THE JOURNAL NEWS

July 2, 2006

Family keeps Guthrie's memory alive

By SEAN GORMAN

For more information on Woody Guthrie

Ä Experience the archives in a LoHud.com sound slide show:

www.thejournalnews.com/legacy/slideshow/070206A

Ä The Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives Web site: www.woodyguthrie.org. Archive visits are by appointment only. The archives can be reached at 212-541-6230.

Ä PBS is airing a documentary on Guthrie July 12 at 9 p.m. On Guthrie's birthday — July 14 — the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville will show the documentary at 8 p.m. The center is located at 364 Manville Road in Pleasantville. There is a $12 admission for members; $16 for non-members.

The people who came to Nora Guthrie's childhood home in Queens weren't your typical visitors. Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Ramblin' Jack Elliott used to stop by the house in the 1960s to play music and visit her father — the legendary songwriter Woody Guthrie, who created "This Land is Your Land."

But Guthrie said she wasn't too interested in their music, and like many children, she shied away from her parents' interests, preferring instead to listen to Motown and the Everly Brothers. Once when Dylan came over, she excused herself to go watch "American Bandstand."

It wasn't until decades after her father died in 1967 that Guthrie — now the executive director of the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives — would get truly involved in her dad's seminal work as a wandering songwriter from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Around 1992, after Nora had already settled into a life as a "house mom" in Chappaqua, she decided to start helping out at the Manhattan office of Harold Leventhal, her father's friend and business manager.

"He called me and he said 'Nora, you know I'm getting on (in age) and someone in the family should just kind of know a little bit about what's going on with the family business,' " Guthrie, 56, said recently. "I didn't even know the words to 'This Land is Your Land.' I (only) knew the chorus."

She typed and filled out labels at the office, where Leventhal had long stored boxes and file cabinets filled with her father's writings. Leventhal started bringing boxes to Guthrie's office.

"He said, 'This is all your dad's stuff. You should look at it,'" Guthrie said.

One day she reached into a box and pulled out a long slender writing tablet and flipped to a page where her father had written a lyric called "I Say to You Woman and Man."

"It was a beautiful lyric that I had never seen before," Guthrie said. "I didn't know he ever wrote about women. I thought he wrote about dust bowls, unions and stuff like that and hard times ... He opened up to me in a way that previously no one had showed me."

She kept reading, and with some of the paper falling apart, she decided to contact the Smithsonian Institute. They got her in in touch with archivist Jorge Arevalo, who undertook a three-year project to catalogue and protect the collection. In September, the Woody Guthrie Archives will mark its 10-year anniversary.

The archives are kept in an office on West 57th Street in Manhattan and include about 15,000 items tucked away amid sliding shelves and neatly arranged in boxes and folders. There are paintings, sketches, letters, lyrics and manuscripts.

There is also a piece of wrapping paper for a baby gift that Guthrie — a prolific and obsessive writer — had typed on.

"You get a sense of the times in which he lived. The Dust Bowl. The New York avant-garde in the 1940s," said Arevalo, the archive curator. "You get a really wide-ranging view, because he had such a wide vision of the world ... It's not just about folk music, it's really about an extensive view of America."

Guthrie was born in Okemah, Okla. in 1912, and left 19 years later when the town's "boomtown period went bust" according to a biography on the Woody Guthrie Archives Web site. Guthrie eventually traveled to California before heading to New York City in 1939 where he was embraced by the city's leftist organizations, intellectuals and other writers who were drawn to his "Steinbeckian homespun wisdom," the archive's Web site states.

In the 1940s, Guthrie played in the Almanac Singers with Seeger, who now lives in Beacon. Seeger recently recalled taking a plane trip with Guthrie from New York City to Pittsburgh in 1946. During the flight, Guthrie wrote verses about the towns they were flying over and what the pretty stewardess might be doing that night, Seeger said.

"Woody was principally a songwriter. I don't think there was a day in his life when he didn't write a verse for a song," said Seeger, now 87. "I'd say 90 percent of the time, maybe 99 percent of the time, Woody would make up a set of words not being sure what tune he was going to use."

Nora's mom, Marjorie, was the second of Guthrie's three wives. Together they had four children — Nora, Joady, Cathy and Arlo.

Woody Guthrie suffered from Huntington's Chorea, an inherited, degenerative nerve disorder that is severely debilitating. He was often in the hospital in the years leading up to his death.

In 1988 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which credits Guthrie for making the "folk ballad into a vehicle for social protest and observation." He wrote a column for the Communist Daily Worker, but he was denied membership into the Communist Party because he refused to renounce religion, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

"He wrote songs that everybody could sing. He wrote tunes from melodies he borrowed or heard from," said Bob Jones, producer of the Newport Folk Festival. "I think that any songwriter probably in his own mind, would love to have the very legacy that Woody has because his songs keep going."

Nora Guthrie now works with performers who use her father's unpublished lyrics in their songs, including Billy Bragg, Wilco and the Klezmatics. The Klezmatics upcoming album, "Wonder Wheel," sets music to Guthrie's lyrics.

"I used to sing Woody Guthrie songs with a friend of mine when I was in junior high school, so it's a bit of a full circle for me," said Lorin Sklamberg, the Klezmatics' lead singer. "I feel (the album is) like giving a gift to the world with these songs, because otherwise they wouldn't be out there."

Nora's daughter, Anna Canoni, works as events and publicity director for Woody Guthrie Publications, a business that oversees publishing of the songwriter's creative collection. Canoni works out of the company's small satellite office on Mount Kisco's Main Street.

"I think he had this really amazing ability to see the world around him with a painter's eye," said Canoni, 27, of Ossining. "I think his creative legacy is his ability to write. It wasn't about the music. It was about seeing this truth ... and being able to capture it and write it down as a song."