The Woody Guthrie Annual is an open-access peer-reviewed journal containing the most up-to-date scholarship on Woody Guthrie, his works and his cultural and political significance. The journal is published once a year between June and December. In addition to peer-reviewed scholarly articles, The Woody Guthrie Annual contains book and record reviews, news, and notices of relevant events. The journal is comprehensively indexed and archived in the appropriate online repositories.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms: Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access). The works and writings of Woody Guthrie are held under copyright by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. It is the author's responsibility to secure rights and permissions prior to submitting the final version of the accepted essay. For licensing requests please contact Anna Canoni at Woody Guthrie Publications: http://woodyguthrie.org/license_request.htm
“With Electric Breath”: Bob Dylan and the Reimagining of Woody Guthrie (January 1968)
“Ruination Day”: Gillian Welch, Woody Guthrie, and Disaster Balladry
Introduction to Volume 3, which is dedicated to the memory of Marjorie Guthrie (1917-1983)
Twelfth Annual BMI-Woody Guthrie Fellowship Winners Announced
Girl from the North Country and Woody Sez: Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Musical Theatre
“The Only Way That I Could Cry”: Woody Guthrie and the Writing of “Balladsongs”
“A Dance That Is Danced Standing Still”: Poetic Motion in the Work of Woody Guthrie
Eleventh Annual BMI-Woody Guthrie Fellowship Winners Announced
"Why Couldn't the Wind Blow Backwards?" Woody Guthrie's Songs for Children
Social Gospel Principles in the Songs of Woody Guthrie
The introduction to the second volume of the Woody Guthrie Annual.
Greg Vandy with Daniel Person, 26 Songs in 30 Days: 59 Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest Ronald D. Cohen, Depression Folk: Grassroots Music and 62 Left-Wing Politics in 1930s America Darryl Holter and William Deverell, eds., Woody Guthrie 65 L.A. 1937-1941
Memorializing "Deportees": Conversations with Tim Hernandez and Lance Canales
Over sixty years following the 1948 plane crash that had inspired Woody Guthrie’s “Deportees,” a poem subsequently set to music by Martin Hoffman, poet and novelist Tim Z. Hernandez began to locate the real names of the deceased passengers, and worked with the families of the “deportees” to design a memorial headstone. On Labor Day 2013, the headstone was unveiled. At the ceremony, California musician Lance Canales and his band, the Flood, played a new version of Guthrie and Hoffman’s song. Canales describes re-writing the song within an entirely new set of musical conventions, from his own subject-position as the grandson of a migrant farmworker, imagining that he was descended from someone killed in the crash. This essay investigates Guthrie’s composition of “Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”, Martin Hoffman’s musical arrangement, Hernandez’s research, and Canales’s re-writing of the song, positioning the song in relation to the history — and present reality — that it has narrated for over sixty years
Pete Seeger and the Origins of "Union Maid"
A commentary on a video interview with Pete Seeger [Video accessible on https://vimeo.com/118369128 . In the video “A Reflection on Woody Guthrie’s ‘Union Maid’: An Interview with Pete Seeger,” filmed in September 2013, ninety-four year old Pete Seeger recounts the story of how Woody Guthrie composed the song “Union Maid.” Seeger reflects on his friendship with Guthrie while also foregrounding the dialogic interplay in the making of folk music as he discusses the origins of the song, both lyrically and melodically. Through this narrative told through his eyes, Seeger shows how songs materialize out of moments and experiences through the push and pull of human relationships. For Seeger, the social and historical context surrounding the song is just as important as the individual moment of its creation, which gives us insight not just into the song’s history but also into Seeger’s own perspective on the creative process: it is not about the individual imposing a will on the world, but it is about the artist listening to the people.
Holy Ground: The Klezmatics Channel Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie’s personal connections to Judaism and Jewish culture began with his courtship and marriage to Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, daughther of Yiddish writer Aliza Greenblatt, and blossomed when he and his family settled in Brooklyn’s Coney Island. Out of this Jewish connection came a rich body of songs eventually recorded by the New York-based Klezmer band, the Klezmatics. With concert performances and two albums of Guthrie songs — Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanukkah and Wonder Wheel — the Klezmatics were instrumental in furthering Nora Guthrie’s project (begun with Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue releases) to expand the parameters within which Guthrie has been received. Concerned that biographers and folk music critics had placed too much emphasis on her father’s early Dust Bowl Ballads while downplaying his later songs, Nora Guthrie argued: “He was a poet and a lyricist that wrote about everything. I don’t want to see him turned into a freeze-dried, Dust Bowl icon representing a narrow version of what somebody thinks he was. These songs are just one more facet of his work that will add to a fuller picture of him as a songwriter.”
"Our Unseen Friend": Early Radio and the Tuning In of Woody Guthrie's Performing Persona
Like many early program hosts in the emerging mass communication medium of radio, Woody Guthrie — during the time he spent as a daily radio program host in Los Angeles, from 1937 through 1939 — learned to craft and hone extemporaneous techniques for successfully addressing a new and unseen audience. Without the benefit of later media effects studies and audience research, Guthrie discerned to whom he was speaking and in what kind of language that would best be accomplished. Guthrie determined that certain aspects of his aw-shucks personality were more successful than others, and this winnowing process developed the performing persona Guthrie utilized during the subsequent escalation of his cultural status. This critical-historical study describes the climate of radio production into which Guthrie and his co-hosts inserted themselves and examines the effect of the medium’s evolution not on the audience but on the performer. The evolving application of parasocial interaction theory is explored in the context of Guthrie’s process of determining his target demographics and especially of shaping the identity of his performing persona. The identity-forming process active in immediate interpersonal communication remains active within the asynchronous feedback channels between radio hosts and audiences. The cultural figure of Woody Guthrie celebrated nationally in the 1940s was largely an identity honed along the trial-and-error learning curve of his earlier radio tenure.
"You Gals Who Want to Be Free": A Feminist Perspective on the Evolution of Woody Guthrie's "Union Maid"
Folk songs are a specific kind of poetry. They are symbolic and rhetorical. They are also, although it seems contradictory, both contextual and universal. “Union Maid” exemplifies this, maintaining cultural relevancy at nearly seventy-five years old. Yet the ways in which it has evolved over time play out many of the “grand tropes” of women’s, especially women workers’, history in the United States. There were other “women’s union songs” written around the same time as “Union Maid,” but this song has had a particular sticking-place in the feminist-folk-labor imagination and it is particularly ripe for a feminist analysis. This essay explores “Union Maid” as a changing song and examines its place within understandings of American women’s labor history.