Book review:

Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie

by Ed Cray

W W Norton & Company, 2004 Hardcover, 384 pp

Reviewed by Bruce Bostick

Since first "discovering" Woody Guthrie over 30 years ago, I've 
devoured everything about him. I listened to — and loved — his 
music. I read all the books about him. I even watched that horrid 
film that Hollywood made about him, Bound for Glory.

Woody was the great "traveling troubadour". He became almost like 
the wistful legend of the IWW organiser Joe Hill, who will 
"always be there whenever working folks fight for their rights".

Woody, however, was a real man: a tough, gritty, skinny, little 
Dust Bowl refugee who wrote and sang the songs of common folks, 
songs that lifted the spirits of people beaten down by the 
corporations and the banks.

Even today, Woody's songs continue to boost people struggling 
against injustice, for a better life. While this tough little man 
is a true hero, an almost mythic figure to many of us, I often 
wondered who the real Woody was. After reading Ed Cray's Ramblin' 
Man, I wonder no longer.

Ramblin' Man is the first piece I've seen on the real 
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma. For 
those who want to read of Woody the legend, this is not your 
book. However, as I read Ramblin' Man, another Woody came 
alive, this one with warts, shortcomings and personal problems 
like all of us, but a much more real-life Woody, struggling — 
like all those around him — against the massive impersonal, and 
truly evil, power of raw capitalism during that awful period of 
the 1930s that we have come to call the Great Depression.

Instead of being swept aside by this tide of brutal history, 
Woody saw the possibility of a better life and was driven to 
fight to get there.

Cray's book traces Woody's life from his early days in Okemah, 
where his father was a rough-and-tumble speculator and 
politician, through an early marriage, to Woody's travels (first 
to the West Coast and later to New York and elsewhere), to his 
rise as one of the premier people's musicians of the 1930s.

It describes the insanity that his mother fell into and the death 
of his young sister in a fire caused by his mother's infirmity. 
These were events that Woody carried as scars throughout his 
life.

The book gives the reader a feeling of being with Woody as he 
travelled to California to find "his people", the Oklahoma 
refugees, "Okies", who'd fled the loss of all they had in the 
horrible dust storms of the early '30s.

Deeply angered by the mistreatment of working people he 
witnessed, he became radicalised. It takes us with Woody when he 
sang, with Lefty Lou, at a radio station in Los Angeles and how 
he came in contact with African American people for the first 
time. Learning that his use of the N-word was offensive, he vowed 
never to use it again.

The book traces Woody's joining up with the Communist Party, his 
long friendships with actor Will Geer and Cisco Houston, and his 
later travels to New York where he met Pete Seeger, Leadbelly and 
many others, including the Almanac Singers. It covers his time in 
the Merchant Marines, in the war against Hitler, when his guitar 
carried the slogan, "This machine kills fascists!"

For much of his life, Woody was haunted by the fear that he might 
be carrying the gene that caused his mother's insanity. That fear 
was horribly confirmed when he succumbed to the ravages of 
Huntington's Chorea, a horrible degenerative disease that 
gradually stripped Woody of his talents and abilities and led to 
his death at age 55 in 1967.

Party membership

Cray's book is a fine contribution to Woody's story. There is one 
area, however, in which his work comes up short. That is Cray's 
use of numerous quotes to show that Woody "wasn't really a 
member" of the Communist Party USA. Cray treats the CPUSA in a 
respectful manner, and acknowledges the role of communists in the 
building of the great people's movement during the '30s and '40s.

Therefore, I found it somewhat ridiculous and out of character 
that Cray felt he should publish quotes from others about Woody's 
"not really" being in the Party at the same time he is writing 
that Woody wrote hundreds of "Woody Sez" columns for the Daily 
Worker and that he stood with the CPUSA during every twist 
and turn of political events during that terrific period.

For me, the only quote that should matter is Woody's when he 
stated, "The best thing I ever did was join up with the Communist 
Party!" (p. 150)

Even with that one flaw, this book is one that will make a great 
many new friends for our brother and comrade Woody. These new 
friends will know a newer, much fuller and richer Woody, one with 
flaws, like you and I, who rose above them and took us up with 
him.

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People's Weekly World