The Asch Series, Part 3 of 3: Woody Guthrie He Was a Desperate Little Man
A close friend and colleague remembers America's greatest folk singer as not a very nice person. Listen below to Bess Hawes's "Song to Woody," as it were
“He always reminded me of the first line to ‘John Hardy,’” Bess Hawes was telling me, in January 1987.1 Hawes was referring to the ballad, of southern Appalachian origin, about a real-life murderer: John Hardy, a railroad worker from McDowell County, West Virginia, who killed a man in a drunken dispute over a craps game. He was convicted and hanged in January 1894 before a crowd of 3,000. The murder ballad that grew up around Hardy and the episode has been recorded dozens of times; one of the best-known versions is the Carter Family’s, recorded in 1928. To quote the Carters’ first stanza: “John Hardy he was a desperate little man/He carried two guns every day/He shot down a man on that West Virginia line/You oughta seen John Hardy getting away.”
……..…….Bess Hawes on her friend Guthrie: “He was kind of a mean guy.”
As far as we know, Woody Guthrie never carried a gun; what he carried, famously, was a Gibson guitar with the sticker “This Machine Kills Fascists” pasted on the front. Whatever his weapon, the Guthrie whom Bess Hawes described differed greatly, and intriguingly, from my, and millions of others’, image of Guthrie as perhaps footloose and irresponsible, but rarely less than great company, a lovable rover gazing raptly at “that endless skyway,” his heart as big as America.
That was not the Guthrie she knew, said Hawes. “I always thought of that [“John Hardy”] line when I thought of Woody. He was a tough man who fought against the circumstances he found himself in”: a fight to the death, if it came to that, with his sworn enemies: capitalists and their murderous vigilante men. “And he was a kind of a mean guy, like John Hardy. He was going to make you listen to him. Mountain singers were like that.” Indeed, Woody Guthrie modeled himself, as a guitarist and a singer, on such southern Appalachian masters as the hugely influential guitarist Maybelle Carter, whose “pick-strum” technique Woody made his own, and the Grand Ole Opry’s Roy Acuff, who liked to think he “sold” a song as well as anyone. Hawes’s Guthrie was a pinched-faced little man and the most insistent performer she’d ever seen or heard. “When Woody was singing, you couldn’t not listen to him. He was very, very, super-intense.” Guthrie didn’t pull your coattails, he yanked them. Hawes’s Woody Guthrie was a challenge—a corrective, she would have said—to what she considered our sentimentalized misconception.
Bess Lomax Hawes was someone you listened to as well. Texas-born and -raised, Hawes (1921-2009) was much more than the daughter and sister, respectively, of the famous song collectors John and Alan Lomax. She had a long and distinguished career as a folklorist, anthropologist, and arts administrator, prior to which, just out of Bryn Mawr, she was one of the Almanac Singers: the loose aggregation that played a significant role in 20th-century America’s first, 1940s, folk revival. The Almanacs, who, depending on what else was going on, consisted of Bess and her eventual husband, Butch Hawes, Guthrie, Seeger, Cisco Houston, Lee Hays, the folk/blues hybrids Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all recorded at one time or another for Asch, Disc, or Folkways, the labels successively founded by the Polish immigrant Moses Asch (Moe to everyone): perhaps mid-20th-century America’s least conventional, most contentious, furthest-left-leaning record man.
The Almanac Singers, ca. 1942, including Woody Guthrie (far left), Bess Hawes (third from left), Pete Seeger (to Hawes’s right) and Agnes “Sis” Cunningham, far right
For Hawes—and this is her second contrarian take on Guthrie—it was when Woody sang with the Almanacs or other groups, and not as a solo artist, that he was at his best. On the Almanacs’ 1941 double album Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads/Sod Buster Ballads (recorded not by Moe Asch but by Alan Lomax for General Records), “I thought Woody got as close to great performances as he did on anything,” Hawes told me. “I thought his [sea chantey] ‘Blow the Man Down’ was absolutely classic,” as she did Woody’s lead vocal on Sod Buster Ballads’ “Hard Ain’t It Hard.” “It was nice to get Woody away from the straight political stuff, which he did most of the time, and his own stuff, and to hear him sing some of the classics.”
There you have Bess Hawes’s Woodrow Wilson Guthrie: an ornery, not infrequently mean-spirited piece of work who, moreover, shone more brightly in a group setting than on his own, and on ages-old ballads like “House of the Rising Sun” rather than his own “Grand Coulee Dam” or “Pastures of Plenty.” This fellow, his art and legend so densely woven into the fabric of our culture, remains a puzzle whose maze-like inner life we will undoubtedly never comprehend.2
I interviewed Hawes and a number of others: friends, colleagues, relatives, and an antagonist or two of Moses Asch, the founder/owner of Folkways Records, for a profile of the recently deceased businessman-cum-intellectual in the November 1987 issue of Smithsonian magazine. Earlier that year, the Smithsonian Institution had purchased the entire Folkways catalog from Asch’s family and renamed the label Smithsonian Folkways, a busy operation today.
This next footnote does not refer to a passage in my text, but to a large portion of the brief but concise Hawes interview below, from 3:32 to the conclusion. In the thoroughly researched, beautifully designed 150-page book that accompanies Smithsonian Folkways’ centennial collection Woody at 100, authors Robert Santelli and Jeff Place document a marathon 1944 recording session: eight sessions, actually, between April 16th and May 19th. Guthrie, both solo and with others: his buddy and harmony singer Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and probably others, converged on Moe Asch’s tiny recording studio on West 46th Street to record more than 160 songs. Many of the songs were Guthrie’s own compositions, some were traditional, and some were written by others (“Hobo’s Lullaby,” for one, written by Goebel Reeves, the self-styled “Texas Drifter”). In any case, not only do the April/May 1944 sessions “make up the vast majority of the songs Guthrie recorded during his short career,” writes Jeff Place, “but [al]most every recording of Guthrie’s currently available comes from these sessions.”
Hawes’s memories are at odds, though not entirely, with Santelli’s and Place’s research. Guthrie, Hawes insisted, was the sessions’ sole participant. She was there for at least several of them, “just to visit my old friend Woody” (not that old a friend, actually; Woody had only turned up in New York in 1940). Her vivid description of Woody at work differs completely from others’, Moe Asch’s for instance. “He wouldn’t sit on a chair, had to flop on the floor,” Asch told an interviewer in his own brand of Eastern-European English. “He got tired, he went to sleep right then and there.” Hawes begged to differ. “Woody was very methodical, in his own funny way. He had all of his songs in looseleaf notebooks. He sat on a kitchen stool, with a big easel sort of stand. He would flip to a page and hit a chord and sing a song and then he’d turn the page and sing another song.” The sessions, whose dates Hawes didn’t recall, were, she said, an act of solicitude on Asch’s part. At the time, Guthrie was in especially poor physical and emotional shape. “Moe was keeping Woody alive,” Hawes said. “Woody was unable to work at that point. He was sick a lot, he was drunk a lot.” Asch paid him a living wage—$50 a week, recalled Pete Seeger, $25 a week, according to Alan Lomax, and $25 a day, according to Hawes [we will never fully pin down the circumstances surrounding this individual’s life]—to report to the studio every morning, as if to a job. “I think it was a remarkable thing for Moe to have done,” said Hawes. “He did it to keep Woody going. He thought Woody was a great artist, and he needed some regular work.”
Hawes was wrong on several counts. Asch, she said, released nothing of what Woody recorded at these sessions; as she put it, “Moe put ‘em on the shelf.” (She recalled these performances, moreover, as substandard.) Asch, in fact, released many of these songs over the years, beginning with Guthrie’s first Asch Records release, 1945’s Woody Guthrie. At least half of this album’s six songs were cut at the marathon session, including “Grand Coulee Dam,” “Gypsy Davy,” and “New York Town.” Asch didn’t merely recognize Woody’s genius; he considered it saleable (and it proved to be, at least by Asch’s modest standards). Asch was seeing to Woody’s well-being while making what he considered a good investment. Finally, Hawes’s visits to the studio may simply have been on days when neither Houston nor any of Woody’s other compadres were present.
A final observation. Back in 1940, Woody, irritated by the constant jukebox play that a song which irritated the hell out him was getting—Kate Smith’s sappily operatic recording of Irving Berlin’s ultra-patriotic “God Bless America”—sat down and wrote an alternative anthem, which he promptly forgot about. He recalled it at the marathon session, and recorded it. In this case, Bess Hawes was correct. Asch shelved the song (which, Pete Seeger told me, “I considered one of Woody’s lesser efforts”). Guthrie, tenacious as always, returned two years later to re-cut it. Asch shelved it again. But this second version found its way to the public, eventually, as the title song (with a odd twist, as we’ll see) to the third volume, American Work Songs, of the childrens’ series Songs to Grow On. The album was released in 1951 on what was now Folkways Records. Woody is just one of six artists on the record, which includes Seeger, Houston, Bill Bonyon, Sam Eskin, “Mac” McClintock, and (posthumously) Lead Belly. Woody sings the song in what became its standard version (minus, that is, a highly politicized verse that was included in the 1944 version), the song that many consider America’s real national anthem. But, oddly, the title on the album cover, which for some reason (some weird kind of originalism?) Smithsonian Folkways has never seen fit to correct, and which Santelli and Place, atypically, fail to note, is This Land is My Land.
Well, I thought I had pretty good knowledge about Woody. I stand corrected. For some reason, this all makes sense. Thanks