Introduction

Authors

  • Will Kaufman University of Central Lancashire
  • Darryl Holter

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5420/wga.0.2

Keywords:

Woody Guthrie, introduction, open access, scholarship, demystification

Abstract

Welcome to the launch issue of the Woody Guthrie Annual, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to scholarship on Woody Guthrie and his world. Guthrie’s most famous song, “This Land is Your Land,” features a second verse that begins: “As I went walking that ribbon of highway / And saw above me that endless skyway ….” The “ribbon of highway” — the image of a two-lane asphalt road meandering off into the horizon, pointing to adventure and a new future— is a point of entry into Guthrie’s uniquely peripatetic approach to life, his inquiring mind and wandering ways, the hard-traveling, cross-country, hitch-hiking, train-hopping jaunts that provided material for his writings and songs, the unsettledness of his personal life, and the absence of a stable home or home-life during much of his professional career. Carrying Guthrie from Okemah, Oklahoma to Pampa, Texas, and then on to Los Angeles, Oregon, New York, Coney Island, and, eventually, to Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, the “ribbon of highway” provides a shifting setting for his experiences, just as it provides a metaphor for the scholarship that has emerged and has yet to emerge, leading to … who knows where?

Author Biographies

  • Will Kaufman, University of Central Lancashire
    Will Kaufman is a Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England. He has written a number of books on American culture — American Culture in the 1970s (Edinburgh, 2009), The Civil War in American Culture (Edinburgh, 2006), and The Comedian as Confidence Man (Wayne State, 1997). In 2008 Will was awarded his first BMI-Woody Guthrie Fellowship, which enabled him to write the first political biography of Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (Illinois, 2011); he won his second BMI-Woody Guthrie Fellowship in 2014 and is working on his second book on Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s Modern World Blues. He was consultant to Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp for the publication of their co-edited edition of Guthrie’s recently discovered novel, House of Earth (2013). His latest book, co-authored with Ronald D. Cohen, is Singing for Peace: Antiwar Songs in American History (Paradigm, 2015). Also a folksinger and multi-instrumentalist, he has performed his “live documentaries” on Guthrie for many years; please see www.willkaufman.com.
  • Darryl Holter
    Darryl Holter is an Adjunct Professor in History at the University of Southern California and a member of Professional Musicians Local 47 in Los Angeles.

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Published

2015-06-30

Issue

Vol. 1 (2015)

Section

Articles

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