Feeling a little lonely, I took myself to the Museum of the City of New York for the Woody Guthrie exhibition. I did not dress well, because when I don’t is when I run into people. So I made the trade-off. I must have looked really disgraceful, because not only did I meet acquaintances, but many people at the museum looked familiar. There was a spirit of reunion in that place--I could probably have walked up to anyone and asked for the story of why they were there.
My own story is that when I--we, in our seventh grade class--learned Woody’s songs from our music teacher, Pete Seeger, it was too early in life for us to derive a bigger message than that he wrote about America, and about bad bosses of migrant workers, and being poor, and especially that Pete thought his songs were wonderful and important. (My mother said Pete was a pinko.)
Woody’s songs seemed to sing themselves: "This Land Is Your Land," of course, "Lonesome Traveler," "Pastures of Plenty," "Union Maid," "So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya"--the words stayed with us. My first trip to Oregon 30 years afterwards had elements of homecoming: "Sandy Willamette and Hood River too, Roll on, Columbia, roll on."
The Guthrie exhibition, two rooms and a corridor, had photos of family and later, newspaper articles and enlarged ink sketches--of women carrying laundry, fat-cat bosses, people reacting to news of injustice. In one corner, a short documentary film ran continuously--snippets of Woody’s songs and commentary from singers who described his influence. ("Bound For Glory" was screened elsewhere in the building.)
Even if Pete had told us about Woody’s sad early life, or how his mother set fire to his father and the family dispersed and he had to fend for himself, we weren’t old or poor enough to absorb the heartache of "I ain’t got no home in this world any more." If Pete had talked about Woody’s crystalline diction--clear like Sinatra’s--or his life on trains, or his enjoyment of wordplay, or evocative character drawings, or drinking or absolute passion to rid the world of injustice, we probably wouldn’t have known enough to be fascinated, either. And Woody, who was to die slowly of a degenerative nerve disease, wasn’t even sick enough to talk about, yet, though Pete did speak of Huntington’s Chorea.
Most people were at the museum to revive their own connection to Woody or his time: maybe they went to one of the schools near the Village Vanguard where the Weavers and pre-Weavers types sang and, before the blacklist, Pete or one of the others were teaching.
Or else they were Sunday regulars in Washington Square, where big Roger Sprung held banjo court and Eric Darling played along on the guitar. So did they, maybe, before wandering off to Israel Young’s Folklore Center to buy The People’s Song Book or an issue of Sing Out!
Two days after my museum trip I found an e-mail from Dave Sear, a banjo player I had re-encountered there. He wanted my list of songs from the summer camp I’d attended during and after the War, because he had been a counselor there later. I imagine his delight when he saw names of songs long forgotten, but what I liked about his letter was the whole reunion concept in his opening sentence. Here it is, applicable to many, and the commas make it: "It is always such fun running into you and I really enjoyed going through the parts of the Guthrie exhibition, that I was a part of, with you."
I cover mostly classical music, but my dream is that Jay Ungar appears in my living room, and I rise up, put on blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, grab my guitar and follow him.