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

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast by Judge Robert Evans, the Honorable Judge Robert Evans presiding over the Court of Bastards. And, you know, I announced last week that I am now officially a legal United States municipal judge.
And I think a lot of people thought that was a bit. They thought I was joking.
And I just want to say, folks, I would never joke about that. Because as soon as I was sworn in, I was handed a case to rule on.
And I've been thinking nonstop about it for the last two weeks. And I know the Supreme Court's got a lot of important cases coming up, obviously, but

they all pale in comparison to this question, which is, which of the stats in the different

interviews with the vampire is more fuckable?

And I have my ruling here.

Is the jury ready to hear it?

Our jury today, including Margaret Killjoy and Sophie Lichterman.

Are you guys ready to hear my ruling on this one?

I am, although I've only seen the evidence produced about the 90s interview with a vampire.

Oh, you've got to watch the new TV show.

It's hot as hell.

And that's who I go with, is the TV list.

Robert, have you ever heard of jury nullification?

Uh-huh.

You can't nullify me on this.

Oh, okay.

Because he's just so hot.

Let's go. go with is the is the tv list have you ever heard of uh jury nullification uh-huh you can't nullify me on this uh because because because he's just so hot look at him look at him sophie have you not looked at him you're asking me looking at him now are you asking me to look up what a man looks like and say if they are hot or not because i refuse on principle i i wouldn't i wouldn't call him just a man uh because he's supernaturally good looking.

Well, the old one is just Gare.

Yeah.

Yeah, whereas the new one looks like, I don't know, kind of like a little bit of Viking,

a little bit of French sex pot.

He's good.

He's good.

It's a good TV show, everybody. Watch the new interview with with a vampire that's my ruling margaret how are you feeling i'm i'm feeling like i uh i like vampires oh you're gonna like that show i struggle with vampire stuff though because i'm incredibly squeamish but i love the romance of vampires and the like sorrow of living forever and all of that so i sometimes start watching vampire movies, and then they start eating people, and I'm like, this is too much for me.
And I'm like, well, what did I think was going to happen? It's okay. They're occasionally sad about eating people in the TV show.
I have a question for the two of you. Okay.
Would you become vampires if given the choice? Absolutely. Yeah, why not? Sophie? Could I still have my dog?

Yeah, you can have your dog. You just can't hang out with your dog in the day.

Less time with my dog, not into it.

Well, it's the same amount of time,

it's just inverted. I just like the idea of

eating people. Yeah, but like, I hang out

with her at night and during the day.

So whatever gives me the most amount

of hours with Anderson.

Can you make a vampire out of Anderson? Would she live forever? Yeah. Oh, Anderson, we're vampires.
We're fucking vampires. Can you make dogs into vampires in standard vampire mythology? In Margaret's world.
Okay. Well, I mean, vampires can turn into dogs.
So I feel like there's clearly a blurring of the line between human and dog and vampire world so we might actually just become peers with our dogs in which case it's an even easier choice the hardest part for me is the drinking of the blood but you know what i'd be willing to accept it there's a lot of people whose blood i drink there's a lot of people drinking my blood i might as well have some some theirs. Most of the people I've asked this have said no.
So I'm impressed with you too. Yeah.
I'm down. I'm ready to do the vampire shit.
Again, Interview with a Vampire makes it seem incredible. I really loved Vampire Diaries.
It's my one really bad CW show that I'm like, that was such a good experience for me. The 17 times I watched it.
I get to be best friends with the guy who played Bell Rios in the Foundation TV show. It's a great idea.
I'm picking Vampire. Again, based entirely off this TV show.
This is going to be a really long call to make it back by one time I went to a grocery store and the Vampire Diaries actor brothers, they're not real brothers in real life were there trying to sell their bourbon and their dog licked my face and um it was a really good experience I'm just saying it was a really good experience for me and I immediately had to record with Robert and Jamie afterwards and they're like what's wrong with you why do you keep why do you why are you smiling so big and I was like I was like Vampire Diaries brother's dog licked my face and they're like, what's wrong with you? Why do you keep, why do you, why are you smiling so big? And I was like, I was like, Vampire Diaries brother's dog licked my face. And they're like, all right.
I was like, you don't understand. Here's the thing.
Yeah. Vampires consume the blood of human beings in order to stay alive.
And so do essentially most of the people who run our country, which is why people have been up in arms and very interested in some stuff that's been happening in the news recently. Sure.
But this brings me to the subject of our annual non-bastards episode. A guy who became very aware of the fact that there were bloodsuckers murdering all of his friends and loved ones and decided, well, fuck, I don't know what else to do but sing some songs about it.
This week, we're talking about Woody Guthrie. Yeah.
Yeah, Margaret, what do you know about Woody? Well, I get him mixed up with Utah Phillips in my head, even though I shouldn't. And I believe Woody is the This Machine Kills Fascist guitar, not Utah, right? He sure is, yes.
And is he the list of stuff for the new year, or is that Utah? I think that's Utah this land is your land yeah where they always cut out the good verses about getting rid of private property yeah yeah and to be fair he cut out the good verses we're gonna talk about that in these episodes we're gonna talk a lot of Woody because Woody is a complicated figure. This is going to be one of our famous, let's talk about the morality and ethics of a guy who lived and was born into a world that most of the people alive have trouble comprehending episode.
Yay, every history episode ever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think this is a good time to be talking about Woody because fascism, as it was when he was a young man, fascism seems to be ascendant around the world.

There are outlawed gunmen carrying out attacks on capitalist institutions that symbolize the poverty and suffering that have made a lot of people miserable. and yeah you know

a lot of the people who have listened to this episode

were probably forced out of their homes

for some period of time this year

due to one kind of environmentally influenced disaster or another.

A not insignificant chunk of the audience, given the hurricanes and fires, yada, yada, yada.

And that's the way things were in Woody's day, too.

So let's let's learn a little bit about America's greatest folk singer, or at least the patron saint of all American folk singers, Woody Guthrie. Cool.
And we're back. So, if you're not familiar, as we stated, he's the author of This Land is Your Land.
He's the author of All You Fascists Are Bound to Lose and a whole bunch of other socialist and anti-fascist protest ballads.

He also wrote a shitload of other well-known American classics and a bunch of unknown folks, and I should say an unknown number of other folk songs. When I say unknown, I mean it.
There is no comprehensive accounting of how many songs Woody wrote and published,

but credible estimates are somewhere around a thousand or more.

That's the way to do it.

So this is a very prolific songwriter, right?

And a lot of the songs that he would have written,

rather than being many, were published in different songbooks and whatnot

and are still sung today, but a lot of them only existed briefly in dingy little stages from New Jersey to the Redwood Coast. So he's my kind of artist.
Yeah, I like that kind of guy. Yeah, it's hard not to.
That said, when we talk about his family background, there's some rough, so got to be some rough moments here and some rough moments in his own life. This is not a guy who was unproblematic in any comprehensive way.
What? A man who had power in interpersonal relationships wasn't perfect? Yeah, we'll talk about how much power he had. He's a little more complicated than that, even.
Okay. Yeah.
His grandfather was born Jeremiah Purcell Guthrie in Bell County, South Texas, and went by Jerry P. Restless, as was the family condition, he'd moved his family north to what was then known as Indian Territory in 1897.
Today, we call most of this Oklahoma. And at the time, it is where the federal government had pushed a number of tribes in order to pretend, hey, we're not trying to dispossess you entirely.

You got to keep moving, but keep moving. But eventually, like, you'll land in this great area where, you know, you guys will be safe forever.
That's Oklahoma. That's what becomes Oklahoma.
It's just the Indian Territory in this period. It's not a state.
So during this period, the government offered land grants in this territory up to 160 acres to anyone with quote unquote Indian blood. And Jerry's second wife, Woody's dad, Charlie's stepmom was one eighth Creek.
Now, obviously, everything around this is messed up and part of policies that were at best ignorant and at worst genocidal. And we're not commenting on the validity of how the government saw indigeneity at this period of time, just saying this is how they handled it, right? So Charlie grew up, and that's again Woody's dad, grew up in proto-Oklahoma, which reads best as proto-Oklahoma, but I don't actually think, I don't know how well it scans audibly.
Anyway, on his dad's ranch, he was ambitious. He studied business through correspondence courses.
He also learned penmanship through correspondence and took a correspondence course on boxing, which makes a lot less sense to me, but okay. Punch.
Hell yeah. Punch better.
Can't wait for that third letter. many people who are listening to this are basically doing that with YouTube right now and not actually practicing.

Right, right.

Yeah, he would have been a YouTube guy in a different era.

He would have been like watching videos on how to punch better.

Yeah.

He was good enough at the money stuff.

He does actually learn pretty well how to manage money and handle business. and pretty soon, as a teenager, he's running the family farm.
Eventually, things are going well enough that Jerry and Charlie sell what they have, and Jerry moves back down to Texas to start another ranch near the border, whereas Charlie moves to a small town called Castle in 1902. He gets a job in a dry goods store, and he meets Nora Tanner, the daughter of a school teacher.
In the 2006 biography Ramblin' Man by Ed Cray, here's how Nora is described. If Kansas-born Nora was not the prettiest girl, she was among the most spunky.
Inevitably, and here's where things take a turn, people judged 14-year-old Nora as something of a tomboy because of her spirited attitude. How else would she assert herself in a house with three brothers and sisters and three half-brothers? Again, 2006 is probably a little too late to be writing about a 14-year-old girl who gets picked up by a man in his 20s that way.
Yeah, not the prettiest. That's what we need to know.
I don't love that. Now, we are talking about Woody Guthrie's dad here.
I just want to remind you of that. This is not the subject of our episode.
And gross arrangements like this. And is this his mom? Is Nora the mom? Yes, Nora's his mom.
And this is gross, but this is also not a wildly uncommon arrangement. And Nora and Charlie, they meet when she's 14.

They don't get together immediately.

He starts hanging around her and her family and gets to know them for two years before

marrying her when she is 16 and he is like 25.

Oh, great.

So many years.

Still uncomfortably awful.

Not great.

Still creepy.

So respectful to just hang out. Two years.
Two years to just lurk over a child. Yeah, just hanging out, making it really clear that you're into this child.
Yeah. But not until they're in a...
I'm not defending this. Let's be clear.
Charlie Guthrie sucks ass. This is not the worst thing Charlie Guthrie's going to be involved in.
Oh, good.

So he's just, he's, I'm glad we have a bastard today. Oh, yeah.
No, there's a bastard in this episode. And it is Charlie.
It's Woody Guthrie's dad, definitely on the bastard spectrum. So he starts reading law, and he gets involved in local Democratic Party politics.
Oklahoma, the state, is about to become a thing. And while, you know, it's unformed in this period, there's an opportunity for ambitious young men to make names for themselves.
And Charlie decides he wants to do just that. He runs for a district court position and he wins election in 1907 because all of the votes from local black men were thrown out under false allegations of ballot stuffing.
Yeah.lie's really just knocking him out of the park the democratic party is not the same no this is before the great inversion of these two parties yeah yeah and he's he's just yeah comprehensively not a nice guy uh after winning he takes his burgeoning family a few miles away to okima a town which was having an oil boom and was an exciting place to be in 1907, something no one has said about Okeema since. For a few years, life was grand, and Charlie gets rich.
He acquired more than 30 properties. He joined a Masonic Lodge.
He purchased the first automobile in town in 1909, and he became a fiery anti-socialist polemicist, giving ranting speeches about Eugene

V. Debs, the pro-union socialist rappel rouser and presidential candidate.

So I bet you're saying, Margaret, wow, what a great dude.

I'm saying like, haha, this guy had a socialist kid.

He sure did.

And we're going to get to why.

But first, let's talk about a crime against humanity. Oh, good.
Yeah, yeah, everybody loves a good crime against humanity. That's why I come on, bastards.
Uh-huh. I thought that's what you were doing to call the ad breaks, which you could do right now if you so choose.
No, no, no, no. It's okay.
Let's talk about a crime against humanity first. That'll lead into the ad break.
Oh, I thought you were talking about advertisements, but okay. No, no, no, no, No, talking about horrible things.
In late May of 1911, a black mother and her son, Laura and L.D. Nelson, were taken into custody after being accused of shooting and killing Ophiske County Sheriff's Deputy George Loney.
The deputy had been on their family land going after a cow he believed had been stolen, and a struggle ensued. Laura apparently grabbed for the deputy's gun first.
It's a little unclear exactly what happened, but her husband wound up pleading guilty to larceny, and so he was away while Laura and LD were taken to a county jail. As was often the case in situations like this, outrage spread around the white families of the area.
A crowd formed. Woody Guthrie would later allege that his father was one of the men who joined that crowd.
They burst into the county jail on the night of May 24th, raped Laura repeatedly, and then hung her and her 14-year-old son until they were dead. As was usually the case, local photographers took pictures of the lynching site afterwards to sell his postcards.
The photos of Laura's body hanging dead are the only known surviving pictures of a black female lynching victim. So, there's a good chance people have seen pictures from the lynching that Woody Guthrie's dad did, or helped do.
Obviously, it wasn't just him. Horrible.
I told you he sucked! Yeah, yeah, no, I am. Charlie Guthrie, not a nice man.
Did he get to die painfully? He has a lot of pain in his life. Don't worry.
Excellent. I'm not going to say it makes, you know, it equals out, though.
So Woody was open about the fact that his father had taken part in this lynching and later accused him of having donned clan robes, right? So Woody's like, yeah, my dad was a Klansman. And he would later in life write several songs about the lynching.
One of them was based on a misconception that Laura's two children were lynched. Her baby was probably found alive nearby.
The song was titled, but a lot of Woody's songs about historical events are not literally about what happened, right? Like there's, you know, this is folk history, right?

Anyway, one of the songs that he wrote about this event was titled Don't Kill My Baby and My Son.

And I haven't found Woody singing this song, but I want to read some of the lyrics.

And this is kind of him sort of singing about this thing that his dad did.

As I walked down that old dark town,

in the town where I was born,

I heard the saddest lonesome moan I ever heard before.

My hair, it trembled at the roots.

Cold chills run down my spine.

As I drew near that jailhouse,

I heard this deathly cry.

Oh, don't kill my baby and son.

Oh, don't kill my baby and son.

You can stretch my neck out on that old river bridge,

but don't kill my baby and son. Damn it's yeah uh bad i mean it yeah i don't know what to say about that i'm grateful for my dad who the only time i've ever seen a clansman in robes was as a kid and i was like driving with my dad and my dad saw these like and we like stopped and they were flyering right and my dad just like rolled up the windows locked the doors and then fumed and it realized and then later he was like those people have guns that's why they're doing this and i realized later it was because he was justifying why he hadn't gotten out of the car to fight four men yeah you know to himself Because all he wanted to do was get out of the car and fight them.
Anyway, I just, I'm glad that I had the inverse, Dad. I don't know.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
I mean, I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma and learned that one of my friend's dads was in the Klan, which is how I learned the Klan was a thing, which was when my mom found out when I stopped hanging out with that kid. Which is also like shout out to your mom about that, right? Because you grew up in a more right wing family, right? Oh, yeah.
She was like, absolutely not about this. Yeah.
Fuck these people. There you go.
There is a line. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, no, that was a hard line for my mom.
Yes. In 1912, the year after the lynching, Woody Guthrie was born.

But the introduction to Rambling Man, written by Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Terkel,

does a better job of setting up his birth than I can.

So here's Studs.

In 1912, the Titanic sank.

In 1912, Woodrow Wilson was elected president.

In 1912, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born.

Fate sings its own kind of poetry. The day was July 14th, Bastille Day in Paris, France.
That's good.

Yeah.

That's a good intro.

Also, it explains my big question, which is, what does Woody stand for?

And now I know.

Yeah.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie.

Yep.

People were a lot more optimistic about Woodrow Wilson for during this period of time, Margaret. There was a lot of hope for a Woodrow Wilson in 1912 that's going to prove to be somewhat, shall we say, mistaken, errantly taken.
Right. But you know who you should have faith in? Is it our advertisers? It's our advertisers.
I don't really know about that, but yeah. Who would never, would never bring America into World War I after promising not to.
If our advertisers say they're not going to send U.S. troops to World War I, they're not going to send U.S.
troops to World War I. You can take that as a promise.
I wish I believed you, but time machines, just around the corner. You probably shouldn't.
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So Woody was the third of five kids, and his first memories were of comfort and, you know, like a degree of wealth, if not outright opulence. He later wrote, Our house was full of the smells of big leather law books and the poems of pomp and high dignity that he, his father, memorized and performed over us.
Charlie was into music as well as racial murder, and he and Nora would sing hymns, old spirituals, and songs about saving the lost and homeless.

Woody later recalled,

the color of the songs was the red man, the black man, and the white folks.

And he's saying there that it was like,

we learned songs that were like of the common people of this country.

I don't know that I trust Charlie to give him a great example of like all of that,

but that's what he later called.

And Woody's also going to, there's a period of time where he's really whitewashing his background and his father right um he's going to make claims that like he was mentored by a young black musician you know during kind of in and around this period when he's a little kid those don't seem to have been true he later admitted they were admitted they were false i think they were kind of part of this period where he's trying to invent a better backstory for himself. Well, and there's also this, like, longstanding way to claim legitimacy.
Right. Of claiming blackness.
Yes, especially within, like, American folk tradition, right? Yeah. Yeah.
While his early years would have been comfortable, things began to change quickly for the worse. His father paid to construct a nice family home, which burnt down when Woody was a toddler and damaged the family finances.
In 1919, another fire hit the home they lived in, and his sister Clara burned to death. Nora had gotten increasingly unstable as she aged, and it's likely that we would have—I mean, we definitely have a—we learn what she's got, right? And we'll be talking about that some in part two, because it becomes relevant for Woody.
But at the time, they were just like, oh, she's crazy. She's got bad nerves.
You know, she's losing it, right? Like, that's the way they talk about this at the time. Yeah.
After Clara burned to death, Woody later said, my mother's nerves gave way like an overloaded bridge. An essay on Woody by the Library of Congress notes, she even had occasional violent episodes and may have set Charlie on fire in 1927, a situation that resulted in a long and painful convalescence for him and a commitment to the state mental hospital in Norman for her.
We can't know exactly what happened here. The best account we have is that when he wakes up to the sound of kerosene being splashed on his chest and then is on fire.
And he manages to put it out, although he's injured. And the first thing he sees when he puts it out is Nora standing over him, watching quietly.
That's intense. Now, Woody never was able to really admit that this was what happened, right? That his mom lit his dad on fire.
And he certainly didn't admit like, well, maybe his dad needed to get lit on fire, right? Oh, yeah. No, no.
No crime was committed. It's fine.
Yeah. I think that's more or less where I land here.
But obviously, this breaks up the family, right? Yeah, fair enough. And Woody's never able to really kind of come clean about precisely what happened.
And also, you know, he's young enough that maybe he doesn't fully know, right? Maybe this is kind of a mystery to him as well. Yeah.
Because his dad probably doesn't want to admit it, right? It's framed as an accident within the family. The most Woody would ever say of his mom's mental state during this period is that her mind went, quote, way over yonder in a minor key, know wait did he write that song way over yonder in a minor key i think so yeah that's one of my favorite songs and every time i pass a minor key i'm like i need to get a picture with me here but i never do it yep woody guthrie yep i like that song covered by billy bragg like a lot of guthrie songs um i mostly know the billy bragg version yeah yeah i think most of at at this point, most of us do, but that's like kind of how Woody's music has been brought down to us too, is by guys like Billy, by guys like Bob Dylan too.
Totally. So things get worse very rapidly for the Guthrie family after this point.
Charlie's business interests folded and his land collapsed in value. He had trouble finding good work after recovering from his injury and the Guthrie family starts to fall through the bottom of their society.
Charlie was forced to leave Oklahoma in search of work with his two youngest children. Thus, Woody and his older brother Roy had to stay in their hometown alone to support themselves.
They are 15 or 16 both when they're kind of left like, hey, figure it out, right? Now, Woody is largely unsupervised and also traumatized during this point in time. He works a series of odd jobs, polishing spittoons and scavenging for scrap metal.
So again, this is a kid who was born into an emerging wealthy class, but he never really gets to live that way, right? Like the bottom falls, he has early memories of when the family had money, but very quickly, like at 15 or 16, he is polishing spittoons and living on the streets. He's homeless for a significant period of time.
He discovers the wonders of both tobacco and hard liquor. For a period, he would hustle for money, drunk, playing his harmonica.
One remarkable performance earned him $7, which must have been a memory that stuck with the young man. That like, oh, I actually have the ability to like, do okay based on like playing and performing for people.
I bet that's like a hundred bucks at least right now. I don't know.
Good money for a 16-year-old kid. Yeah.
He starts riding the rails and traveling hobo style down to the Gulf and back. People begin referring to him as a tramp.
Ed Cray, one of his biographers, writes, Woody scrounged home-cooked meals wherever he could. His friend Colonel Martin invited him home often enough.
Guthrie would live with the Martin family for three months. He moved in with the Price family, quarreled and moved out.
For a week, he slept in an unheated packing case converted into a hillside gang clubhouse until two members of his gang, brothers Casper and Floyd Moore, pleaded with their parents to let Woody live with them. Tom and Nora agreed, and Woody moved in with a wardrobe of two shirts and a pair of mended overalls.
So, he's on the edge here. He's like, again, he's a tramp, right? But he's pretty liked.
You know, a lot of families in town, you know, they like Woody, their kids like Woody, and they'll take him in for a period of time. I think this was like a kind of common way that the like, my grandfather was a hobo fairly shortly after this and kind of the same region and yep you know and it wasn't a full like yeah you're like it wasn't a full oh i totally just live outside and ride the rails it was like sometimes i ride the rails and sometimes someone gives me a ride you know like yeah sometimes i'm living in an unheated like fucking packing crate and sometimes i've got you know a room or I get to crash on the equivalent of a couch yeah exactly yeah and he's he's you know he's he doesn't have great hygiene he's famous for his shabby looks but he's also in demand for his musical skills one of his hosts recalled a night when he brought home 60 dollars in coins from dancing and playing for the American Legion uh Nora's husband suggested he buy some new underwear with the money, and Woody's response was, no need to, I wouldn't wear it.
Instead, he bought candy for their kids. He's a crust punk! He is a crust punk, yes, he absolutely is a crust punk, and he uses his money to buy candy for his friends who got him a place to crash.
Hell yeah! Now, one interesting aside is that this particular family i'm talking about uh had the last name more which is my mom's maiden name and my family lived in oklahoma in this period maybe it should there's good chance it's just probably is just a coincidence but i don't know all the branches of kin i had floating around down there um that's cool i like that yeah this connection i will have a more direct family connection to Woody Guthrie later in these episodes. Okay.
Nora Moore said this of young Woody. Sometimes he was sad and didn't talk much.
He often sat for long periods as if he were in deep study. Then again, when he was with the gang of boys, he was lively.
He seldom laughed. And if he did, it was short and quick, but he was witty and smart.
So, you know, you've got a thoughtful kid who's a little, you know, definitely traumatized as well. And there's something kind of magnetic about this young man, too, right? Like, you get that feeling just whenever you read people who knew him in that period kind of talking about him.
He also, okay, like, one, he moved in with another Nora, which is, I mean. Yeah, there's a lot of Noras on the, thick on the ground in this period, yes.
But also, I was putting it through that, so his mom probably set dad on fire and I'm like, eh, whatever. Yeah.
His sister died in a horrible fire. Uh-huh.
His mom might have killed his sister. He has bad luck around fires.
Okay. His family, his whole family does.
He's just kind of flammable? His whole, yes, the Guthries are unfortunately quite flammable. Okay.
There's going to be a really unfortunate story involving that in part two as well. All right.
In 1928, his father called for him to move to Pampa, Texas, near Amarillo, where some other members of the family, including his Uncle Jeff, who's quite a character, lived. Before leaving, Woody visited his mother in the state hospital one last time, and she didn't recognize him until the very end of the visit, which is deeply traumatic to this kid.
Traveling to East Texas was not a simple thing for a teenaged boy in 1928. Woody had to busk and work odd jobs to make his way down.
Mostly he sang and played harmonica for workers on their lunch break at the railroad and hotel lobbies, and most often outside of whorehouses. He learned as he went, picking up tips from every musician he came across.
He later wrote, I followed the religious street singers up and down the sidewalk and learned of all the songs they sung. I never did learn how to make tips off religious folks because the best ones are always broke.
But some of the best songs I ever heard and some of the best feelings I ever had was when I catch some girl's eye beating on a skin drum tambourine singing hi hallelujah. I love the way he talked and wrote.
I know. I know.
It's poetic as hell. Yeah.
Texas provided Woody with both relief and an outlet when his uncle Jeff taught him how to play the guitar. Jeff was an award-winning fiddle player, and once Woody felt like he had a good bassline, he went looking for other amateur musicians and they formed a band called the Corn Cob Trio.
He fell in

love with the sister of one of his bandmates,

Mary Jennings, and the two were

eventually married. Now, Uncle

Jeff was one of those sorts of men you'd best

describe as a real character.

Ed Cray described him as

a country fiddler, great

dreamer in a family of dreamers, fingerprint

man, parlor musician, and sometime faith healer. When Woody met him, Uncle Jeff was a cop, but his ambition was to leave that job for a career in music.
In 1930, he lost it anyway when a guy he wasn't friends with got elected sheriff. Jeff made himself quite a fella.
Police officer, faith healer.

Yeah.

Fingerprint man, whatever the fuck that means. Jeff made himself the manager of Woody's amateur musical outfit after he gets fired as a cop.
So, he's like, well, being a cop didn't work out. I'm going to try to turn these teenage boys into a money ticket.
And he starts booking them gigs. He hatches a scheme, because Jeff's a schemer, to get him a slot performing

with a traveling show put on by

a wealthy rancher. Because he was

trying to entertain on a budget,

music was just one of the things they were hired

to do. Woody was expected

to do stand-up comedy and to act

as a magician as well. And the

only thing I need to tell you to make a point of how

cringy this would have been is that his routine involved the use of, quote, flesh-colored grease paint. Uh, uh-huh.
Now, sometimes he does seem to be dressing as a different kind of white guy. He's got a freckle pencil, and I think he's, like, dressing as a redhead or something like that sometimes, but he is doing blackface.
He is doing a lot of blackface. This ad, there are minstrel show and medicine show, which are very racist, right? These are shows where the comedy hinges a lot on the way white people think that black people talk based on, again, racist jokes, right? That is a big part of the comedy he is doing at this stage in his life.
Oh, Woody, uh-huh. And this is very, like, this is a very normal, this is going to be in some, to some extent, a normal kind of comedy.
You know, it gets, every couple of years, it gets a little bit like, whitewashed, just a little bit more, if you'll forgive the term. But, like, if you watch the old Christmas movie, White Christmas, like, there is a non-blackface minstrel show that they do in that because, and it's them talking about like, oh, the music that we grew up with, right? The comedy that we grew up with, right? This shit stays a lot longer than I think a lot of people are necessarily aware.
And want to admit to themselves, yeah. Yeah, and want to admit to themselves.
Or want to admit to their grandkids, uh-huh. Yeah.
And again, at this stage in his life, Woody is as racist as you would expect for a boy raised by a klansman who lynched people right like he is a very racist little kid um not out of step with white kids in the area but not better in any way certainly um that said most of his act did involve fairly safe comedy uh here's one representative example i stopped with a family that had two twin boys. One was named Pete and the other Repeat.
And at another place, they had two twin girls. One they called Kate and the other Duplicate.
Anyway, it's like bits like that, right? I love Repeat. I've heard the Pete and Repeat.
I love that. And they don't do well, right? He's not like a successful, he's not, you know, a breakthrough comedy star, right? He's also not what you'd call political at this point, right? He's not talking about a lot of left-wing stuff.
Life is too lean in general for him to have much time for reading tracts. But he is aware of poverty because it's the very air he breathed.
and he does start tailoring his jokes to an audience that's in the same position socioeconomically. Here's one related in the book, Ramblin' Man.
They have raised the price of meat until it's getting so a working man can't eat meat. The nearest thing he can come to eating meat is oxtail soup and beef tongue.
That's the only way he can make both ends meet. Get it? Because it's like from the front and the back of the animal.
Uh-huh. Yeah.
Not a bad little bit. So, the traveling show is a catastrophic failure, though.
1931 and 32 are bad years to try and convince people to pay for amateur entertainment in rural Texas. Woody did not need to search hard for an explanation as to why his life was difficult.

He had only to step out and look at the road each morning,

where an endless stream of climate and economic refugees

had begun tramping vaguely west,

looking for any hope of survival.

He wrote,

Most everyone that come had just recently lost everything they had in the world.

The others were fixing to lose it.

This caused a lot of fights and feuds to break out between, as he's watching other people's lives fall apart and the evidence of that, you know, and his life isn't, you know, going to stay together that much longer than this. But for a while, he does have some hope, courtesy of his Uncle Jeff, who after losing his job as a cop had also sought work as a faith healer to survive.
And we're going to talk about faith healing, and weirdly enough, we're going to talk about a book that relates kind of directly to our immediate future president here. But first, you know what doesn't relate to the president is these ads.
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There's a guy, when we talk about Donald Trump, who was a big influence on him norman vincent peele who was a big advocate of something called the power of positive thinking right and this relates to a lot of modern sort of grift culture right you know the secret this idea that if you just start thinking hard enough about the things that you want right you just start making affirmations right uh that that That that will influence reality, right? That like, and so as a result, if you're not getting what you want, if you're not rich, if you're not successful, it's a failure of yourself to believe in yourself, right? You're the only one you have to blame for not succeeding. You know, this is the underpinning of the prosperity gospel.
This is the underpinning of MLM culture, right? And Woody Guthrie, at the start of the Great Depression, through his Uncle Jeff, gets hooked on the very first sort of vector for this kind of nonsense, right, in American culture. And it's through a series of pamphlets, The Secret of the Ages, published by an American self-help author named Robert Collier, right? What a good name.
Yes, yes. So The Secret of the ages published by an american self-help author named robert collier right what a good name yes yes so this is the secret of the ages is to write things called the secret of the ages and then sell it to gullible people that's the secret of the ages and that's exactly what collier does right it's a it comes in seven parts it's a mail order thing and it's it's all this kind of shit that's going to get wrapped up and you you know, the power of positive thinking, prosperity gospel, MLM nonsense, and kind of modern America.

And like subscription-based services.

They were ahead of the curve.

Yes, they really are.

They would have had pod—he would have been listening to this podcast, right?

Collier would have had a fucking podcast if things had been a little bit further along, right, technology-wise by this point.

Now, the gist of the message in The Secret of the Ages is the power of positive thinking. If you just fix your mind, you can bring yourself abundance and success.
And if you aren't enjoying success, well, brother, that's on you. And I'm going to read a quote from...
This isn't from the pamphlet that Jeff would have ordered, but it's from a book that he later makes based on the pamphlet. All cause is in mind, and mind is everywhere.
All the knowledge there is, all the wisdom there is, all the power there is, is all about you, no matter where you may be. Your mind is part of it.
You have access to it. If you fail to avail yourself of it, you have no one to blame but yourself.
For as the drop of water in the ocean shares all the properties of the rest of the ocean water, so you share in that all power, all wisdom of mind. If you have been sick and ailing, if poverty and hardship have been your lot, don't blame it on fate.
Blame yourself. Yours is the earth and everything that's in it, but you must take it.
The power is there, but you must use it. It is round about you like the air you breathe.
You don't expect others to do your breathing for you. Neither can you expect them to use your mind for you.
Universal intelligence is not only the mind of the creator of the universe, but it is also the mind of man. Your intelligence.
Your mind. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.
So start today by knowing that you can do anything you wish to do. have anything you wish to have, be anything you wish to be.
The rest will follow. I love it.
It's so politically confused. Are you a drop in the water or are you completely an individual and everything is your fault if you fail? I love it.
Yeah, it's definitely leaning more towards the other side of that. And Woody early early, and it's worth noting, like, he falls hard for this as a kid, right? Yeah, yeah.
I mean, whatever. This is, I think, going to be part of why he's a little bit less vulnerable to this as an adult, is because he kind of gets inoculated by this bullshit with his uncle, you know? Yeah.
Now, what's remarkable to me about this book, which enraptures Woody and his uncle as their dreams die around them, is how similar it reads to a lot of modern self-help claptrap. It's also, and this is one of the weirdest things that I was not expecting to see as I go through this book, it's focused on immortality in a way that you could take passages out of this and put these into like 21st century Silicon Valley, like fucking Peter Thiel shit, and it wouldn't sound out of place.
And I want to read you a quote from that because this really does sound like some shit Peter Thiel would have funded. Why is it that the animals live five to seven times their maturity when man only lives two to three times his? Why? Because man hastens decrepitude and decay by holding the thought of old age always before him.
Dr. Alexis Carroll, Nobel Prize winner and member of the Rockefeller Institute, has demonstrated that living cells taken from a body, properly protected and fed, can be kept alive indefinitely.
Not only that, but they grow. In 1912, he took some tissue from the heart of an embryo chick and placed it in a culture medium.
It lived and grew for some 30 years until they tired of tending it and threw it out. Dr.
Carroll showed a moving picture of these living cells before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. They grew so fast they doubled in size every 24 hours and had to be trimmed daily.
The cells of your being can be made to live indefinitely when placed outside your body. Single's right! Everyone just needs a blood boy.
Yeah. We all do want a blood boy,garet but for different reasons you know for different reasons i i want a blood boy for purely humanitarian reasons you know really what's that yeah want to go into that further i like blood and i'm a human wow groundbreaking yeah uh so i do one of the reasons i love reading shit like this and incidentally folks one of the best reasons to read history even the history of hokum like this is because when you're going through like if you spend part of your day job looking at the fucking network state silicon valley nonsense coming out right now about how like oh you know brian johnson's found a way to reduce his fucking biological age back down to 18, right? All this shit that people who like to portray themselves as like geniuses based on the fact that they have money and are good at finding desperate people to like market themselves to.
It's the same shit that the same kind of people have been peddling forever, right? Honestly, since the days of fucking ancient Egypt, right? But like a lot of people who think these folks are intelligent, who think that they're special, who think that there's something new with our new Silicon Valley overlords, right? They're just too ignorant to know that these people have been peddling the same bullshit to hook rubes for a century, right? It almost sounds identical. Cool stuff.
Yeah. Cool, cool, cool.
I love it. So Charlie's new wife, Betty Jean, a nurse fell in love with the book as well, with Collier's book, and she starts faith healing patients that medical science had failed to save.
Everyone agreed she was a great faith healer. And more importantly, she made money with her magnetic massages.
And it's one of those like, everyone talks about what a great faith healer she is and how even the rich men come to her for healing and then it's like well what's her method magnetic massages okay yeah okay yeah i think i might know what's going on here two of the oldest professions are now interacting with each other again yeah I think I might have an idea as to why this works.

Curing male hysteria. Uh-huh.
Woody is enthralled enough to start faith healing as well. Like Betty Jean, he often worked for free, but in short order, he was making more money doing this than he had at the whiskey store where he'd been working before.
So he decides to go into business himself as a faith healer with a sign that read,

Faith Healing, Mind healing, mind reading, no charge, right? And obviously sometimes he gets a charge, but he's willing to work for free a lot. He's not like a, he really does, I think, believe for a while that he's got some ability to heal people, an ability to read their mind.
I don't think he's a, he's a grifter here. I think he's a kid who's kind of gets really excited by this shit that has enraptured all of the adults in his life too.
And he's like, well, maybe I'm special. I've always felt like I was kind of special.
My ability to draw attention, to get people to pay attention to me. Maybe it's because I've got these magical powers, right? He's more of a busker than a grifter anyway.
He's a busker, right. And that's the other part of of this when i used to busk all the time for a little while we would just go and set up like a lucy's advice stand and we would just like set up we'd we'd build a little thing out of cardboard boxes and it'd be like advice one dollar and people would just come up and ask us for advice it was really fun yeah and and woody that's that's what i i get that vibe from woody too he is later in life embarrassed about this period.
And he'll start to claim that, like, oh, I only did, like, faith healing by accident. I never wanted to get into the business.
Quote, hundreds of people got my name mixed up with Papa's new wife and come to my house by mistake. Finally, I hung out a sign telling him to come on in and talk it over.
I decided that faith was the main thing. But that's not really true.
This is Woody massaging his history again. Yeah, magnetically.
Ed Cray found strong evidence to the contrary. In 1935, Woody, who had started a local newspaper called News Expose, wrote an article announcing that his pseudonym, Alonzo M.
Zilch, had become a psychological reader. Guthrie advised readers to take your troubles to zilch he's an expert worrier the eyes of lots of people are on this man for good or bad so he's writing under his real name about a psychological reader with a fake name he's created who is also him oh i love this i love i identify way harder with woody guthrie than i expected even though he's been doing a lot of stuff I don't approve of.
He's a petty con man and a punk kid, right? You know? Not in a way where I think he's like a predator, but... In my first book, I've interviewed all these people.
One of them is me under another name, and I just didn't even tell my publisher. I fucking love you, Magpie.
Yeah. It's another good Bastards Pods character

who has a lot of similarities to Margaret Killjoy as a young person.

That makes sense.

Uh-huh.

He was reasonably popular as a faith healer,

which probably owes more to his charisma than psychic powers.

Still, by the time the mid-30s turned to the late 30s,

times were bad enough that Woody had started to wonder if maybe his future might lay elsewhere. The Dust Bowl had kicked off in the early 1930s.
Due to nearly a decade of drought, it lasted until 1939, right? This is like 31 to 39, something like that, is the Dust Bowl? Like, it's a fucking a long time that everything is just covered in dust, right? And it's the result of the fact that this huge number of people had moved to these vast plains in the American interior and started farming. And they had over-farmed.
They had plowed too much of the native grass, which had, like, led to this situation where when they have this drought and things dry out, there's nothing really keeping the topsoil together. And then you get these huge windstorms, which cause these epic apocalyptic waves of dust like ocean tides to sweep over small towns and blacken the sky.
Now, economic collapse was happening kind of independently, but also related to this, right? These things feed into each other, even though they are not like entirely, you know, independent of each other. Farmers lose their farms, people lose their homes, factories close, and despair and desperation becomes the normal state of affairs for everyone in Woody's life.
Woody has a front seat for all of it, writing, there on the Texas plains, right in the dead center of the Dust Bowl, with the oil boom over and the to head west. He became one of 400,000 Americans to make his way to California.
The horror of the situation and his ultimate response to it contributed to one of his early songs for which we have an actual recording. And I'm going to play the whole thing, both because at this point it's clearly in the public domain, but also Woody had an understanding of copyright law and refused to copyright things for the vast majority of his musical career.
And in fact, here, I want to read you. Have you ever read the copyright notice that Woody Guthrie put in his early songbooks, Magbuy? No.
This song is copyrighted in U.S. under seal of copyright number 154085 for a period of 28 years.
And anybody caught singing it without our permission will be mighty good friends of Arn because we don't give a darn. Publish it, write it, sing it, swing to it, yodel it.
We wrote it. That's all we wanted to do.
What I used to write as the copyright notice in my early zines was for those who believe in copyright this zine is copyright. Everyone else is free.
Yeah, Woody would have liked that. So anyway, I'm going to end this by playing you our first full Woody Guthrie song and we'll hear a couple over the course of these episodes but here's So Long It's Been Good to Know Ya So long It's been good to know ya So long, it's been good to know you

So long, been good to know you

So long, it's been good to know you

This dusty old dust is a-blowing me home

I've got to be rolling along I'll sing this song but I'll sing it again

Of the place that I lived on the West Texas plains in the city of Tampa the county of great here's what all of the people there say well it's so long it's been good to know you so long it's been good to know you so long it's been good to know you. So long, it's been good to know you.
So long, it's been good to know you. This dusty old dust is a-blog these people all congregated in their little houses.
and in the room in the house that I was in, there was 12 or 15 people. And while we was there, telling each other so long, it's been good to know you.
Dusty old dust is blowing me home, and I ain't got long to stay. I've got to be drifting along.
Well, here's what happened. The telephone rang and it jumped off the wall.
That was the preacher paying his call. He said, look at the shape that the world is in.
I've got to cut price on salvation and sin

So long, been good to know you

So long, it's been good to know you

So long, it's been good to know you

This dusty old dust is driving me home

And I've got gotta be drifting along. The church houses were jammed and packed.
People were sitting from front to the back It was so dusty, the preacher couldn't read his text So he folded his specs and he took up collections And said, so long, it's been good to know you So long, it's been good to know you So long, it's been good to know you.

This dusty old dust isn't rolling me home.

Gotta be drifting along.

Ah, Woody.

It's a good one.

I like it.

Uh-huh.

Also, when you see those photos of him,

or anyone who saw the video of it, my assumptions are that man has been in a lot of fights, and he's not particularly good at it, but that has never stopped him. No.
That's my read. Yeah, no, that's a guy who does not back down from many fights and doesn't win any of them.
Yeah, exactly. Oh, man.
Well, Margaret,

you got anything to plug here?

My most recent book is called The Sapling

Cage. It came out from Feminist Press in

October, and it is about a young trans girl

who goes off and becomes a witch, and

it helps, alongside other people,

save the world. And

I have a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff,

which I totally didn't

rip off of from you with the Christmas episodes. Totally not.
Not at all. It's like Christmas every day over on Cool People That Did Cool Stuff.
Damn straight. That's right.
And, oh, if you listen to It Could Happen Here and or Cool People That Did Cool Stuff, every Sunday in December 2024, we're dropping podcasts from the future. 30 years from now, in the middle of the Dino War.
That's what Cool Zone Media, we have tapes from the future, and we're playing them all, and General Lichterman is there, and something's going on with Robert, but we're not quite sure yet. And you can hear about the Dino War every Sunday.
Excellent. Alright, everybody.
That's the episodes. Well, part one.
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