"Woody Guthrie: Live Wire": A Fascinating Document of One of America's Greatest and Most Radical Folk Singers

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Once my husband Charles and I had watched last night’s movies – the 2021 Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Festival DVD and the Lifetime movie A Dangerous Affair – I played him a fascinating CD I just just got from Amazon.com: Woody Guthrie Live Wire, dubbed from a 1949 live recording of the great American folk singer made on a wire recorder. Wire recording was a primitive forerunner of tape recording, and the two worked on the same principle – encoding sound on magnetic material through an electromagnet and playing it back by reading the same magnetic impulses – but wire recording was considerably less practical. To make the system work, the wire had to be preposterously thin – about the width of a human hair – and the wire had to move through the recorder at fast speed to get any decent sound quality. What’s more, the wire would easily snap, resulting in a tangled mess (tape recordings sometimes did that, too, but they were considerably easier to untangle), and if your wire recording broke you were instructed to tie the ends back together with a square knot. One wonders what that would do to the heads, but at least that gave you the potential of salvaging a recording that otherwise would just have to be thrown away. Tape was considerably easier to use – because it was a thin film coated essentially with rust, it could be spliced and edited – but through a quirk of recording technology history, for years the only country that had access to tape recording was Germany under the Nazis. It was only after the Nazis lost World War II that their tape recorders became war booty and American and other Allied nations’ companies started copying and modifying them.

This 1949 concert of Woody Guthrie appears to be the only historically important musical document preserved on wire recording rather than on homemade discs or tapes. It came from a concert Guthrie gave at a Jewish community center in Newark, New Jersey, and the show was introduced by Guthrie’s second (of three) wife, Marjorie – Arlo Guthrie’s mother. Since Marjorie was Jewish – her maiden name was Greenblatt – that probably accounts for how she was able to book him at the venue when the McCarthy-era blacklist was already making it hard for performers with Leftist reputations to find spaces where they could give shows. Naturally when I heard about the existence of this album I was overwhelmingly curious about it, and especially interested in hearing whether Woody Guthrie in person was like Utah Phillips and more recent folksingers, who gave long-winded explanations of the songs they were about to sing before they sang them. When the folk-music scene started to get commercially significant in the 1950’s, there were a lot of jokes about thai; Charles and I have seen a TV show from the 1950’s in which Andy Griffith played a character who said, “I’m not a song-singer, I’m a song-explainer,” and in Stan Freberg’s parody record of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line” the record producer cuts off the singer’s long-winded explanation of the song and says, “Are you going to sing the song, or read it, or what?”

It turns out that Guthrie’s show (assuming this one was representative of how he generally performed) was very much like a modern folk concert in the long-winded explanations of the songs before he sang them – indeed, both he and Marjorie took turns narrating the concert and the percentage of talking to actual singing probably approaches 50/50 – though one thing Charles noted that Guthrie didn’t do that more recent folk singers did was invite the audience to sing along. (That tradition seems to have started with Guthrie’s friend and sometimes collaborator, Pete Seeger.) The show opens with a very long rap by both Guthries about Woody’s childhood in Oklahoma and how his father had managed to build up a small fortune and owned 30 farms – until he lost them all to foreclosure, and Woody joked that his dad was losing one farm per day for an entire month. The first song he sings here is “Black Diamond,” about a race horse which Woody says his mother taught him when he was a boy. The rest of the show is more or less familiar territory to Woody Guthrie buffs, including his accounts of the great Dust Bowl that killed the farming economy of much of the Midwest and led to the epic migration of the so-called “Okies” out West in search of work. The migration was chronicled by writer John Steinbeck in his 1936 novel The Grapes of Wrath, and Woody Guthrie adapted the book into a two-part song, “Tom Joad,” which he sings here.

He also talks about how the Bonneville Power Administration, a branch of the federal government formed to build a series of dams across the Columbia River to keep it from flooding out farmland and also to create hydroelectric power so rural communities could have electricity at long last, hired him to write and record songs to promote the project. It harkens back to the says when Leftists liked giant infrastructure projects instead of harping on about what they might be doing to species and their habitats, though the song Woody actually sings after talking about the dam project was not “Roll On, Columbia,” as I’d been expecting, but “Pastures of Plenty,” one of his most intense songs about itinerant farm workers and the shabby way they got treated by the people who hired and exploited them. (This is one of the few Woody Guthrie songs that someone else did better than he did; Woody’s version, both on his commercial record and here, is pretty matter-of-fact and it took the great Black woman folk singer Odetta to bring the song to raw emotional life.) One of Woody Guthrie’s frustrations as a live performer was being expected to sing his songs exactly as he had recorded them; he talks here about how he’d bring in a long song and the record producer would tell him to cut the piece to fit the three-minute 20-second limit of a 10-inch 78 rpm side. He’d be told, “Do chorus 1, 6 and 4, in that order,” and then he’d have to remember how the record producer had to cut the song and what order he had to sing the remaining verses to match the records. In fact, he jokes about how when he’d play a dance, the dancers had memorized all the pauses in his records and he had to make the same pauses in his live performances or the dancers would be thrown out of whack and end up bumping into each other.

In one of his stage raps Guthrie said folk singers don’t have conventional voices. They don’t, he argued, fit into the normal vocal categories of soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, tenor, baritone or bass. That was one of those statements that had me going, “Huh?” Maybe one can make the case ini terms of white folk singers, but not Black omes: it was certain that Paul Robeson was a bass, Josh White a baritone, Marian Anderson a contralto, and Roland Hayes a tenor. Not only did Marian Anderson break the color line at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955 in a contralto role (as Ulrica in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera) but Roland Hayes made seven private recordings for Columbia (actually vanity pressings for which Hayes had to pay) in 1917-1918 in which he seemed tp be presenting himself as the Black Caruso. The three operaq selections Hayes recorded in his vanity sessions for Columbia – "Vesti la giubba" from Leoncavallo's {agliacci, "Una furtiva lagrima" from Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore, and the duet "Solenne in quest'ora" from Verdi's La Forza del Destino with baritone G. Summer Wormley – had all been recorded by Caruso and were among his biggest hits. (It was not until 1925 in Britain that Hayes got to record professionally – i.e,, getting paid rather than having to pay – and in the 1959’s Vanguard signed him and had him record folk material.)

Woody also talks about his politics, and when he introduces his song “1913 Massacre” he mentions that it was one of the few he’d written that wasn’t based on an experience he’d witnessed personally. Instead the story – a grim tale about how a bunch of strikebreakers and scabs ambushed union families at a Christmas dance in Calumet, Michigan and killed nearly 500 of them, including 70 children – was told to him by the pioneering Communist Party organizer Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor, and Charles pointed out that she was so notorious that even without Guthrie’s other political alignments, name-checking her as the source of a song would have been enough to get Woody Guthrie on the blacklist. (The Wikipedia page on Bloor also mentions her involvement in the Prohibitionist movement; a lot of early feminists were also ardenr Prohibitionists, apparenlty because they believed abolishing alcohol would end domestic violence and preserve women’s ability to provide for their families instead of seeing their husbands blow all their pay on booze.)

For me, the most powerful part of this Woody Guthrie performance was his very last song, a rewrite of Billy Gashade’s “Ballad of Jesse James” called “Jesus Christ.” It was an attempt to reclaim Jesus and his legacy from the Right, who then (as now) had largely appropriated it and used it for reactionary political ends. Guthrie’s song – one of his most audacious pieces – taps people on the shoulder and points out that Jesus Christ was a radical who attracted the ire of the 1-percenters of his time by preaching against economic exploitation and racism. In the song’s final verse, Woody comes right out and says that if Jesus came back in modern-day America, “if Jesus were to preach like he preached in Galilee, they would lay Jesus Christ in his grave.” Woody Guthrie: Live Wire was released in 2007 by the folk label Rounder Records after a lot of rehabilitation of the sound from that original wire to make it listenable, and the result was a fascinating document – it won the Grammy Award for Best Historical Album – and an awesome listening experience in its own right.