Woody Reflected - Charlie Maguire

Pop, Tony, and Charlie would like to thank
the Woody Guthrie Foundation
for their encouragement and support.
www.woodyguthrie.org
Baltimore to Washington, Pastures of Plenty, End of My Line,
High Floods and Low Waters, Roll On Ocean, New York Town, Government Road,
Dust Bowl Refugee, and Good Night Little Darlin’ Goodnight
Words & Music Woody Guthrie © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc.
& tro-Ludlow Music, Inc. (bmi)
Stepstone
Adaptation by Woody Guthrie © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. (bmi)
Take A Whiff On Me
Words & Music, Huddie Ledbetter, and Alan Lomax © Folkways Music Publishers, Inc. (bmi)
Oklahoma Hills
Words & Music by Woody Guthrie and Jack Guthrie
© Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & Unichappell Music, Inc. (bmi)
Jiggy Jiggy Bum Bum (Wild Hog Song)
© Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. (bmi)
The Northern Line
Words & Music by Pop Wagner © Horse Chorale Music, (sesac)
cover illustration: Woody Guthrie with Guitar
Original artwork by Woody Guthrie. Courtesy of the Woody Guthrie Archives
photography: Mel Floyd, Deb Forbes design: Linda Koutsky
Woody
Reflected
Pop Wagner, Tony Glover, and Charlie Maguire
Woody Reflected
W
o odr o w w i l s on g u t h r i e
(1912–1967) rambled a million
miles by foot, thumb, Liberty ship,
boxcar, streetcar, “Car Car” and even airplane. He wrote copiously along the way,
with “his guitar hanging like a tire iron on
a rusty rim,” as John Steinbeck described
him. He turned out song after song and
became, in the words of Studs Terkel, “one
of a handful of the world’s greatest all-time
balladeers.”
His output has been pegged at more
than a thousand songs. Some have refrains
that can be sung from memory by kids as
young as three years old (“This Land is
Your Land”) and folks well over eighty
(“So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh”).
The Woody Guthrie Foundation and
Archives continues to publish and disseminate Woody’s lyrics, songs, and writings. Furthermore, in varying ways, musicians — including all three of us — have
played a role in continuing Woody’s
legacy, by preserving books; writing letters, articles, and reviews; and collecting
cast-off bits of audio tape, old radio
broadcasts, and dusty recorded outtakes,
so that years later we could come together
to rediscover, interpret, and present to
you the musical comings and goings of
the quintessential American folk singer as
reflected in our own lives.
To commemorate the 100th birthday of
Woody Guthrie (1912–2012), we offer our
own musical reflections on disc. And we
add our own ramblings of people, places,
and days with the Man — or as Lee Hays
might have put it, “With them that knows.”
TONY GLOVER
Brooklyn, New York, 1962
n forty-odd years in music, as writer and
Iplayed
performer, I’ve met, interviewed, and
with a lot of people who went on to
become household names. But there were
only two I was in awe of: Muddy Waters and
Woody Guthrie. Even in 1962, Guthrie
already had attained near-mythic status.
Early in May that year, I took my first trip
to New York City to visit my partner Dave
Ray, and also hooked up with former
Minnesotan Bob Dylan. One day, Bob
asked if I’d like to go along with him to visit
Woody at Kings County Hospital in
Brooklyn. Even though I was heavy into
blues at the time, almost to the exclusion of
any other music, I jumped at the chance.
We met on Bob’s doorstep on West Fourth
Street in Greenwich Village and climbed
into the car of another bluesman, John
Hammond. (Hammond was still in college
then; it would be a year before he appeared
at the Newport Folk Festival and recorded
was inspired by a 1927 recording by Blind
Lemon Jefferson: “One Dime Blues,”
which Woody had recorded for the
Library of Congress in 1941. In his 1944
recording (from a mammoth one-day, 55song session with Cisco Houston), Woody
takes Blind Lemon’s structure and melody
and makes them into his own image of a
rambling man finding himself in an
uncomfortable location.
11.) Government Road. The song was
written in the Hanover House Hotel at
43rd Street and 6th Avenue in nyc on
February 24, 1940, just one day after Woody
wrote This Land Is Your Land. Woody —
fresh from a trip from Texas to nyc, by bus
and thumb, less than two months earlier —
may have still have been smarting from the
fact that there were no fast and direct interstate highways to places he wanted to go.
12.) Dust Bowl Refugee. Woody’s observations of the Dust Bowl exodus have been
captured in his better-known but lighter
songs like So Long, It’s Been Good to Know
Yuh. But for pure grit and realism, you can’t
beat the heat, poverty, desperation, and
anger of Dust Bowl Refugee. Woody once
said, “I am a photographer without a camera,” and this song is as good a snapshot
of life on the road in “the dirty ’30s” as a
Walker Evans or a Dorothea Lange.
13.) The Northern Line. In 1969, Pop wrote
this song in the course of about four minutes
as he was passing through the freight yards
in Ashland, Wisconsin. He must have been
“channeling” Woody himself!
14.) Good Night Little Darling Goodnight. From the Woody tapes Tony collected came an outtake from late January/
early February 1947, featuring not only
Woody, but also his second wife, Marjorie
Mazia Guthrie. They were at the Asch studio at 117 West 42nd Street to record the
new song as a birthday present for their
daughter Cathy Ann. You can clearly hear
them both, especially Woody cooing into
the microphone. Soon after, four-year-old
Cathy died as a result of burns suffered in a
house fire the day following her birthday,
February 6th. It’s not clear if she ever heard
her record.
We dedicate our album to her.
Pop Wagner
www. popwagner.com
Tony Glover
www.mwt.net/~koerner/tonyglover.html
Charlie Maguire
www.charliemaguire.com
3.) End of My Line. From the Bonneville/
Department of Interior commission May–
June 1941, for which Woody was paid a total
of $266.67. The traveling from the Dust
Bowl to the Pacific Northwest in the song
mirrors Woody’s own travels during the
month he applied for and won the job in
Portland, Oregon. The trip was rough. To
get gas money and feed the kids, Woody
had to borrow money against the family
radio on the drive up from Los Angeles.
4.) Stepstone. This nineteenth-century
parlor ballad has received many interpretations over the years. Woody’s version is our
favorite. There may not be a more lonely
song: The singer not only looks back to the
home of his youth, but also faces a future
alone, with winter coming soon.
5.) High Floods and Low Waters. From
the tapes Tony collected and shared with us
for the first time in 1980, the original song
is a live recording from Oscar Brand’s radio
show on wnyc. Written by Woody during
a drought in nyc in 1947, it’s not a song that
has been sung a lot. John Cohen remembered singing it in the 1950s. The way
Woody sang it was more in his Carter
Family style. Charlie put a little more drive
on it this time around.
6.) Oklahoma Hills. Woody Guthrie and
his cousin Jack share the copyright of this
song, but according to Woody’s biographer
Joe Klein, it was written by Woody in 1937
in Glendale, California, when Woody and
Maxine Crissman had a daily radio show
for the newly arrived Okie audience on
kfvd in Los Angeles. It was Jack, however,
who ultimately made it a popular song during World War ii.
7.) Jiggy Jiggy Bum Bum (Wild Hog
Song). Pop first heard this song at a
friend’s house in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in
1969. It was on one of those 10-inch LPs.
He learned it on the spot and has been
singing it ever since.
8.) Take A Whiff On Me. “Whiff ” was a
song popular in both white and black cultures, about then-legal cocaine. Woody
probably also heard it from Leadbelly, who
performed it at his 1935 nyc debut, presented by Alan Lomax.
9.) Roll on Ocean. This song was recorded
at about the same time as Good Night Little
Darlin’ Goodnight — in January or early
February of 1947, with Cathy Ann Guthrie
in mind. Woody mentions the Mississippi
River and Duluth. This storybook gem of a
kids’ song — with a mention for Minnesota
— has not been sung all that much. Thanks
to the tapes that Tony collected, it sees the
light of day once again.
10.) New York Town. Woody had big ears
and he caught songs everywhere. This one
the first of twenty-nine albums of classic
blues tunes.) Bob couldn’t find the hospital’s address, but we headed for the wilds of
Brooklyn anyhow; after making several
wrong turns and receiving heavily accented,
misguided directions, we wound up at a
gray stone three- or four-story building. It
was set back from the street, the windows
covered with heavy wire mesh.
Bob led us in, since his name was on the
visitor’s list. An attendant escorted us
through a couple of sets of heavy, locked
doors to a second-floor dayroom. Woody’s
name was called, and eventually, down the
hallway shuffled a short, wiry guy wearing
pajamas open to the waist, and worn cowboy boots cracked with age. His hair was a
shock of gray Brillo; his skin, weatherbeaten and chiseled. His arms jerked spasmodically, and occasionally tics contorted
his shoulders. It was a struggle for him to
talk, but despite his strangled words as Bob
introduced us, his eyes were piercingly alert.
Woody led us down the hall to his room.
He sat on his bed, and we sat on the other.
Bob asked how Woody liked the record he’d
dropped off on a previous visit (his debut
Columbia album, Bob Dylan, containing
“Song to Woody”). “It’s a good’un,” Woody
replied. Bob borrowed John’s guitar and we
all sang a couple of Woody’s songs for him.
After “Hard Travelin’,” Woody said,
“Should be faster.” I pulled out a harp and
played along on a couple more. During
“Pretty Boy Floyd,” Woody tried to sing
along, but his pitch was wavering. He reached
in his boot and pulled out a pack of cigarettes,
and after much difficulty got one in his
mouth. John and I reached for our lighters,
but Bob shook his head at us, so we watched
for several minutes as Woody fought to control his arms long enough to get a match lit
and get the fire up to the cigarette. He finally
did. He took a deep drag, with a lightningbolt look of triumph in his eyes.
Altogether, we stayed about an hour,
and as we left, Bob promised to be back.
We did not talk much in the car on the
long drive back to the Village. The force of
Woody’s presence still hung in the air, and
it said more than words could.
POP WAGNER
Ashland, Wisconsin, 1967
oody’s songs have been ringing
W
through my traveling life from my earliest memories. My father would sing “Car
Car” to us as we traveled the back roads of
southwest Ohio to visit our grandparents.
In the fall of 1967, my freshman year of
college in Ashland, Wisconsin, there came
the sad but not unexpected news of
Woody’s passing. Off campus, where I
lived with three other students (who were
also folk singers), we hatched the idea to
hold an outdoor folk festival the following
May in Woody’s honor, to raise funds to
help fight the disease that took him. It
seemed like a fitting tribute to Woody; his
spirit and songs were with us five months
later on stage, with the snow barely gone.
The funds were so sparse that first year
that we barely covered expenses, and nothing but good wishes went to the
Committee to Combat Huntington’s
Disease that time around. Later, as part of
the June Apple Musicians’ Co-op, I helped
to organize a similar event at the
University of Minnesota in Minneapolis
that was 200 miles farther south, indoors,
and more successful.
While on a busking tour in Europe with
my friend Bob Bovee, we ran into Derroll
Adams, who wanted us to carry a message
back to his old pal Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in
California. We did just that, hitchhiking
and riding freight trains once we got back
to the u.s. That unlikely oral-tradition
messenger service across an ocean and a
continent began a lasting friendship with
Jack, who rewarded us with his own firsthand accounts of running with Woody.
When I was given a guitar at the age of
fourteen, Woody and his cannon of work
helped show me the way and supplied a
major part of my performance repertoire. It
also inspired a career of traveling, singing,
and organizing, on behalf of all kinds of
people. It still does.
CHARLIE MAGUIRE
Croton-on-Hudson, New York 1972
ee Hays was a singer and songwriter
L
with considerable show-business acumen, which he used to mentor young peo-
ple — this may have been his true calling
— whether they were destined for the stage
or not. He knew absolutely everybody; his
Rolodex in those days ran from Steve Allen
to Joan Baez to Olympic gold medalist
Mark Spitz. Lee and I used to practice
“constructive loafing,” as he liked to call it,
from cushy chairs at his cottage in Crotonon-Hudson, about thirty miles north of
New York City. I was with him the day the
ups man delivered a package that contained an award for One Million (forprofit) Performances of “If I Had a
Hammer,” which he co-wrote with Pete
Seeger during his days on America’s Hit
Parade with the Weavers.
Lee had paid his dues, and he knew
Woody intimately. Because Guthrie literally wrote the book about being a traveling
songwriter, I felt the need as one of
“Woody’s Children” (as Lee would later
dub me and many others) to check in with
him from time to time on the status of my
“education.” You see, learning the folk
singer/songwriter trade is a lot like learning
to be a plumber, except that it pays a whole
lot less. You start off as an apprentice, then
a journeyman, all the while learning from
the masters on the way to becoming one
yourself . . . maybe. That is what it means
to live a life in the “folk tradition.”
When Lee told his Woody stories, he
would look straight ahead and take you
back with him. He always added a warning
though, like the kind of labels you see on
cigarette packages. Recalling Woody’s performances, he’d tell how the man “rode
herd on an audience. He never let them get
too far away. He’d cajole them, laugh with
them, or insult them, but he never let them
stray too much.” On the virtues of being a
good houseguest, he recalled the time
“Woody stayed at my apartment and read
through my entire library in about two
weeks. He’d write a little review of each
book and stick them between the pages; I
found them for years afterward.” Then the
downside: “One day during that same visit
he paid me back by passing out drunk on
my new sofa and wetting himself during
the night.”
In describing happier incidents — like
the times he, Woody, and folk singer Cisco
Houston had a square meal and a full bottle to contemplate — Lee would turn and
look at me with a grin: “And do you think
Woody and Cisco would just drink a little
and save the rest for another day? Hell no!
It was the Depression and nobody saved
anything. They’d drink it all up in one sitting, all the time singing the same song
over and over.” Then came the warning:
“Now that’s the way Woody was, but don’t
let me hear about you behaving like that!”
(Portions of the above notes originally
appeared in the article “Rambling Men,”
The Rake, April 2004.)
The Songs
ollowing in the wake of these stories,
here are a few recollections regarding
the songs on Woody Reflected.
F
1.) Baltimore to Washington. From the
Asch sessions of April 1944, with Cisco,
Woody, and Sonny Terry. Cisco Houston
was not only Woody’s stalwart friend from
adventures on the S.S. Sea Porpoise, but
according to historians, Moe Asch could
count on Cisco to help Woody keep the
rhythm and remember the verses they had
sung before.
2.) Pastures of Plenty. One of the few
Woody songs in a minor key. Migrant
workers and their working conditions
played a major role in Woody’s writing, and
this is one of his most enduring songs on
the topic, written during the time of
his work with the Bonneville Power
Administration. Since Woody and his first
family were fairly migratory too, maybe it
was an easy place “to go” in his mind.