Woody Guthrie’s birthplace, Okemah, Oklahoma (Photograph by Walter Smalling, October 1979. Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division. Call Number: HABS, OKLA, 54-OKE.V, 1-2.)

A Woody Guthrie Centennial Moment

Where’s Woody When We Need Him?

By Jim Hightower

(from www.jimhightower.com, March 22, 2012)

Where's Woody when we need him?

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Woody Guthrie, and in these hard times of tinkle-down economics, we sure could use some of his hard-hitting musical stories and inspired lyrical populism.

He wouldn't need to write any new material. Just as in his day, our Wall Street banksters are getting rich, even as the victims of their narcissistic greed get pink slips and eviction notices. He wrote about this outrage in his great old song. "Pretty Boy Floyd," including this verse:

"Yes, as through this world I've wandered,

I've seen lots of funny men.

Some will rob you with a six-gun,

And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,

Yes, as through your life you roam,

You won't never see an outlaw

Drive a family from their home."

Woody Guthrie, ‘Pretty Boy Floyd,’ from The Asch Recordings Vol. 4 (1944)

Guthrie unabashedly celebrated America's working class, seeing a strong commitment to the common good that lifts America up. This drove The Powers That Be crazy (a pretty short ride for many of them back then, just as it is today). So they branded him a unionist, a communist and all sorts of other "ists" — but he withered them with humor that got people laughing at them: "I ain't a communist necessarily, but I have been in the red all my life."

Going down those "ribbons of highway" that he extolled in "This Land Is Your Land," Guthrie found that the only real hope of fairness and justice was in the people themselves. Guthrie preached of "just one way to save yourself, and that's to get together and work and fight for everybody." Indeed, that's exactly what grassroots Americans are doing across our country today. From Occupy Wall Street to the ongoing Wisconsin uprising, people are adding their own verses to Woody's musical refrain: "I ain't a-gonna be treated this a-way."

Where's Woody when we need him? He's right there, inside each of us. To save ourselves and our country, we must all be Woody.

Jim Hightower is the best-selling author of Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow, on sale now from Wiley Publishing. For more information, visit www.jimhightower.com.

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‘We Call This The American Spirit…’

"Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit." --John Steinbeck

Woody Guthrie, ‘Lonesome Valley’