Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People by Woody Guthrie

His goal is not simply to create well-crafted characters, but rather to change hearts and minds by amplifying marginalized voices. The portraits Guthrie paints have both a particular perspective and agenda. 5 He eschewed the planners and engineers, instead writing about the men hammering rivets, setting dynamite charges, pouring concrete and welding steel. In addition, Guthrie wrote extensively about the unnamed and largely unremembered workers who built New Deal infrastructure. 3 These itinerant workers supplied the cheap labor necessary to harvest crops which fed the rest of the country. Perhaps the most well-represented set are migrant laborers, particularly the “Okies” of the 1930s who fled the Dust Bowl in search of agricultural jobs in California. Writing maintenanceĪs he crisscrossed the country, Guthrie wrote songs and produced artwork that amplified the lives and voices of the maintainers whose company he kept. Maintainers diagnose, fix and test while learning how to do those things more effectively at the same time. 2 I also understand it as cyclical and dialogic work where the doing of and the learning from are inextricably related. I understand maintenance as a form of care work, and therefore work that is embodied, emotional and performative. I want to be clear about what I think maintenance is and does. Second, it can be seen in his maintenance of tradition, and the use of that tradition as a way to maintain and repair the world. First, it can be seen in his creative output, which is filled with the figures of maintainers, and their hopes, dreams, fears and daily work. I argue that Guthrie’s understanding of folk music as maintenance is manifested in two ways. “A folk song,” he wrote “is what’s wrong and how to fix it,” as clear a statement of what maintenance is and does as any you’ll hear this conference. In September 1940, Oklahoma-born musician, writer, artist and activist Woody Guthrie wrote to Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress, laying out his philosophy of folk music.

“What’s Wrong and How to Fix It”: Woody Guthrie and the Maintenance of Folk Music Apr 08 2017

Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People by Woody Guthrie