Left Wing, Right Wing, Chicken Wing: Guthrie Music Is Revived
Published: Friday, February 21, 2025
The following is from Alan Guebert, a freelance agricultural journalist from Illinois.
Folk singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie is undergoing a welcomed revival with the success of the new Bob Dylan biopic, "A Complete Unknown."
In it, Dylan, played by Timothée Chalamet, seeks out Guthrie shortly after arriving in New York City from his hometown of Hibbing, Minn. It's the early 1960s and Dylan finds Guthrie in a nearby New Jersey hospital suffering from Huntington's disease, the neurodegenerative disorder that slowly killed his mother and is now slowly killing him.
Although Guthrie is unable to speak, the film portrays the two musical geniuses—one already a lodestar in folk music, the other about to fly light years beyond his mentor's galaxy—communicating through Dylan's guitar and his spare, Guthrie-like lyrics. It's poignant, poetic and peaceful.
And powerful; just two people who had never met coming together in the slanted winter light of a sparsely furnished hospital room over the unadorned sound of a single guitar and one reedy voice. The bond is immediate and deep.
Woody Guthrie, like Bob Dylan, was famous for many things but he mainly wanted his songs to be heard for what they were, songs to and about America. Several biographies note that the footloose Guthrie greatly disliked Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" because he believed it "jingoistic and exclusive," as one notes.
Guthrie, who penned hundreds of songs, wrote a musical reply to it that he titled "God Blessed America For Me." That title was supplanted by a later added line to the song's chorus: "This Land Is Your Land."
It wasn't a slander of Berlin's hugely popular hit but a reply to point out how great America already was; all the flag waving and chest beating in Berlin's song wasn't needed to see that greatness.
The explanation did little to allay public backlash. Guthrie was called every name in the book including populist, socialist and—of course—communist. If it bothered him, he didn't show it. "Left wing, right wing, chicken wing," he replied, "it's all the same thing to me."
And to ensure all understood his view on the pointlessness of political labels, he added, "I ain't a Communist necessarily, but I've been in the red all my life."
He was no saint and never pretended to be one. He was, as one biographer described, "seemingly afraid of money or fame ... and he left behind three wives (and) eight children ..."
And musical letter after musical letter to America because its Constitution-guaranteed promises held so much for every American, native and immigrant alike, that he just couldn't stop singing about its farms, crops, mountains, oceans, deserts, cities and people.
His joy, however, didn't mean he served up sugar-soaked patriotism or chest-thumping exceptionalism; he was clear-eyed and direct. "All you can write is what you see," he reportedly explained when asked about his songwriting method.
According to one biographer, many of Guthrie's unplanned, unmapped Depression-era "trips cross-country opened his eyes to a land where people went hungry, and the lives and health of immigrants and union workers were threatened by moneyed interests."
This unvarnished side of America got its due in the second to last stanza of "This Land" when Guthrie, writing what he saw, penned:
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
In the next and final verse, however, Guthrie reminds us that what we make of America is up to us:
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever turn me back
This land was made for you and me.
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