Nobody can. Write About the Fight Guthrie found content for songs not only in tragic events but in all sorts of human drama. The fight can be a fight that leads up to a love affair.
Or your song can tell about how a love affair led up to a fight. Love affairs and fights are all tangled up like dry leaves in a spider web. For Guthrie, the fight depicted in a song could be between people or against tough circumstances. I spend hours and hours just writing down my ideas for titles to my songs.
Think About Today. This week. This month. This year. Something that will not tomorrow be gone with the wind. But something that tomorrow will be as true as it is today. The secret of a lasting song is not the record current event, but this timeless element which may be contained in their chorus or last line or elsewhere. Land gonna be mine!
Not only in small personal senses, but broad social ways and in the broader esthetic ways. To squeeze the kernel of useable good out of all his experiences. He made this point vividly in a letter to Lomax with wide-ranging thoughts about songwriting. I had a big dog once and all of the kids played with him and liked him and he would go and get their baseball when they knocked it too far or he would run in their football games and stand around with his eyes shot over and his ear stuck about half way up and his tongue running in and out of his mouth, his head cocked over sideways like and watching the kids shoot marbles.
But an old neighbor lady with something haywire in her head went and poisoned the dog and it killed him and the kids all had a big funeral for old poochy they called him and they dug him a nice grave and painted his name on a flat rock and it was a plum heartbreaking affair.
You could write a song about that and it would contain enough of all the high and low feelings to put it over if the blame was properly placed on the old lady that poisoned the pooch. I think one mistake some folks make in trying to write songs that will interest folks is to try to cover too much territory or to make it too much of a sermon.
A folk song ought to be pretty well satisfied just to tell the facts and let it go at that. And there is something very funny about almost everything that happens if you do a good job of a telling just exactly what took place.
Both parents were musically inclined and taught young Woody a wide array of folk tunes, songs that he soon learned to play on his guitar and harmonica. Tragedy and personal loss visited the budding musician early and often throughout his childhood, providing a bleak context for his future songs and supplying him with a wry perspective on life. In short order, Guthrie experienced the accidental death of his older sister Clara, a fire that destroyed the family home, his father's financial ruin, and the institutionalization of his mother, who was suffering from Huntington's disease.
At the age of just 14, Guthrie and his siblings were left to fend for themselves while their father worked in Texas to repay his debts. As a teenager, Guthrie turned to busking in the streets for food or money, honing his skills as a musician while developing the keen social conscience that would later be so integral to his legendary music.
When Guthrie was 19, he married his first wife, Mary Jennings, in Texas, where he had gone to be with his father. The Great Depression hit the Guthrie family hard, and when the drought-stricken Great Plains transformed into the infamous Dust Bowl, Guthrie left his family in to join the thousands of "Okies" who were migrating West in search of work.
Like many other "Dust Bowl refugees," Guthrie spent his time hitchhiking, riding freight trains, and when he could, quite literally singing for his supper. With his guitar and harmonica, Guthrie sang in the hobo and migrant camps, developing into a musical spokesman for labor and other left-wing causes. These hardscrabble experiences would provide the bedrock for Guthrie's songs and stories, as well as fodder for his future autobiography, "Bound for Glory.
The duo soon garnered a loyal following from the disenfranchised "Okies" living in migrant camps across California and it wasn't long before Guthrie's populist sentiments found their way into his songs. In , Guthrie's wanderlust led him to New York City, where he was warmly embraced by leftist artists, union organizers and folk musicians. He took up social causes and helped establish folk music not only as a force for change, but also as a viable new commercial genre within the music business.
Guthrie's success as a songwriter with the Almanac Singers helped launch him into the popular consciousness, garnering him even greater critical acclaim. The ensuing fame and hardships of the road led to the end of Guthrie's marriage in A year later, he would go on to record his most famous song, "This Land is Your Land," an iconic populist anthem which remains popular today and is regarded by many as a kind of alternative national anthem.
Guthrie was famous for performing with the slogan, "This Machine Kills Fascists," scrawled across his acoustic guitar. While he was out of the Merchant Marine on furlough, he married Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, and after the war the couple made their home in Coney Island, New York, eventually filling the house with four children: Cathy, Arlo, Joady and Nora. This period in Guthrie's life would prove to be his most musically prolific, as he continued to produce political anthems while also writing children's classics like, "Don't You Push Me Down," "Ship In The Sky" and "Howdi Doo.
By the late s, Guthrie began to show symptoms of the rare neurological disease Huntington's Chorea, which had killed his mother. Guthrie arrived in California, and began living in a compound owned by activist and actor Will Geer, populated largely by performers who had been blacklisted during the Red Scare of the early Cold War years. Guthrie's health continued to deteriorate in the late s, and he was hospitalized until his death in His marriage to Van Kirk collapsed under the weight of his disease, and the couple eventually divorced.
During the last years of his life, Guthrie's second wife, Marjorie, and their children would visit him in the hospital regularly, as would Guthrie's most famous heir in the world of folk music, Bob Dylan.
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