Autry Exhibit Puts Woody Guthrie Into Words

Woody Guthrie, the subject of a major show premiering Saturday at the Autry Museum, lived long enough to hear son Arlo’s “Alice’s Restaurant.”

Nobody knows how the folk legend felt about his son’s song--perhaps the catchiest anti-war song ever written--because, by the time the elder Guthrie died on Oct. 3, 1967, at the age of 55, Huntington’s disease had left his brain in tatters and stolen his ability to communicate.

Guthrie took a long time to die. He fought the hereditary disease for 15 years. It killed his mother and two of his daughters and hangs over the rest of his descendants.

Eventually, Guthrie could only express himself by blinking when someone--usually his second wife, Marjorie (from whom he was divorced)--held up cards with “Yes” and “No” written on them. The cards are the most heartbreaking artifacts in the show.

What it was like for the man who wrote “This Land Is Your Land” and more than 1,000 other songs to lose language yet retain consciousness, only he really knew.

But in words included in the exhibit, Guthrie makes it clear that he left the world reluctantly: “I want to go on and I want/To climb on and ramble on/And ankle on and stumble on/And stagger on . . . How many hours I can do it.”

Even before Guthrie’s decline, he had become something more than an enviably prolific, anti-fascist, anti-plutocrat balladeer whose boosters included the elite performers and preservers of Populist American music.

Much as Jack Kerouac did, Guthrie had become an American icon--someone who embodied the hopes, attitudes and anger of an entire generation.

Organized by the Smithsonian Institution in collaboration with Guthrie’s daughter Nora, executive director of his archives in New York City, the Autry exhibit is groundbreaking in several ways.

As Autry staffer Michael Fox explains, it is filled with dozens of drawings and pages and pages of Guthrie’s writings that have never been seen before.

“They’ve really discovered a treasure trove of unknown Guthrie material at the archives, and this exhibit effectively showcases it,” says Fox, assistant curator at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage.

The show is also notable in paying homage to a man who openly sympathized with the Communist Party and was on the list of subversives compiled by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Guthrie made light of his politics: “Left wing, chicken wing, it’s all the same to me,” he once said. And he wrote in his “Woody Sez” column in the Daily People’s World: “I ain’t a communist necessarily but I been in the red all my life.”

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Socialist, if not communist, views were common among people who had seen the suffering of the Dust Bowl, the Depression and a nation where there was wholesale joblessness, homelessness and hunger--with no safety net. But few others could take the pain and injustice Guthrie saw while riding in boxcars and hanging out in Hoovervilles and make music of it.

The Autry show differs from many recent exhibits in that it is rich in text. Words are everywhere, including on many of Guthrie’s drawings. This is a welcome change from many museum shows of late, which seem to fear that ample explanatory labels or other text will somehow exclude viewers or interfere with the experiential flow of the exhibit. But this is a show that demands words. A lyrical motor mouth, Guthrie was drunk on them and couldn’t stop stringing them together.

Unlike his father, a professional guitarist, Guthrie was an indifferent guitar picker and a mediocre fiddler.

“He wrote his songs at the typewriter; it was the instrument he played best,” writes Joe Klein, whose riveting 19-year-old biography of Guthrie was recently reissued, probably for no more laudable reason than the success of Klein’s best-selling “Primary Colors.”

Guthrie first came to California, as so many Okies did, expecting to find paradise. He found antipathy toward outsiders instead.

But he returned and had his first taste of success in Los Angeles with a program on radio station KFVD. When he finally got around to sending for his first wife, Mary, and their two children, they lived with relatives in a tiny house in Glendale “so close to Griffith Park Zoo,” Klein writes, “they could hear the lions roaring at night.”

Later, during the blacklist, Guthrie fled New York City and lived for a time at Will Geer’s place in Topanga Canyon, where Guthrie often went naked, and wooed his third wife, Anneke, over a potter’s wheel.

Guthrie was one of those greatly talented, charismatic men that you are really, really glad you never got involved with. Remember how girls of the ‘60s listened to Joan Baez sing “Silver Dagger” until the record skipped? Guthrie was the kind of guy the mother in that song warns her daughter about, a heartbreaker who drank too much and took off without warning. Or as Guthrie himself put it--”So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.”

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Music historian Alan Lomax said of Guthrie: “His voice bit at the heart.” You hear Guthrie’s distinctive rasp as you walk through the show and realize fury is as much a part of his music as light.

In Klein’s view, it isn’t Guthrie’s work alone that has made him an American immortal.

“Woody Guthrie’s most enduring quality has turned out to be his wild, heterodox and overpowering sense of freedom,” Klein writes. “It is a deeply American trait, made possible by the vastness of the land and the stability of the political system.”

The great Odetta was among the first to propose that “This Land Is Your Land” replace our venerable but clunky national anthem.

All in favor say, “This land was made for you and me.”

“This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie” opens Saturday at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park. Through Sept. 26. Call (323) 667-2000.