Woody Guthrie’s Not-So-Golden State

Woody Guthrie’s childhood in small-town Oklahoma was hard. His sister Clara died in a fire; his father Charley, an ambitious businessman, would be destroyed by the economic downturns ravaging the state in the early decades of the 20th century; his mentally ill mother Nora would be institutionalized after setting her sleeping husband on fire. Woody himself would be passed from family to family during the next couple of years.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie never graduated from high school and seemed untouched by ambition, although he already was dabbling in the folk music that would become his life’s passion. He married young, scrambling to find whatever work he could as the Depression sent the country into a tailspin, toiling at odd jobs from drugstore clerk to sign painter. Finally, in 1937, like other Okies fleeing the hardships of tenant farming and drought, 25-year-old Guthrie joined the migration west to California.

Near Yuma, Ariz., Woody Guthrie crossed into California, hitchhiking north on farm trucks through the already green lettuce and cotton fields of the Imperial Valley. “Coming out of the Dust Bowl, the colors so bright and smells so thick all around, that it seemed almost too good to be true.... My eyes had got sort of used to Oklahoma’s beat-up look, but here, with this sight of fertile, rich, damp, sweet soil that smelled like the dew of a jungle, I was learning to love another, greener, part of life.”

Like hundreds of thousands before him, Guthrie had crossed the last divide; he was no longer in the West, but “West of the West,” as a touring Theodore Roosevelt had noted 30 years earlier. California the dream had become shimmering reality.

The blacktop highway skirted the north shore of the Salton Sea, bored through the unlikely groves of date palms outside Indio, and widened to become the main street in Banning and Beaumont. North of Riverside he rejoined Route 66 and the steady trickle of migrants in their sagging cars and trucks. He hitchhiked the last leg of the journey in a ’29 Ford coupe driven by a friendly “Japanese boy.” As the young man touted the soil, the climate, the life in California, they drove through the endless orange groves that lined Arrow Highway into Los Angeles.

It was dark when the Ford pulled up in front of the Plaza church, tucked between office buildings of downtown Los Angeles and the city’s Chinatown, across a muddy field from the rail yards and “a block from everything in the world.” Guthrie was awed by the city, its sheer size and noise, so much bigger and louder than even the biggest cities he had tramped through. Whatever thoughts he had of staying fled. Instead he decided to head north to the farming community of Turlock, where his Aunt Laura had settled.

Turlock was a thriving town of more than 4,000, surrounded by hundreds of small farms. Nurtured by a sprawling irrigation system that siphoned the glacier-fed Merced River, the rich alluvial loam produced alfalfa, watermelons, row crops, peaches and apricots nine months of the year.

Guthrie’s Aunt Laura and her family had moved from Glendale to Turlock months before, but the work had run out, and they were ready to move back to the L.A. suburb. Turlock offered little work for a sign painter like Guthrie, and he had no interest in farm work.

From Turlock Guthrie made his way north on U.S. 99, through Sacramento with its Hooverville on the fetid banks of the Sacramento River hard by the city dump, then on to the Redding area. The federal government was going to build a huge dam, the first step in a vast irrigation plan to water the Central Valley, and it was said there were jobs for laborers there. As many as 5,000 job seekers had camped in the sardonically named Happy Valley, a shantytown 15 miles outside of Redding. Guthrie decided to move on.

In Redding he sang on street corners with a blind man; the two of them swapped songs, playing for whatever pennies and nickels they could milk from the thin crowds. Then Guthrie decided to retrace his steps southward, to follow his Aunt Laura’s family to Glendale. He could stay with them until he found work.

Guthrie was a few months short of 25, the father of one child, his wife pregnant with another. He sent occasional, small money orders to his wife Mary, who depended on her concerned parents most of the time. “I know it upset my dad a lot--my mother too,” Mary said. “Woody wasn’t doing the manly thing.”

Worse still, he was unsure of his future, seemingly no better off in California than he had been in Texas. The best he could say was that he liked this new and bountiful country, but he was still broke, and without an idea how to change that. His lack of purpose was an itch he couldn’t scratch, and it left him vaguely frustrated.

An unexpected visit from cousin Jack would change that.

Jack Guthrie was tall, attractive to the ladies and musically talented. His father John played fiddle; His mother Ethel sang the old ballads and heart songs popular in the previous century. Jack himself boasted a rich tenor voice and played guitar well. He had dreams of becoming a western star--he had worked up a bullwhip act in which he snapped cigarettes from the lips of a stage partner--but was responsible for a wife and child.

Three years younger than his cousin, Jack Guthrie was polished where Woody was not, a careful dresser, ambitious, an accomplished guitarist and smooth singer who had taught himself to yodel by listening to Gene Autry and Jimmie Rodgers records. He was also something of a showoff, whereas Woody was self-effacing and quiet.

Most important, Jack Guthrie was as ambitious as his cousin Woody was directionless. And he had a suggestion. Why didn’t they team up and see if they could make a go of it in Los Angeles?

They made an unlikely pair. Jack was a western singer, his songs heavily influenced by popular music. Woody was a country singer, his music born of an older oral tradition. Indeed, Woody privately disdained 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. His idea of playing up the neck of the guitar was to use a capo.

Still, the two agreed to work up some sort of act.

Sprawling Los Angeles--an ill-sorted patchwork of insular neighborhoods, orchards and truck farms--swallowed them without notice. Jack found work on construction projects while Woody hustled “all kinds of loose jobs all up and down the West Coast. I shingled houses. I mixed cement. I painted signs. I painted houses. I played my guitar around at saloons.” He spent six weeks washing dishes at wrestling champion “Strangler” Lewis’ Monterey Lounge on Brand Boulevard in Glendale, a few blocks from Aunt Laura’s home. That job lasted until he used lye to clean a sink full of aluminum skillets; the resulting chemical reaction spewed a foul-smelling smoke that emptied the restaurant for the night and the kitchen permanently of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie.

Living in a quarter-a-night hotel on Los Angeles’ Main Street, Guthrie eked out a living by singing for tips in the musty saloons of skid row. When his cousin Amalie protested, Guthrie merely shrugged. “Those are good people, good material to write about.” Even better, when he was out of work, he could pitch his hat on the sidewalk in front of a bar and hustle tips with songs.

At a western music jamboree held in the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, Jack wangled an appearance for them at the Strand Theater in Long Beach. Between showings of the newly released “Waikiki Wedding” and the short subjects, Jack, Woody and a popular local group, the Beverly Hillbillies, entertained onstage during the last week of June 1937.

Polished Jack Guthrie was the featured singer, his cousin Woody the comic sidekick playing his harmonica, his spoons or his bones. They evenly divided their $9 daily pay--$5 for singing, and $4 for driving around town in their truck, bedecked with a sign proclaiming “Headed for the Strand.”

The movie theater was crowded. Country and western music was popular; the added attraction of live entertainment was certain to draw a good house--even if the feature film was poor.

Los Angeles at the time was awash in cowboy-western music. Stuart Hamblen’s Gang was on KEHE, and busy Hamblen also on KMTR. The Covered Wagon Jubilee and Beverly Hillbillies each had a show on KMPC, Saddle Pals on KMTR and KMPC, Bronco Busters on KFWB, Saddle Tramps on KFOX, and the Sons of the Pioneers on KRKD. There was a “Hollywood Barn Dance,” and a “Hollywood Hillbillies,” a show that featured Cincinnati-born Leonard Slye, before he became Roy Rogers.

By turning the dial every 15 minutes, a listener could go from 5 in the morning to past midnight with country or western music in the air.

Only KFVD had no country music programming. The station offered everything from the Radio Poets Club to organ music to a Spanish language program each morning, and the “Editor of the Air” daily at noon. The owner of the station, a defiantly individualistic J. Frank Burke, presided over that show. A onetime Progressive, Burke had kept the reformer’s faith. As other Progressives, including California’s Sen. Hiram Johnson, moved toward the center, then on to the right, Burke continued to plug for social and political reform. He left the day-to-day management of the station to his son, Frank Junior.

On July 15, 1937, the Guthrie cousins drove to the KFVD studio in a once grand, converted home on Wilshire Boulevard. The audition went well. Frank Burke offered them a daily 15-minute slot at 8 a.m. They could do the program and still make it to a construction job site early enough to pick up at least a half-day’s work.

The Guthrie cousins accepted. They were radio performers.

That there were so many cowboy shows on the air, particularly in Los Angeles, was hardly accidental.

From the earliest days of silent films, former cowboys such as Bronco Billy Anderson had turned out one-, two-, then four-reel flickers. Over the years, particularly after the invention of the talkie, the heroic cowboy of a legendary West gave way to singing cowboys in a West that existed only on Hollywood’s back lots.

Across the nation, country or western music filled large blocks of airtime--even in such urban areas as Philadelphia and New York. The music was not only popular with listeners, it was inexpensive. Station managers and program directors had no trouble finding musicians like the Guthrie cousins willing to perform for free in the hope of building a following. With that, as Jack argued, they could cash in when they appeared in local nightclubs and bars.

But the hoped-for guest appearances were few. Jack and Woody hustled saloons for bookings, played the less selective skid row bars for tips or free beers, and made the rounds of the motion picture studios.

They scraped by, Jack torn between the need to feed his family and his desire to make a career as a cowboy singer. He vacillated, one day talking of quitting and going back to construction work, the next enthusing about the paying dates that were sure to come their way.

Woody chafed as “the sidekick,” with little to do on the show. One day he suggested that his Glendale neighbor Maxine Crissman come with them to the studio and that he and Maxine harmonize on a song or two. Jack agreed.

Though she and Woody had comfortably sung together at family gatherings, the 22-year-old Maxine spent the night gripped by stage fright. The butterflies in her stomach alternated with laryngitis, leaving her both hoarse and nervous when they departed for KFVD the next morning.

Woody and Maxine sang two songs together on the morning program, including Woody’s own “Curly-Headed Baby.”

She’s my curly-headed baby,

Used to sit on daddy’s knee.

She’s my curly-headed baby,

Come from sunny Tennessee.

Every night and day that passes

We go playing in my dreams

And I dream that we’re together

Down in sunny Tennessee.

The tune was cloying, and it owed more than a little to George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” but it put an end to Maxine’s stage fright. Woody presented her a “graduation certificate” in the form of a cartoon of the two of them singing into the microphone as Maxine’s knees knocked together.

The first two weeks of September 1937 were unsettled for the Guthrie cousins. On the first day of the month, Frank Burke shifted their show to 11 p.m. so that Jack could work more construction jobs by day. Burke handed the morning slot to Woody--who was willing to work the strange split shift. Guthrie in turn asked Maxine to join him.

There was no audition, recalled Maxine: “Must of been two or three days before they found out I was on the air.” Woody simply introduced her as “Lefty Lou from Old Mizzou”--”Lefty” a childhood nickname because she was left-handed, “Lou” simply because it rhymed with “Mizzou.”

Within days, the station began receiving letters for Woody and Lefty Lou, letters praising the “sweet singers” who offered songs the listeners remembered from their youth, songs that reminded them of distant homes, of Saturday night church socials and Sunday morning church services. Many wrote to request particular songs and hymns, requests Woody and Lefty Lou tried to fulfill.

They were different from the cowboy singers who favored artificial “buckaroo ballads.” Rather than sing of a West that never was, Woody preferred to re-create in song a West that had vanished. At the same time, Woody’s performances reflected influences of both 19th century medicine and minstrel shows and 20th century vaudeville. He mixed cornpone humor borrowed from hoary stage routines with contemporary, sardonic observation.

The 25-year-old Guthrie’s singing style was evolving as he was maturing. His unusual two-part harmony with Maxine stemmed from the 100-year-old church tradition of shape-note hymn books, with the male voice providing the tenor harmony and the female alto carrying the melody. As a soloist, he forsook the traditional nasal, pinched-throat voice of the Southern mountains. Instead he sang, or rather rasped, a harsh head tone, more of the West, a voice at once old and new.

Their programs were unrehearsed, virtually unplanned. Maxine learned Woody’s songs, old or new, as they walked the mile from his Aunt Laura’s house to the Crissman residence. They would stop passersby and try out the tune there on the sidewalk.

Guthrie began compiling a songbook. “We would set it up on a rack in the studio and wherever it opened up, that’s what we would sing. If we started on a wrong note, we just stopped and started over. It was never anything formal. It was exactly like Sunday afternoon back-porch singing back home.”

“The Woody and Lefty Lou Show” found an audience, or, more accurately, the audience discovered them by turning the dial. “All these displaced people from the Dust Bowl,” Maxine recalled, “well, they found us, and we were a touch of home.”

But the young Okie also brought to his program the prejudices of those small towns. He casually referred to Negroes as “niggers,” his language as unconscious and unexamined as his boyhood not far from that part of Oklahoma known as “Little Dixie.” One evening he introduced a harmonica solo by its traditional name, “Run, Nigger, Run.” Shortly after, he received a polite letter from a listener:

“I am a Negro, a young Negro in college and I certainly resented your remark. No person, or person of any intelligence uses that word over the radio today . . . .

I don’t know just how many Negroes listened to your program tonight, but I, for one, am letting you know that it was deeply resented.”

It was for Guthrie a question of a man’s dignity. He apologized on the air, declined to play the harmonica showpiece again--under that title--and from then on spoke of “colored men.”

Beyond that, he remained largely indifferent to politics. Any social commentary was slight, mostly confined to the ironic, as in a new song he had written to an older tune, “Hang Out the Front Door Key”:

Thousands of folks back east they say

Leavin’ home every day,

Beatin’ a hot and dusty way

To the California line.

O’er the desert sands they roll

Tryin’ to get out of the old dust bowl.

They think they’re a-comin’ to a sugar bowl,

But here’s what they find:

The police at the port of entry say:

“You’re number 14,000 for today!” Oh!

If you ain’t got the do-re-mi, folks,

If you ain’t got the do-re-mi,

Better hang on in beautiful Texas,

Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.

The song was a warning to the unwary, to those who believed western singer Jimmie Rodgers’ assurance that “California’s waters taste like cherry wine.” It offered no solutions. It was wry, not angry. “Lefty Lou and me agrees that it ain’t so much on poetry, but it tells a LOT of truth.”

Woody and Lefty Lou were getting a surprising number of letters, more than Jack and Woody had ever polled. In October, despite a 17-day hiatus during which they had abandoned the nighttime show, Woody and Lefty Lou received 410 pieces of mail. Here was ample proof of the show’s popularity, so much so that Frank Burke offered them a year’s contract in November.

According to the terms of the contract, they were to receive a sustaining fee of $20 a week whether they were sponsored or unsponsored. Additionally, they would receive $15 each for every 15 minutes that sponsors bought. To Guthrie, it was riches.

Doug mack, the manager of the sons of the pioneers, had heard “The Woody and Lefty Lou Show” and was impressed with the singing. He suggested to booking agent Hal Horton that he listen to these kids. The two singers would do well on Horton’s radio station, XELO in Tia Juana.

Horton was both a booking agent and sales manager on the West Coast for Consolidated Drug Co. of Chicago. Consolidated peddled beauty supplies and an array of over-the-counter remedies, most with hard-sell radio commercials that barely skirted the outrageous and illegal.

Horton proposed that Guthrie take the show to XELO. He would make Guthrie responsible for the noon-to-11 p.m. slot. Horton was prepared to pay both him and Maxine $75 a week.

The Horton offer was a great opportunity. The pay was twice and more what they were making at KFVD, and XELO’s thunderous signal day and night reached a huge audience. Scattered along the border, the “X-stations” such as XELO were licensed by the Mexican government but maintained business offices across the border. The oldest of the stations, XER, built its transmitter and antenna in Villa Acuna, Coahuila, in 1930, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. Free of the wattage limitations imposed by the Yankees’ Federal Communications Commission, the signal of XER and its successor, XERA, blanketed the entire American Midwest well into Canada.

Broadcasting from Mexico also freed promoters from Federal Trade Commission restrictions. Consequently, snake oil salesmen prospered on these “border blasters,” selling cure-alls for feminine ailments and concoctions such as J. R. Brinkly’s goat-gland extract for sexual impotence.

The stations were immensely profitable--both to owners and Mexican bureaucrats who discovered requirements for all manner of local “license fees.” In short order, a half-dozen of these stations ranged along the Mexican border. Programming aimed at rural, less sophisticated audiences offered a stream of country and western singers, Pentecostal evangelists and shrill commercials. “If one could endure the seemingly never-ending advertising, he could occasionally hear a hillbilly song of the best quality,” country music historian Bill Malone wrote.

When Maxine and Woody told the younger Burke they had Horton’s offer, Burke released them from their contractual obligation to his station. “OK, come back when you finish your contract” with Horton, he added. (Burke knew they were salable if they returned. “The Woody and Lefty Lou Show” had had a succession of sponsors: a headache remedy had been replaced by the Victor Clothing Co., which specialized in work clothes and uniforms, and by a local firm that sold inexpensive perfumes.)

Soon Woody and Maxine were getting mail praising the XELO program, including an encouraging postcard from Woody’s musical idols, the Carter family: A.P., his wife Sara, and sister-in-law Maybelle. The mail came from as far away as Indianapolis, where a listener heard the nighttime program clearly enough to write in requests. Then Woody read a note from a Canadian listener on the air and casually remarked, “Looks like we smuggled some songs into Canada.”

That afternoon as they were crossing the border for the evening show, federal authorities arrested Guthrie. He was to be charged with smuggling. Or insulting Mexico. Something.

Woody was in custody, and “we were stranded in a foreign land--without our ‘leader.’ Very worried,” Maxine commented later. “[We] had heard awful stories regarding Mexico City’s jail.”

Guthrie turned up hours later, having talked himself out of trouble. But not for long. A squad of six armed soldiers marched into the XELO building, and ordered them from the country. An army officer described as big and ferocious informed them in English that their visas did not have the necessary work permits to continue broadcasting. “If you come into Mexico tomorrow, you will be arrested and charged with being spies.”

After three weeks, the Mexican adventure was over. They were a sad bunch that returned to Los Angeles. Without so much as a telephone call, on Feb. 16, 1938, Woody and Maxine strode into KFVD, which had moved to new studios on South Western Avenue near Wilshire. “We’ve been looking for you,” Frank Burke Jr. boomed. “Cross the hall and to your left.”

As simply as that, they returned to KFVD.

A foot of rain in the first week of March 1938--more than 6 inches in one day--brought widespread flooding throughout Southern California. Streets became raging spillways, intersections flooded to the point where water covered wheel hubs. More than 130 people died in the unexpected floods. Many of them living in once-dry washes and gullies were literally washed out to sea, their bodies never recovered.

From a concrete bridge hardly a mile from his house, Woody watched the muddy, torrential waters of the Los Angeles River churn under his feet, and went home to write a lachrymose ballad about the storm and its victims.

For all his success, Guthrie began to be restless. Maxine remembered dropping him on the edge of heavily traveled San Fernando Road after their midday broadcast, Guthrie wearing a jacket and porkpie hat, sometimes carrying his guitar. Even as he waved goodbye to her, “he would do a sort of Mississippi shuffle and I have seen three cars stop at once, wanting to pick him up.”

Maxine found it harder and harder to stay out late. All her life she had suffered from anemia, and the frantic pace since going on the air the previous August had taken its toll. She gave up trips with Woody to the Central Library and the bookstores downtown or to the La Brea Tar Pits to the west. She lost weight. Increasingly, she paused to catch her breath on the stairs of the converted mansion that housed the KFVD studios.

“It was time to take off,” she concluded.

In the meantime, Frank Burke Sr. had started a weekly newspaper, The Light. The eight-page paper was a platform for Burke’s personal causes, among them group health plans, unions and the farm labor situation. Since Guthrie was going off the air, Burke suggested that he might be interested in a project Burke had in mind: a series of stories on the plight of the Okies in California.

Guthrie, with nothing better to do, agreed.

There was a small condition. As the capstone for the series, Burke proposed that Guthrie demonstrate Gov. Frank Merriam’s indifference to the wretched conditions of farmworkers by getting himself arrested in the state Capitol. No stranger to jails, Guthrie agreed.

On June 18, 1938, 10 months after they first went on the air together, Woody and Lefty Lou broadcast together for the last time.

On that last show, Guthrie announced that he would become The Light’s roving “hobo correspondent.” First he planned to ride the rails 500 miles north to Chico, where hungry migrant farmworkers anxiously waited for the almonds and peaches to come in. From there, well, they could read The Light to find out.

Guthrie was then to hitchhike to Sacramento with the idea of getting arrested. As he told the story to Maxine--it would be elaborated upon in later retellings--he walked into the Capitol, unslung his guitar and started singing in the marble rotunda. A crowd of secretaries and tourists applauded his impromptu serenade and some good-naturedly threw coins for him. After a few songs, Capitol police simply escorted Guthrie from the building--but not before he swept up and pocketed the change on the floor.

For a month he drifted from noisome Hoovervilles in the northern San Joaquin to smartly maintained farm labor camps run by the federal government. He slept in fetid ditches alongside country roads, covered only with cardboard, and in dismal hotels in the larger cities. He was on Stockton’s skid row, then in Tracy, hanging around the rail yard.

Hunger he had seen before, while tramping the Southwest, but armored in the self-absorption of the young, he had paid little heed. The squalor and deprivation he saw this summer of 1938 rasped.

In this fifth year of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, an older Woody Guthrie saw with a new understanding. These migrants were desperate amid plenty, proud folk trapped by the “crooked work and starvation going on all around.”

The migrants were his people. They were the Okies who had listened to “The Woody and Lefty Lou Show,” who had written to him and Maxine at KFVD and had sent gifts, who had shared stories of their hard times and their abiding faith. He knew them; they were family.

Twenty-six-year-old Woody Guthrie was angry.

Guthrie would spend the rest of his short life as a radical activist--writing 1,400 songs, a classic “autobiographical novel,” “Bound for Glory,” and thousands of often brilliant essays. As an advocate for farmworkers’ rights, he fell in with actor Will Geer and, later, a skinny kid from Harvard learning to play five-string banjo, Pete Seeger. Geer introduced Guthrie to New York City’s folk music community, and Seeger brought him into the sing-for-any-good-cause Almanac Singers. In New York, too, Guthrie would swap songs with the equally legendary Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter and sing for any number of social causes. He would record two albums of “Dust Bowl Ballads” for Victor that captured the voice of the Okie, and literally hundreds of songs for Folkways Records--including “This Land Is Your Land,” which Guthrie had written in February 1940 and set aside. During World War II, Guthrie sailed three times as a merchant mariner, and was torpedoed twice. He agitated for the radical National Maritime Union while J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI tracked his every move.

Guthrie left Mary and their three children, eventually to take up with Martha Graham dancer Marjorie Mazia in 1942. They would have four children, including Cathy, who prompted Guthrie’s inspired children’s songs, and Arlo, who was to become a professional folk singer.

It is said that the poet is given 10 years. Guthrie had his decade, beginning with his first “Okie” ballads written in Los Angeles in 1937. By 1947 he was all but through as a poet, an author, even as a singer, felled by the Huntington’s disease that killed his mother two decades before. He died of pneumonia in Brooklyn State Hospital on Oct. 3, 1967. He was 55 years old.