us, you know, you got outlaw blood in you, right? Like it was something she was very proud of. In a way that's a little weird if you heard the way these people tended to talk about other, like urban crime, right? Outlaw crime was very different to them. And I'm talking particularly my relatives who were survivors of the Great Depression. Outlaws are very different than modern criminals in their eyes, Right. I'm not saying that's actually a fair, but their conception of these people is extremely different. And a big part of why is not just Woody, but songs like this that Woody made. Who turned these guys who were bank robbers and gangsters into Robin Hood figures, right? And Floyd was a fairly easy one to turn into a Robin Hood character because he kind of was at least a little bit that guy. There's a debate as to, like, how much of that sort of character was real and how much of it is kind of myth making that Floyd did. But some of it's certainly true. Floyd was born in Georgia, but had moved with his family to aikens, Oklahoma in 1989. And his career as a criminal had started early when he was arrested at age 18 for stealing $3.50 worth of, I think, stamps from a post office. A few years later, he robbed a payroll in St. Louis. So he goes from like stamp theft to armed robbery fairly quickly. And he does three years or so in prison for that. After he's released, he becomes a Kansas City area bank robber. One thing you get about Floyd is he doesn't seem to have ever considered not being a criminal.

[Margaret]

Ye.

[Robert Evans]

Immediately like, no.

[Margaret]

He found this thing that sort of works. Yeah, well, I guess it didn't really work. That's the other weird thing about it.

[Robert Evans]

No, but he never really thinks about doing anything but being an outlaw. And he quickly gains. He starts robbing banks in Kansas City and he earns the nickname Pretty Boy, which eventually becomes Pretty Boy Floyd because people thought he was very good looking. He hated this Nickname. So he's gonna pull up a picture of the man. You can decide yourself how good looking he was.

[Margaret]

It's just a picture of Luigi.

[Robert Evans]

Americans do love their sexy criminals.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Huh.

[Margaret]

Not my type, but, you know, standards.

[Robert Evans]

Were not as high back.

[Margaret]

He's got, like, a soft gaze that's kind of nice, you know, like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Prominent nose, good jawline.

[Margaret]

Yeah. He's not bad looking.

[Robert Evans]

Certainly not.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Nice hair. Yeah. Yeah.

[Margaret]

He's better looking than what? He got three if we go ab real quick.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. He is a hardened criminal. He killed at least one federal agent. He also killed The Sheriff of McIntosh county, other members of his gang, killed several police officers, and other criminals as well. There are multiple police officer murders that he is also a suspect in that we don't fully know. Did he kill all those cops? But he killed a number of cops. You know, like, he shoots a lot of police. In the early depression years, he took to robbing banks in Oklahoma, where in addition to taking money for himself, he would destro mortgage documents in order to free poor farmers from debt.

[Margaret]

Hell, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now, we don't fully know if this happened. Right. It's not the kind of thing. How would you prove it? For one thing. Right. People told stories about it. I will tell you that everyone I knew in the towns in Oklahoma, like, where he had been active, and again, including my family members who knew him, would tell you that this is what he did. I don't know. It's not provable. It's one of those things where. Where it would make sense for him to do it, even if he was not really morally a Robin Hood character. Because if you're destroying people's mortgages, they will hide you from the cops.

[Margaret]

I could tie this back to Italy in the 1870s. Malatesta and all these other anarchists in Italy, in Benevento Province, would go. And their idea of how to do propaganda of the deed was to go. And they'd march on these small towns and they would destroy the tax and ownership records. And they were like. And then everyone would come out and be like, you have freed us. The priest was like. Came out of the church and was like, these people have been sent by God to free us. And then they all got arrested, but then they actually only spent, like, a year in jail because everyone was going so crazy in Italy at that point that they were like, you know, we better just let these people out.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. We can't go too hard on these people. Everyone really likes them for some reason.

[Margaret]

And so that's like, there is a specific point, and if you're gonna be a criminal, if you go hard enough and make everyone like you, there's a certain safety in.

[Robert Evans]

One of my favorite Floyd stories is that he had a gang, and his gang decided they wanted to rob a bunch of people on, like, black Wall street at one point, which was very well armed. And Floyd was like, well, you guys can go do that. I'm not fucking with that.

[Margaret]

Like, that seems like.

[Robert Evans]

And sure enough, they got fucking, like, shot to pieces.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So he was a smart man.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

My other favorite story about him is I mentioned in my high school AP English class that he was a cousin of mine. And my teacher, who was, you know, in her 50s or something, said he shot my grandfather in the leg.

[Sophie]

Oh, what grade did you get in that class, buddy?

[Robert Evans]

No, no, she was like, it's okay again. Cause she was raised in this same culture. She was like, it's okay. Like, pretty boy said, no move. And my grandpa moved. You know, he didn't kill him. He just shot him in the leg a little. That's so funny. Again, there's a lot of tolerance for these specific sorts of outlaws in that part of the.

[Margaret]

That you probably wouldn't find today. Just to be clear, anyone listening? That you probably wouldn't find today.

[Robert Evans]

You will not find today. So, again, fascinating character. And, yeah, I can't say how much of the whole Robin Hood thing is true, but I think a lot of the Robin Hood image that he has comes from Woody. Although it's also worth noting he is part of why it takes so long for him to get caught. Because he's, like, one of the last gangsters to get caught and killed by the government. His death is generally agreed to have heralded the end of the gangster era.

[Margaret]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Because I think 34 is when he's gunned down. And, like, there's a lot of stories of him, like, hiding with little old ladies and lying to the cops. And then when he, like, leaves, there's $100 bill under the plate where she'd fed him dinner or something like that. So in 1939, you know, about five years after his death, when memories of this guy are still very strong, Woody writes the song that is very much responsible for Christmas crystallizing this image of Pretty Boy Floyd as this kind of, like, bandit, outlaw king of the American South. And we're just gonna listen to that song because it's Christmas, and it's a song about my cousin.

[Margaret]

Hell, yeah.

[Unknown]

If you'll gather around me, children A Story I will tell bout Pretty Boy Floyd and outlaw Oklahoma knew him well. It was in the town of Shawnee a Saturday afternoon, his wife beside him in his wagon as into town they.

[Robert Evans]

Rode.

[Unknown]

There a deputy sheriff approached him in a manner as rude, vulgar words of anger and his wife she overheard. Pretty Boy grabbed a log chain and the deputy grabbed his gun. In the fight that followed he laid that deputy down. Then he took to the tree and timber to live a life of shame. Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name. But many a starving farmer the same old story told how the outlaw paid their mortgage and saved their little home. Others tell you about a stranger that come to beg a meal. Underneath his napkin left a thousand dollar bill. It was in Oklahoma City, it was on a Christmas day. There was a whole carload of groceries come with a note to say, well you say that I'm an outlaw. You say that I'm a thief. Here's a Christmas dinner for the families on relief guesses. Through this world, world I've wondered. I've seen lots of funny men. Some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen. And as through your life you travel. Yes, it's through your life you roam. You won't ever see an outlaw drive a family from their home.

[Robert Evans]

I love the way that song ends.

[Margaret]

It's beautiful.

[Sophie]

Anderson likes it too.

[Robert Evans]

Some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen.

[Margaret]

That's the line I hear all over the place.

[Robert Evans]

It's a great fucking. I mean, this is one of his more famous songs. Yeah, but it's a damn good line.

[Sophie]

I enjoyed that thoroughly.

[Robert Evans]

I also like that. Look, I've seen a lot of outlaws. I'm not saying I'm not defending the things they've done, but it's not the outlaws I see forcing people to be homeless, you know, that's the banks.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

Yep.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So I disagree with my family about a lot, but our shared pride in our cop killing ancestor is not one of those things.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Anyway, as is often the case for people who come to Los Angeles for the music industry, Woody wound up having to take his family back home to Texas and then leave them again to move to New York City in 1940, chasing what had become for him a dream of folk stardom, by this point, he'd become a little bit of a legend, enough that the Library of Congress had him sit down and record his Dust bowl songs for posterity. He laid down tracks with Pete Seeger and became an influential part of the urban folk revival. Of the time. In a letter to Alan Lomax, another influential pillar of the urban folk revival, he described his thoughts on what folk music ought to be. And I'm interested for your thoughts on this, Margaret. A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it. Or it could be who's hungry and where their mouth is, or who's out of work and where the job is, or who's broke and where the money is, or who's carrying a gun. And where the piece is, that's folklore. And folks made it up because they seen that the politicians couldn't find nothing to fix or nobody to feed or give a job of work.

[Margaret]

That's good.

[Robert Evans]

That's.

[Margaret]

It's so interesting, maybe because if you say folk music in different places, you mean something so completely different. Right. American folk music is this Woody Guthrie kind of vibe thing, whereas in almost any other country, you're looking at stuff that's a little bit more technically interesting. Like, musically.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Margaret]

I don't know. I have a lot of thoughts about folk and folk instrumentation and music and all that, but I think what he's describing is great. And specifically that thing that it's. It's like this is the stuff that people make up. You know, it's not fancy. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And it's also how poor people, without really any other idea of how to have a voice, talk about, in a lot of ways, the kind of issues that today we ascribe to, like the job of journalists. Right. Who was hungry and where their mouth is, who's carrying a gun and where the pieces. Right.

[Margaret]

Yeah. Yeah, totally. It's gossip.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Yes. It's gossip and it's agitation. Right. You look at a lot of folk songs and a lot of folk stories, and that's the first safe place to attack the wealthy and the powerful. Right?

[Margaret]

Totally.

[Robert Evans]

A little bit. You know.

[Margaret]

Totally.

[Robert Evans]

Oftentimes, you know, there's also plenty of folk stuff that reinforces some of those things, but it is where you see a lot of subversive stuff.

[Margaret]

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about, like, populist and popular stuff is it can really go either way.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

But it's like, stuff still on some fundamental level. Interesting.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Now, it's worth spending some time on just how radically folk music changes. As you noted in other countries, it's very different. And part of why it's different in the US Is Woody Guthrie. He changes what folk music is in the United States in a fundamental way. In an article for the New Yorker, David Hajdu writes, quote, Folk music, including country, blues and other vernacular styles, was supposed to be a nod, a collective art passed along orally from singer to singer, generation to generation, sometimes culture to culture. From the vantage point of today, when kids with their first guitar start writing songs before they learn to play other tunes, it is difficult to process how exceptional it was for a folk artist such as Woody Guthrie to have created a vast repertoire of deeply idiosyncratic works. Many Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood songwriters of the 30s and earlier were as skilled and prolific as Guthrie, but they were working in a different vein, writing to order for professional singers. Guthrie brought the authorial imperative to vernacular music in America. And I think that's also very interesting.

[Margaret]

Just to keep going with all the weird family connections. My great grandfather was a Tin Pan Alley songwriter and yeah, he just wrote. He wrote music that he didn't own the copyright to. He wrote the B sides for more popular musicians.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, that makes total sense. I'm not surprised that that's your family connection.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So by this point in time, Woody was what you would call a left wing radical, although not again a card carrying 1. He played benefits 4 and was associated with the American Communist Party. But he never got around to joining and you'll find several different theories as to why. The leading one that you'll hear is that he liked his independence a little too much to be a joiner. Now, this sounds good especially to people like you and me, but it leaves out a crucial fact, which is that Woody was his era's equivalent of like a tank, right?

[Margaret]

Totally.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, it also leaves out the fact that like, he vocally took claim to have a card like claimed to be a member of the party. Right. And that it was the best thing he'd done, which he hadn't. Again, he wasn't immune to the worst impulses of the American left during this period. He had been enthusiastic about FDR early on, but once the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact was signed and the USSR locked into a treaty with the Nazis, he attacked Roosevelt as, quote, Churchill's lapdog for his anti Nazi stance and support of Great Britain during the early months of the war. Argued that the developing world war was a capitalist fraud. When Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland together, Guthrie supported Stalin to an extent and with such vociferousness that biographer Will Kaufman called it shocking. In Ramblin Man, Ed Cray goes into more detail about a left wing anti war song he wrote called why do youo Stand There in the Rain? Based on the Title of a New York Post article and I'm gonna read from that section from Ramblin man here. Just days before, some 6,000 delegates of the American Youth Congress had gathered in Washington to advocate jobs and peace. At the invitation of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The delegates gathered in front of the south portico of the White House in a cold drizzle to listen to a half hour speech by the President. FDR threw down the gauntlet aware that the Young Communist League had taken firm grip on the once broadly based popular Front ayc. The Soviet Union, as everyone who has the courage to face the fact knows is run by a dictatorship and is absolutely as any dictatorship in the world, it has allied itself with another dictatorship and has invaded a neighbor, Finland, so infinitesimally small that it could do no conceivable harm to the Soviet Union. A neighbor which seeks only to live in peace as a democracy and a liberal forward looking democracy at that. Roosevelt heard the boos and hisses through the cold rain. People's World columnist Woody Guthrie knew where he stood. He chided the President and song. Now the guns in Europe roar as they have so oft before and the warlords play the same old game again they butcher and they kill Uncle Sam foots the bill with his own Dear children standing in the rain why do you stand there in the rain? Why do you stand there in the rain? These are strange carrying on the White House capitol lawn. Tell me why do you stand there in the rain? Then the President's voice did ring. Why? This is the silliest thing I have heard in all my 58 years of life. But it just stands to reason as he passes another season, he'll be smarter by the time he's 59. So he's being like real, real shit pity to Roosevelt there specifically about his support of England in the war that is developing and very defensive of the USSR and invading a much smaller neighbor and invading Poland. And it's one of those things where this is both like horrifying given what we know happens. You have to, to an extent, while still saying he was wrong, look at his level of knowledge and what had actually happened previously. Obviously World War I was the touchstone here and in World War I the US did enable further butchering. Right. Like we were arming and profiting off of a hideous war that we had no business sticking our noses into.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And he's pissed about that. It's also there's a lot less information about what was going on in the Soviet Union. Now. I will also say More than enough that he should have known. Right.

[Margaret]

Yeah. I mean, the internationalist newspaper stuff was pretty.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

Sometimes they were better at knowing what was going on around the world than like a modern leftist is today. But he's holding the party line. They got told very specifically, like, I mean, this is the problem with the Comintern, the Communist International.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Margaret]

Is that someone in the American Communist Party during this era is literally taking orders from Russia.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

And that's like one of the parts that we don't want to talk about with the Red Scare. Because the Red Scare is bad. Right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

But when they're like, oh, these foreign agents acting under a foreign national, they were.

[Robert Evans]

There was literally like they were taking direct, like, propaganda direct orders, like from Moscow. Well, not from Moscow, but like from the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. And they were really wrong on some things as a result of that, because it turns out out Hitler's not an ally of international communism.

[Margaret]

It turns out. No.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, no, no. That goes very badly, very quickly.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And yet Woody had been. Had been describing himself as an anti fascist at this point. But also, I think he probably would have said that like, well, you know, the Communist Party knows its business. If they think that's what they've got to do to secure themselves. What matters is, you know, the survival of communism, which at that point had weathered a number of attacks from the international capitalist community, like during the Russian Civil War. And I'm not saying that because I think that's a good argument. I'm saying I think that's the argument he would have made. I'm pretty firmly on the stance of Stalin bat and the Molotov Ribbentrop pact. Inexcusable.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But also I always emphasize inexcusable on behalf of the Soviet leadership. You know, I've got nothing but respect for the guys who wound up dying by the millions to stop the Nazis.

[Margaret]

Absolutely.

[Robert Evans]

Totally in the right, those guys.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And, ladies. So it is impossible to look at this situation without seeing commonalities between more modern failures of the left to condemn dictators seen as anti imperialist for very flawed reasons. I might suggest that we also not forget at the time, one of the complicating factors here is how the US Government deals with what it considers communism and what things it considers communism. Right. Because that's important. Woody had an extensive FBI file. And in 1941, after he joined the Merchant Marine, one of his shipmates was cited as saying Woody followed the Communist Party line and that they were very pro Russian and advocated racial Intermarriage. So again, that is what the guy who informs on him and the FBI considers evidence of his communist sympathies is he thinks that black people and white people should be able to get married. So keep that in mind, too.

[Margaret]

The Communist Party was absolutely right about racial politics in the United States during this era.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, 100%.

[Margaret]

And they were one of the only non black organ. It was actually heavily black. But one of the only not majority black organizations that was right about this.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes. And so, like, when we talk about, like, criticizing him, don't leave out the fact that he's also very much correct about this.

[Margaret]

Right. Totally.

[Robert Evans]

After the war, he would be accused by the California State Senate's far right Committee on Un American Activities for being Joe Stalin's California mouthpiece, which was at one point true, but also for being a member of a factionalist sabotage group, which was absurd. Woody never sought or attempted to do anything but sing songs and write articles for socialist papers. He was not sabotaging anything.

[Margaret]

I have a feeling the reason he didn't get a card is he was like, I don't want to be on that list.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I mean, that may have been it. I think he also just might have been too lazy.

[Margaret]

Yeah. Didn't want to pay the fees. Whatever.

[Robert Evans]

He's an artist. He's not good at signing papers.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Marjorie Guthrie, who is his second wife, he starts a family with her after he divorces his first wife, Mary and moves to Coney island, sums things up this way. I don't know what happened prior to my time, but from my time in Coney island, he was not welcomed by the party because he didn't want to follow a party line. You couldn't tell Woody what to think. And so we were not members of the party in Coney Island. And again, I include that cause she was his wife, she knew him. But also. So that isn't entirely true because he certainly followed the party line on some very fucked up things.

[Margaret]

But actually that's still, like, even when we talk about the way that people have arcs. Right. One of the things I've read a lot. I've read a lot about the UK Communists at this era, where a lot of the communists left the Communist Party once they realized that they were just being mouthpieces for Stalin, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and again, there is a degree to which which the fact that there's so much disinformation being pumped out about the Soviet Union. Totally. There's so much bet, like it's certainly more reasonable then for someone to doubt a lot of the official narratives coming out and to doubt a lot of the information that makes Stalin look bad from their position in the United States. Right again, I think enough that a man is obviously intelligent as Woody should have been better informed, but he's not the only one who makes this mistake. And it's a more understandable mistake then than it is now, is what I'll say. That's totally true without forgiving it, you know. So, yeah, however you want to mark this down morally for Woody, his the US shouldn't be getting into this capitalist war. They're all cooking this World War II thing up. That attitude ends for Woody on June 22, 1941 when Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union. This is Operation Barbarossa. Woody ran to his friend Pete Seeger after this like breaks and told him, well, I guess we're not gonna be singing any more of them peace songs. Woody was not the only man forced to change his tune rapidly due to world events.

[Margaret]

Winston Churchill, anyway.

[Sophie]

Yeah, yeah, well done, well done.

[Robert Evans]

Winston Churchill, who was one of the world's loudest anti communists, was forced by sheer necessity to make temporary amends and even express support for the cause of Soviet soldiers. When Woody heard this, he told a friend, Churchill's flip flopped. We got a flip flop too. You know who doesn't flip flop though, Margaret?

[Margaret]

The consistency with which our sponsors provide high quality goods and services.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. That's right. Our sponsors have never once changed their opinion, which is why today, tomorrow and forever, they advise you to vote Millard Fillmore for president.

[Anderson]

You wake up, put on your Ray Ban meta glasses. Classic style, innovative tech. You're living all in. You realize you need coffee desperately.

[Robert Evans]

So you say, hey Meta, how do I make a latte? To make a latte brew two shots of espresso.

[Anderson]

After Meta AI gets you caffeinated, you start walking to work and you need a soundtrack.

[Robert Evans]

Hey Meta.

[Anderson]

Play hip hop music with the built in camera. You snap a pic of a dope mural on the side of a building that you think is worth sharing.

[Robert Evans]

Hey Meta.

[Paris Hilton]

Text my last photo to Eva.

[Robert Evans]

Sending message.

[Anderson]

After work you head to meet some friends.

[Margaret]

Hey, nice glasses.

[Anderson]

Ray Ban Meta glasses. The next generation of AI glasses. Just say hey Meta. To harness the power of Meta AI. Listen to music, make hands free calls with open air audio and built in microphones and so much much more. All while staying present to the world around you. Shop Ray Ban meta [e-mail] smart glasses.

[Unknown]

It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku Channel, your home for free and premium TV is giving you access to holiday music and genre base stations from iHeart, all for free. Find the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeartChristmas and North Pole Radio. The Roku Channel is available available on all Roku devices, Web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs and the Roku mobile app on iOS and Android devices. So stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iheartradio on the Roku Channel. Happy streaming.

[Paris Hilton]

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[Robert Evans]

Store or Google Play PK hey guys.

[Margaret]

We want to tell you about Peloton.

[Robert Evans]

Peloton has a variety that allows me to adapt to any season of life and keep me coming back through my childhood's growth, changing interests, potential injuries and recoveries, or even just a busy season. That's right.

[Unknown]

Peloton has what you need to keep.

[Robert Evans]

You on track to your goals no matter what season of life you're in. You're right, Anders. Peloton has a variety challenging classes that you can lean on and fit into your schedule. Whether you're a new parent, traveling for the holiday, training for something Big or just busy. From four week strength building classes to running, cycling and everything in between, Peloton can adapt to any goal and need. In this season of your life, you.

[Margaret]

Could challenge yourself anywhere with Peloton's all access membership.

[Robert Evans]

Like at home, on your bike, tread and row. Or take your favorite classes on the.

[Margaret]

Go and at the gym.

[Robert Evans]

With the app they have 10 minute hikes, 15 minute hit rides, 45 minute strength classes. No matter the amount of time you need, Peloton has the perfect class for you to sweat in. Find your push, find your power with [e-mail] we're back. Our sponsors are all old hair tonics from the 1800s. Anyway, vote for much of the Woody that we know. The famous Woody Guthrie you know, you brought up as soon as I said, what do you know of him? That the picture of him with a guitar that has a this machine kills fascist sticker slapped across it.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

By the way, that sticker was like put out by the U.S. government.

[Margaret]

Huh, that makes sense.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it was a propaganda.

[Margaret]

Strange bedfellow.

[Robert Evans]

Good piece of propaganda. There were a lot of machines we were using to kill fascists. Perfectly reasonable to put some stickers on them.

[Margaret]

Wait, did they. Oh, that was like the government was putting that on machines to raise morale. And he took one of those and was like, I'm putting this on my guitar.

[Robert Evans]

I think it's something like that. I read it in that article in I think LA Weekly by the fellow who was writing about like Woody's history with racism where he was like, this thing was like a product of the government that he.

[Margaret]

That makes so much sense. I never quite understood that. I always really liked though, when people carve into their AK's wooden stock, this machine makes folk music.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, there's been some good ones of that coming out of Syria. Yeah. So he changes his opinion very rapidly and once the Nazis invade the ussr, he starts getting much more patriotic. And again, he had been making anti Nazi music and been anti Nazi prior to this. And if you're saying, well, that's incoherent for him to be against the war and you know, whatnot. Yes, lots of people have incoherent politics, but his politics get a lot more cohesive after Operation Barbarossa. An article for oklahomahistory.org notes in New York, he appeared on numerous popular radio shows before joining the Merchant marines with Cisco Houston. During World War II, Guthrie was on three torpedoed ships. And the day Germany surrendered, he was drafted into the US Army.

[Margaret]

Like he was on ships that were hit by torpedoes three different times.

[Robert Evans]

He is. And the merchant marine is effectively a part of the military during a war. Right. He is a combat veteran. You know, like, that's like. He's on three ships that get hit. Now he's not in the army very long. It basically immediately gets out because the war ends. But yeah, he does like his bit. You know, he is not. When we play songs of his where he's talking about wanting to fight the fascists, he goes and does it. You know, he is doing an important, dangerous job where he gets shot at. So you cannot. Yeah, he's very willing to put his skin in the game.

[Margaret]

Yeah. One blown up ship. If you quit after one blown up ship, no one's mad. You did your part.

[Robert Evans]

Nobody will call you a coward. Yeah, I don't know that. Yeah. And so from late 1941 to the end of the war, Woody Guthrie wrote several iconic anti fascist anthems, including Reuben James, about a US destroyer that was torpedoed and sunk by the Nazis in 1941. As you might expect from Woody and the kind of. He wrote this song focused on the lives and deaths of normal men at war. The refrain went, tell me what was their names? Tell me what was their names? Did you have a friend on that? Good. Reuben James. It's a good song. But if you want my personal favorite War Years Woody Guthrie song, nothing beats this particular banger. Sophie's gonna put it up now.

[Unknown]

Put it there, boy. And we'll show these fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do. Well, I'm going to tell you fascists, you may be surprised. People in this world are getting organized. You're bound to lose, you fascists. Bound to lose.

[Robert Evans]

All you fascists. Bound to lose. All you fas. Bound to lose. Yes, all you fascist. Bound to lose. You bound to lose. You Bound to lose.

[Unknown]

There's people of every nation marching side to side. Marching across the fields where a million fascists died. You're bound to lose, you Fascist.

[Robert Evans]

Bound to move all. Yes, all of you. Fighters. Founders, all of you. Ah, banger music is so good. Yeah, it's a real banger.

[Sophie]

I enjoyed that immensely.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. One of my favorites. So near the end of Woody's wartime experiences, he would record the first official version of a song that he'd been working on since 1940, this land is yous Land, which would go on to be undoubtedly his most famous work of music. It is definitely the one Woody Guthrie three song. Everyone's Fucking hurt. Like you basically can't get through school without hearing this land is your land.

[Margaret]

Because it was so easily recuperated.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. And in the decades since 1944, it's also been criticized for what many people interpret as an air of imperialism and support for Manifest Destiny, which is definitely present in the version of the song that is commonly sung. Given this, I think it's interesting to actually look into why Woody wrote the song and what its original lyrics were. This Land Is yous Land was initially something of a folk music diss track. It was a response to Irving Berlin's God Bless America. This is a song Berlin wrote in 1918 after being drafted and re released in 1941 as something of a cash grab. The lyrics, if you aren't familiar, go like this God bless America, Land that I love Stand beside her and guide her through the night With a light from above. Woody fucking hated this song. And it's good he did, because it's a fucking dogshit song. He considered it far too sweet a hymn for a nation that had just sent millions of its citizens into a depression. This Land is yous Land was meant to be a retort discussing the real America that Irving had tried to conceal. The original title was God Bless America for Me. Joe Reilly writes of this first version of the song, Quote, it was more of a question than affirmation. In fact, it was a sarcastic retort. Woody later changed the refrain to this land was made for you and me and the song to this land is yours land. The verses he ultimately omitted from the final draft of the song include this banger. There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me. The sign was painted said private property, but on the backside it didn't say nothing. This land was made for you and me. In the squares of the city and the shadow of the steeple near the relief office, I see my people and some are a grumblin and some are wondering if this land's still made for you and me. And that's a banger. That's very much not an imperialist song. That's more him talking about like this. The people that this country ought to be for are the ones being harmed by the system that governs it. Right? Like that's the original point of the song. That said, this is not a case of it being recuperated by someone else who changes the lyrics because they think that they can tweak it. They don't like Woody's original version. Woody changes. Changes it, right? And he changes it. He removes that verse about the relief office because late in the war, he decided it was too pessimistic and he replaces it with lines like, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me. Which is not all that different from like some of the stuff Irving had been written.

[Margaret]

Totally.

[Robert Evans]

Right. The song becomes a massive hit. It is practically a new national anthem. And Woody does not initially bother to copyright it because this is, you know, that's not uncommon for him. Right. He generally neglected to do that. Alas for Woody, the post war optimism faded quickly. I mean, in it. So the first horrible thing that happens to Woody after the war, because things go downhill for him quickly. In February of 1947, there is an electrical fire in his home and his little girl, Kathy Ann, dies.

[Margaret]

Oh, God. He has bad luck with fire.

[Robert Evans]

He, like I said, like, he had horrible luck with fire. Now he and Marjorie have three other kids, but yeah, like, that's obvious. Obviously. Really fucks him up. And like, that same year, 47, and then in 48, he gets repeatedly attacked as a communist, both in the State Committee of Un American Activities in California and in the House of Representatives Committee on Un American Activities. Now they were attacking him for being a communist and he was, but he was not un American. No one was more American than Woody fucking Guthrie.

[Margaret]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

He suffers as a result of this. He gets blacklisted. He had written an autobiographical novel at this point called Bound for Glory that had been set to be turned into a major Hollywood product production. But that deal and others like it fell apart as unions were forced to take anti communist stances. In this new, more paranoid era, Woody stopped getting hired to play the events that had largely supplemented his income rather than fold as many did, and denounce the things that he believed. Woody spoke out constantly against J. Edgar Hoover, writing at one point, quote, the roaches crawl across my page tonight and make a noise that makes more sense than all that. Hoover writes. Good. He became less dogmatic on the Moscow line as well. Although he never stops being a Communist. He starts writing that his goal was to, quote, get this thing called socialism nailed and hammered up just as quickly as he can, and praises Eugene V. Debs, former chairman of the Socialist Party, as, quote, a pure cross between Jesus Christ and Abe Lincoln, which again, is not really something that the Moscow Party wants you saying.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Despite the consequences to his career, he continues to seek and sing his mind. Fascism is being afraid. Fascism is fear bossing you. Fascism is worse than all of these things. And fascism is more closer to you than I can make you see. I'M trying to wake you up and tell you that you're sleeping with something 10 times more dangerous than a poison fang snake in your bed. If fascism does come, and if it does kill me, well, then you add me alone onto the hundreds of millions which fascism has already dusted under, and it don't scare me so very.

[Margaret]

That rules.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's a good line.

[Margaret]

All right. It might kill me. It's killed millions of people before, so it's.

[Robert Evans]

I'll be in good company. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Margaret]

That's hard. I like that.

[Robert Evans]

Yep, that's hard. And this is, unfortunately, Margaret, where the story gets awkward again. No.

[Margaret]

Is he gonna heel turn again? He keeps dancing.

[Robert Evans]

It's more complicated than a heel turn. He's about to do a bad thing. Thing. There's a mitigating factor that's pretty significant.

[Margaret]

Okay. Okay.

[Robert Evans]

But it's a pretty bad thing. Woody is at this point and always on the verge of being broke, but also a famous and influential musician. And we know what comes with that, right? Which is the temptation to be a sex pest.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And, you know, Woody does not commit, like, rape, but he does sexually harass someone very badly. And this is a very ugly story. The gist of it is that things with his second wife, Marjorie, go downhill as his career. She is the family moneymaker. She actually makes a very good living teaching dancing. She's an extremely accomplished dancer, and his career is not doing well. This leads to fighting, and Woody eventually moves out and rents a room for himself. He starts writing letters to his old music partner, Lefty Lou's sister. She is 28 years old. He is 36. So they're not, like, crazy far apart. But the bigger issue is she had never insinuated that she was into him. Right. He is just writing her letters about wanting to fuck her apropos of nothing.

[Margaret]

Oh, fuck.

[Robert Evans]

Now she. Woody had just kind of assumed that because she, like, they knew each other, right? They were, like, friendly. But she gets divorced, and he just kind of assumes, well, I'm getting divorced too. That must mean she wants to fuck, right? And his letters to her take on an air of obsession. He writes at least 12 long letters suggesting they move out together, hit the road, and start having sex. These letters include long, rambling descriptions of the kinds of sex Woody wanted to have and more. And I'm going to quote from Ramblin man here into the envelopes. Guthrie stuffed pages torn from New York's tabloids with muddy magenta circles slathered around stories of grisly murders. The packet, sometimes two or three a week, frightened Mary Ruth by their intensity, the sexual proposals and the suggestion of violence. She drove to Los Angeles to show them to her sister, who knew Guthrie best of all. You have no idea how horrible it was, her older sister Maxine said. She in turn called the police. Police. Now the police get involved because they think Woody might be a budding serial killer. And given the kind of stuff he's sending, not an unreasonable thing to be afraid of. Yeah. And given the fact that the feds are hounding him, I get why Woody is like, this is them going after me for my politics, but it really isn't. Yeah, he's writing very upsetting things. Now, there's another part to this story which does not make the things he's writing less fucked up or upset. Upsetting. But he is losing his mind.

[Margaret]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

He is losing his mind in a degree that is very soon to be clinically diagnosed. Right. In episode one, I mentioned that Woody's mother went insane when he was quite young and was institutionalized. Right. This traumatized him. And at the time, we didn't have an explanation for what she was going for. They just said madness. Right. We now know what she had because Woody has it, and it's diagnosable by the time he gets it. And it's called Huntington's disease.

[Sophie]

Oh.

[Margaret]

Oh, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

His mom. And Woody gets it. And he is starting to suffer the effects of Huntington's by the late 40s. This is a neurodegenerative disorder that Huntington's Disease News describes as characterized by uncontrolled movements, loss of cognitive ability, and psychiatric problems. The middle stages of the illness are associated with psychosis. Some patients experience delusions which they tend to be convinced are accurate. And it also comes with these sort of obsessive delusions. Right. Which might explain the whole him thinking that this was something that was reciprocated. Right.

[Margaret]

So this isn't a heel turn. This is just a degeneration. This is just a.

[Robert Evans]

This is a very tragic degeneration. Right. You know, I don't know how, again, you want to parse it out morally, but, like, he is diagnosed, like, he is losing his mind. He is going to spend most of the rest of his life in an institution. So this is not just a case of, like, a powerful man in music being a sex pest who was not like this before, so far as we know. Absolutely. Declining and becoming increasingly delusional.

[Margaret]

And like, famous man sex pesting is fans. Famous man sex pesting is like. Or everyone in your orbit you just assume they want to fuck you, which I guess he's doing to this. No, yeah, the degeneration thing. That just makes sense. It's just.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. He probably always had a crush on her. And then this, like, he becomes convinced that there is something going on there, that there's nothing.

[Margaret]

Right. But the fact that it was out of the blue to her means that he probably kept his fucking mouth shut about the fact that he had a.

[Robert Evans]

Crush on her, one would assume. Right. So it's not great. He is ultimately charged in 1949 with sending obscene material through the mail. He avoids prison time but is sentenced to therapy. And he and his therapist do not have a good relationship. His therapist does not like him, but he's not diagnosed with anything quite yet. So his therapist is just like, he's kind of an asshole. Which I can't blame the therapist for, because he's being an asshole if you don't know the mitigating factor of the family mental illness that destroyed his mother and is destroying him. Woody eventually refuses court mandated therapy and his lawyer manages to narrowly get him out of a six month sentence. His lawyer, who is one of his shipmates, right. He and this guy are torpedoed together. And this lawyer, who's a very good friend, who was like, I'm not going to let my, my war buddy go to a fucking jail, right. Woody was mostly angry when his sentence gets like, cut off. He's kind of pissed because he had been planning a Christmas Eve show for the inmates that he doesn't get to do. So there's still that piece of him in there. Right. By the mid-1950s, Woody was disabled with Huntington's badly enough that his second wife Marjorie, who again he has separated from, had to take charge of his affairs. And it does say something that this person who he was not nice to at the end, had enough affection for him still that she makes sure he's taken care of. Right. Which included she registers a copyright for this Land is yous Land for the first time. Right. And for a number of his other songs. And she's doing that because, like, we're going to need some way of taking care of him.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

You know, and this makes sense. Right. One of the fun side effects of this is that his family is going to wind up in a lawsuit with Donald Trump about this Land is your Land because Trump kept trying to play it. It is now in the public domain, but it wasn't for a while. So that same year, 1956, he was involuntarily committed to Greystone Park, a New Jersey mental institution. Over the next five years he lost the ability to play music or even to, to type. But and again, this really says something about the amount of love there was still for him. He is not cut off or alone. His family visits him regularly, they take him out and he stays with them for weekends and holidays. He's taken out and, you know, taken to shows and trips by his friends and by fellow artists. Bob Dylan, who at this point is not particularly famous, starts visiting Woody at the asylum in 1961. And Dylan starts working with other performers over the 60s. They like, they play shows, they take Woody to some of these shows where they're playing his music to this new generation of newly radicalized Americans. And Woody lives long enough to see his music honored in like sold out shows by some of the, you know, like fucking Bob Dylan, some of the most beloved up and coming musicians of the 60s. So he does go out knowing that his music doesn't just live on, but has like influenced this new generation of people who are going to become incredibly famous and influential musicians in there own right. Which as far as being an artist goes, is about as much as you can hope for.

[Margaret]

Totally.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

Especially for someone who's at the kind of beginning, not the very beginning of recorded music, but like pretty close to it. Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

He dies in October of 1967. At that point he is unable to communicate by any means besides pointing at cards that said yes or no. But he left behind again a pretty incredible legacy. Two novels, hundreds of articles, more than a thousand songs and poems, 500 illustrations, and a central role in the folk music revival that changed American music forever. We've listened to a lot of Woody Guthrie's music in these episodes. And while I do hope you all take the opportunity to listen to more, I want to leave you with a quote of his that I think is quite relevant for our times, which Ed Cray picked out to open his 2008 biography of the man. About all a human being is anyway is just a hoping machine. And I like that. I also like this quote from Bob Dylan, who was asked in 1963 to sum up his feelings on Woody Guthrie in 25 words for a book on the man. As History.com notes, Dylan responded instead with a 194 line poem called Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, which took as its theme the eternal human search for hope. And where do you look for this hope you're seeking? Dylan asks in the poem, before proceeding to a kind of answer. You can either go to the church of your choice. Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital. You'll find God in the church of your choice. You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital.

[Margaret]

Cool.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Anyway, that's Woody Guthrie.

[Sophie]

That was awesome.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret]

I knew so little about him. I knew about some of his music, and it's been super influential. But that's awesome.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it was one of those, like. Again, it's a messy story, but yeah.

[Margaret]

Honestly, it was better than I would have guessed.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

Great pick for the non bastard holiday episode.

[Robert Evans]

A relevant kind of guy to know about for the kind of times we're heading into.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

And speaking of somebody people should know about, I adopted a second dog. This is Anderson's sister, T.R. truman. She's learning how to be a dog, but she's a good girl.

[Margaret]

She's already a good podcast dog, which is a hard level for a dog to reach.

[Sophie]

Yeah. Especially a herding dog.

[Margaret]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

Yeah. You're a good girl. Yeah. Yeah. I guess just to say happy holidays, everyone.

[Margaret]

Happy holidays.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Happy holidays. And, I don't know, listen to some Woody Guthrie. Yeah.

[Sophie]

We'll be back in the new year or the first week of the year. We'll have a couple Q and A episodes.

[Robert Evans]

We'll have some Q's, we'll answer some A's. It'll be a good time.

[Sophie]

Any final thoughts, Magpie? Anything you want to plug?

[Margaret]

Well, if you want Christmas every week, I have a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff where I talk about cool people did cool stuff. And then either this week or next week, depending on when everything gets released, I also will be covering the history of the song Bella, Ciao. Because I got excited by this recording last week of part one, and I thought, I'm gonna do a song too.

[Sophie]

It will be the week after we'll.

[Margaret]

Be releasing that, so next Monday you all can hear me talk about the history of Bella Chow.

[Sophie]

Awesome. All right.

[Margaret]

Merry Christmas and. Or whatever you want to have. Happy. Happy.

[Sophie]

Well, that'll do it. That'll do it for children. 23 for year 2024.

[Unknown]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

2024. Yeah. More or less.

[Sophie]

More or less. All right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

Be well.

[Robert Evans]

Bye. Bye.

[Sophie]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards.

[Unknown]

It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku Channel your home for free and premium TV is giving you access to holiday music and genre base stations from iHeart, all for free. Find the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeart, Christmas and North Pole Radio. The Roku Channel is available on all Roku devices, Web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs and the Roku mobile app on iOS and Android devices. So stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iheartradio on the Roku Channel. Happy streaming.

[Paris Hilton]

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[Unknown]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Unknown]

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[Robert Evans]

The hatchback.

[Unknown]

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