As Woody Guthrie's daughter Nora points out in “My Name Is New York,” the book she introduced Monday at the Brooklyn Historical Society, Woody spent most of his adult life in New York, and a sizeable part of that time in Brooklyn. Nora and the famous Arlo, who have the same frizzy gray mane, grew up in Coney Island, and her book has the beach photos to prove it.
In fact, one of the first songs Woody wrote when he came to town in 1940 (and lived on the same block as Town Hall) was "This land is your land, this land is my land, From California, to----" Don’t go there. It turns out that "New York island" was not his first thought. Don't we wish it was Coney Island? But that place was in his future. The crossed out word was Staten. And she showed slides of handwritten lyrics to prove that too.
Nora played interview clips of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and others, and although she was a little self-referential, she has the right to be. Her dad knew Burl Ives and Leadbelly, and wrote “Tom Joad.” She showed the typewritten pages he wrote after Seeger, and other buddies who shared an East Village apartment had gone to sleep.
It was an informative two (intermissionless) hours, and the society’s assembly room was full of attentive, knowledgeable listeners, most probably folkies. Nora has devoted herself to archiving Woody’s manuscripts, starting a foundation to preserve his songs, drafts and memorabilia, even finding help to make tunes to lyrics that didn’t have tunes yet.
Since there were slides of Woody’s first wife and their three children, it would have been nice to know what happened to them. They disappeared from the narrative. Maybe they’re in the book or the DVD.
It was a nice evening, and that roomful of people enjoyed remembering Woody, learning his life and listening to his songs, which capture the American spirit. He’d have been proud to know that Arlo wrote “Alice’s Restaurant” and that Nora is the keeper of the flame.
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