Woody Guthrie has been dead nearly a quarter-century, but his legend and controversy still blow through this former oil boom town like thick prairie dust.
Guthrie is now heralded as a ”national treasure.” A rambling folk singer, he blew out of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, singing about freight trains, outlaws, big business` oppression of the working poor and American beauty.
Three decades have passed since Guthrie influenced Bob Dylan and a generation of young artists who altered American pop music. Throughout the country, schoolchildren still sing Guthrie`s most famous song, ”This Land Is Your Land.”
But here in his hometown, Guthrie isn`t remembered so fondly by some. Guthrie`s flirtation with the American Communist Party remains a source of friction in Okemah, which is still struggling over how-and even if-to recognize its most famous son.
”It`s still very sensitive around here,” said Carolyn Price, who helped found Woody Guthrie Day in 1989. ”There`s a few people that just won`t let go.”
Price, guidance counselor at Okemah High School, is helping organize the third annual Guthrie celebration on Sunday. She said her long-term goals include road signs honoring Guthrie at the edge of town and, someday, a museum.
The movement has picked up steam, but still faces resistance.
Okemah, a town of 3,400 people nestled in east Oklahoma`s rolling hill country along Interstate Highway 40, is land fit for the hearty. Carved out of Indian country, Okemah (Cree for Town on the Hill) enjoyed a brief oil boom in 1920, but the local economy has alternated between bad and worse ever since. Small oil pumps still dot the countryside, where cattle and hawks outnumber people.
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born here in 1912, coming into his prime when the great dust storms of the 1930s blew thousands of farmers off the land and into a migratory poverty in California and the West. Socialism and the labor movement grew with joblessness, despair and the collapse of the banking system, often colliding violently with big business. Guthrie earned his bad reputation here by becoming a vocal advocate of reform.
Socialism and the labor movement grew with joblessness, despair and the collapse of the banking system, often colliding violently with big business. Guthrie earned his bad reputation here by becoming a vocal advocate of reform. ”Back in those times, Woody Guthrie was like everyone else-he was on the wrong side,” said Bob Herrod, who owns a restaurant called The Loving Spoonful in downtown Okemah.
Debate still lingers about Guthrie`s relationship to the Communist Party, though he certainly was an enthusiastic spokesman for organized labor and social reform.
It was a restless era, a time that planted seeds of rebellion for the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Young political singers known as ”Woody`s children,” such as Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton and Phil Ochs, followed their mentor and emerged as minstrels for civil rights and social reform decades later.
But perhaps the greatest living testimonial to Guthrie is Pete Seeger, who worked with Guthrie and helped spawn folk music`s first widespread popularity in the 1950s. At 72, Seeger is still singing-and his repertoire includes numerous Guthrie songs and references.
”Sometimes I`ll reach in and sing some Guthrie song I haven`t sung for a long time,” Seeger said at a recent music festival in Wilkesboro, N.C.
”They`re so outrageously simple you think, `Any fool could write that.`
But it was no fool who wrote them.”
Although he never enjoyed commercial success during his life, Guthrie wrote more than 1,000 songs, including numerous political rousers, folk ballads and children`s songs.
In an interview, Seeger shrugged off questions about lingering resentment in Guthrie`s hometown.
”Difference of opinion is not a bad thing,” he said. ”Without it, we wouldn`t have horse races.”
However, Guthrie`s townfolk have not dismissed the controversy so easily. Protesters thwarted an effort to open a Guthrie memorabilia museum in Okemah in the 1970s. In 1971, the local Chamber of Commerce opposed a U.S. Senate resolution for a national Woody Guthrie Day.
The first Guthrie celebration in 1989-which featured Woody`s famous folk- singing son, Arlo-stirred a small protest, including a sign posted outside the American Legion Hall that read: ”Woody was no hero.”
Guthrie is named on one of the city`s water towers, and one resident unsuccessfully lobbied the city council a few years ago to paint it over.
The biographers are divided over whether Woody ever joined the Communist Party, though his sympathies were clear: he attended and sang at numerous Communist meetings in the late 1930s and 1940s, gravitating toward the party because of his intense sentiment for the poor and downtrodden.
”It was probably the only moment in American history when being a Communist seemed at all plausible to more than a tiny minority of the people,” Joe Klein wrote in ”Woody Guthrie: A Life.” ”The people who seemed to be fighting hardest for the things he believed in were members of the Communist Party.”
For a time, Guthrie wrote a column for the Communist newspaper, People`s World. The most famous line from Guthrie`s ”Woody Sez” column: ”I ain`t a Communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life.”
Guthrie also was attacked in his home state for his lifestyle. Married three times, Guthrie fathered eight children, drank heavily and often left wife and kids to go on some boxcar or hitchhiking junket across the country.
Guthrie`s life itself was a tragedy. He was left homeless at age 15, when his mother was committed to an insane asylum and his father was injured in a fire. His sister Clara was killed in another fire, and years later his 4-year- old daughter Cathy died in a fire.
Guthrie eventually came down with Huntington disease, a hereditary nervous disorder that crippled his creative powers at age 42 and took his life at 55.
