“Nothing Sweet: Woody Guthrie, People’s Songs, Revolutionary Love…”
By Doug Morris
[Every] artist must fight for freedom or slavery. I’ve made my choice .
-Paul Robeson
We thought the world was worth saving and that we could do it with songs.
-Irwin Silber
The world (though not some of its institutions) is surely worth saving and the urgency of the task grows with each passing day, made clear by among other things: climate change/global warming and related disasters; eco-system destruction; the Sixth Great Extinction; ongoing wars; police state violence and repression; hunger, poverty, pandemics, and pestilence; inequality of wealth and power, etc. Songs alone, despite Irwin Silber’s thoughts, will certainly not abolish the various forms of degradation and dehumanization that still trouble the world, songs will not overthrow capitalism and engender socialism (despite the dreams of many of the singers of “people’s songs”), or create democracy in the workplace; nor will songs provide people with the skills and tools necessary to build a society in which the self-realization and fulfillment of each is the condition for the self-realization and fulfillment of all. But songs, as potential vehicles for transcendence, can help people develop a better understanding of the world, feel what it means to go beyond and be liberated from the present, enliven the radical spirit, and inspire the collective will, in order to engage in carrying out the urgently needed structural transformations that might save the world from cataclysm.
Given the threat of cataclysms, one might consider it rather anomalous, even outlandish, to reflect on and write about songs and singers, and especially if one is focusing on a singer of people’s songs dead now more than fifty years. “Who cares about Woody Guthrie, people are dying,” one might say. Yes, there surely are more urgent topics (see above). Given the power of songs and the influence of singers, however, in people’s individual and collective lives, we might consider it equally aberrant, or more so, to not consider the relationship between the power of songs and singers as transformative cultural forces and agents (and sometimes, unfortunately, transmogrificational forces and agents), and the manifold monstrosities we are facing. Given the crises and challenges we now confront we must pursue every possible pathway for developing rebellious attitudes that struggle AGAINST the root causes of the crises we face, and revolutionary attitudes geared toward struggling FOR the kind of decent, dignified and sustainable society we need. One of the multiple pathways to go beyond the meanness of the world is through songs for the people.
Woody Guthrie (1912 -1967) told us in song that there are “Mean Things Happening in This World.” Therein, more than seventy years ago, Woody sings (and it could be sung today) about people without “a cryin’ dime,” people being spied on by the police, “brothers and sisters killed” to serve the interests of the “green back dollar bill,” people thrown in jail for talking peace or “brotherly love” in the streets, and the need to “organize my brother and sister” if we are going to “win this world” that really belongs to us. Winning this world that belongs to us, not to those obsessed with “the dollar will,” is a theme expressed in Woody’s most famous song, “this land is made for you and me [not the ownership class],” so we must mobilize and fight to “win this world” that is rightfully ours.
To try to address and overcome those mean things happening, seventy-five years ago, on December 31, 1949, a group of folksingers, union organizers, and other radicals (including Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax Hawes and Irwin Silber – and roughly 25 others), with a common interest in folk songs and political songs, gathered in a Greenwich Village basement to create an organization, People’s Songs, dedicated to spreading the message of radical democracy and popular participation through songs. They wanted to sing songs that educated and entertained, reflected and transformed, that grounded and transcended, and that moved people emotionally and awakened people intellectually. The “people” to whom they were referring were primarily the working people of the world. Guthrie, Seeger, and the others, understood songs to be an intrinsic and imaginative component of a wider cultural apparatus rooted in and growing out of lived experience in the dominant capitalist culture, that could both expand people’s critical understanding of the world as well as nurture and nourish people’s capacities for creative engagement with, production in, and transformation of the world.
If songs are intrinsically an expression of the imagination, and imagination is the source of empathy because it provides us an opening into the lives of others, then those committed to singing people’s songs asked how it is that songs might be incorporated in ways that generate not only empathy (feeling the pain and suffering of others) but also compassion (actions to alleviate the cause of the pain and suffering). These would be songs, inflamed by a socialist/communist consciousness, that helped working people both understand the root cause of troubles in the system of capitalism, and be the root solution to those troubles, in the collective organization and struggles of the people for socialism. People’s songs would function as a mirror on current realities, a window into different and better realities, and a hammer to help build from where we are to where we want to be.
Gordon Freisen, the editor of Broadside which published the works of Bob Dylan, Malvina Reynold, and Phil Ochs, said that “Woody Guthrie was the only one in the Almanacs (1940-1943 New York City based folk group) really fighting for socialism, who really wanted and needed socialism.” Others in the Almanacs, and surely many more in the later People’s Songs gathering, would disagree that Woody was the only one fighting for socialism.
Woody Guthrie has often been referred to as a “protest singer,” but more accurately he should be called a “protest and revolutionary singer,” or “a singer of people’s songs.” Like many of the other singers and composers of people’s songs, Woody used songs to radically educate and to rouse people to political awareness and participation, to help people critically understand the world and to incorporate that critical understanding in the work to radically change it. People’s songs are rooted in and work to promote the values of community and solidarity, care and love, democracy and freedom, resource sharing and cooperation, equality and fairness, peace and mutual aid, and these days, ecological rationality and sustainability. Musicologist Charles Seeger (Pete’s father) called it “socialism in music.” Bess Lomax Hawes, in talking about “people’s music” said “we saw ourselves as educators and as political artists.” For singers of people’s songs, music was a political act and an educational project geared to singing the truth about the upside/down world in which people live where the poor work all too hard and the rich hardly work.
Woody tried to help people see the “upside/down” nature of things and to turn them right side up. In his song “I Ain’t Got No Home,” the message is conveyed that “the banking man is rich and the working folks is poor,” while “the rich man took my home and drove me from my door,” capturing in a few lines the exploitative, dispossessing, degrading, and repressive nature of the capitalist system that the IWW (“The Singing Union”) sang about relentlessly. The Wobblies, in “Solidarity Forever,” refer to bosses taking “untold [tr]illions they never toiled to earn” and noting how without the “brain and muscle [of the working people] not a single wheel would turn.” It is a sentiment expressed back in an 1829 lyric printed in an early union paper, The Mechanics Press: “The poor can live without the rich /As every man may know/But none that labor for their bread/Could by the rich be spared.”
When Woody sings in “This Land is Your Land,” “I saw a bread line forming, in the shadow of the steeple; at the relief office, I saw my people; they stood there hungry, and I stood there asking ‘Is this land made for me and you?’” it is Woody’s way of saying what Rage Against the Machine said fifty years later, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” i.e. I will not accept that this land should not belong to the working people, whatever the boss class tells us and does. Intimated in Woody’s lines that see through the lie of “God Bless America,” is a profound anger directed at the upside/down nature of massive and monstrous poverty and suffering imposed on the people who labor to make the world work existing alongside great wealth and ostentatious privilege among those who do no meaningful work but exploit those who do. For Woody, the inequality and indignity should be recognized as intolerable, especially when we understand that “this is our world,” not theirs.
For Woody, and other singers of people’s songs, there was little separation between, on the one hand, composing and singing songs and, on the other hand, struggling to transform the dominant institutions of the society. Composer Earl Robinson said, “It was clear that our system [of capitalism] had to be overthrown,” and “people’s music,” it was believed, could play a decisive role in the overthrow. Irwin Silber, founder (with Pete Seeger and others), and editor, of Sing Out! added that with people’s songs, “we were making a political statement and combating [capitalist] ideology.” “Boots” Casetta (People’s Songs West Coast organizer) said that people’s songs were to be applied to “whatever struggle we might think was worthwhile.” For Woody, at the core of what was worthwhile was the struggle for socialism, what he called “the freedom highway.”
Woody was often writing (especially from the late 1930s forward after meeting communists and Wobblies in California) as a socialist/communist/humanist and anti-capitalist, a point easily missed by people who hear “This Land is Your Land” as a patriotic anthem. “Woody's best song” (as Pete Seeger put it) is, in some sense (as I hear it), Woody's version of the Industrial Workers of the World anthem, "Solidarity Forever," an anthem to the working people of the land and a clear call to oppose the system rooted in the private capitalist ownership and control of the material and ideological means of production. In Woody’s song, the other side of the “private property” sign “didn’t say nothin’” and it is that side in which private control of property is replaced by cooperation and resource sharing, a form of production that is ”made for you and me,” i.e. made for fellow workers and toilers of the world.
One might also be surprised to hear it, but most of Woody’s songs are “love songs,” rooted in a deep care for and love of working people. Pete Seeger captures this need for “love songs” in his classic album Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs, an album that makes it clear that if you love human beings you must be opposed to war and mass violence, i.e. one must be opposed to this kind of meanness in the world, a form of “trouble,” that traumatizes, brutalizes and destroys human lives. Woody said: “trouble is caused by two things. Fear is one. Greed is the other.” Greed is a problem within the capitalist culture Woody strongly opposed because it reduces people (and the rest of nature) to a source for exploitation and enrichment; and fear is a problem because it reduces other people to a threat to one’s achieving, to one’s accumulating more, and more, and more. Such greed and fear, concomitant with capital, produce anxiety and distress that always results from the inequality in access to the resources and conditions needed to live happy, creative, meaningful, and fulfilling lives. Woody offered a remedy: greed and fear are “removed by one thing, and that is love. That is the secret of secrets,” Woody said, “and you will never educate yourself past it.” In other words, even the most pervasive and penetrating systems of propaganda and indoctrination cannot erase from us a basic truth about being human: loving and caring for one another, like freedom and democracy, are basic human values that may be suppressed but cannot be extricated and erased.
One is here reminded of Paul Robeson, educator, activist, and singer of people’s songs grounded in revolutionary love of the working people of the world. Robeson, singing at the 1952 Peace Arch Concert at the border between Canada and the United States (on the border because the U.S. State Department had pulled Robeson’s passport given is love of and care for the working people), changed the lyrics of the old standard “Ol’ Man River” from “I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’,” to “I must keep fighting’ until I’m dyin.” The lyrical shift moved the singer from the role of reproducer to the role of creator and moved the song from the perspective of passive recipient of history, from an object shaped by conditions, to an active subject participating as an agent in making history, from a mood of acceptance to a statement of protest and resistance, from being determined by external conditions to rebelling against those conditions, from surrendering to fear and fatigue to struggling to overcome that which produces fear and fatigue. In short, the song was converted into a people’s song, a song of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. And there is radical anger in the pronouncement; it is an anger against the meanness in the world and deeply grounded in what Michelle Alexander might call “revolutionary love,” a love rooted in mutual struggles for fulfillment and flourishing, humanized and humanizing comradeship, what Aristotle called filia, a condition that demands substantive equality in order to ensure autonomy. “When we allay our anger in the face of injustice, we subdue our love for the victims of injustice,” to paraphrase William Sloane Coffin, and when we diminish our love for the victims of injustice we compromise our ability to address and overcome the root cause of the injustice. Robeson, Guthrie, Seeger, and other singers of people’s songs brought a heightened anger and deepened love in the struggle for justice.
Robeson’s lyrical shift is a recognition of the unfinished and changeable nature of history, society and people, an acknowledgement that history and society are products of the collective work of human beings who must be always seen as social/historical/biological individuals, objects shaped and subjects capable of shaping history and society. To be willing to fight, even if it means one might be dying, or killed in that struggle, is also the fundamental lesson of one of Woody’s favorite historical figures, Jesus Christ. Christ teaches that we must be willing to sacrifice life itself in defense of justice and love, demonstrating that “if we love too much, they will kill us (but if we do not love, we will die),” as Terry Eagleton put it. And Ché Guevara taught us that true revolutionaries, like Robeson and Guthrie, are motivated by a deep love of humanity.
Systems of unjust and unfair, repressive and exploitative, violent and oppressive, authoritarian power want us to be tired of living and scared of dying. Enervation and trepidation serve the interests of the oppressors and exploiters. Like Guthrie, Robeson, implores us to remain vigilant and courageous in the struggle, to not surrender to fear and passivity, to produce a different and better radically democratized society where we also remain conscious of our incompleteness and potential for contributing to and participating in the ongoing struggle for a society in which “it is not idiotic to be kind,” as Richard Levins put it.
Robeson’s small but vital lyrical shift captures the radical transformative component often present in people’s songs, the “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” element. It points to why Woody Guthrie said he would fight until his last breath and last drop of blood against music that made people feel hopeless and defeated, degraded and demoralized, passive and acquiescent. Robeson’s radical shift again points to how we are both makers of history and made by history (so we should be careful about the kind of history we make), again subjects and objects in the historical/social/transformative process It is not that Robeson “will” keep fighting (though he will), but that he “must keep fighting,” it is a moral and rational obligation, a call to take the decisions that integrity demands, and not only in the short-term, but until he is dying, revealing the call for a commitment to the long-term struggle of the people for peace, freedom, dignity, equality, and justice. That he “must” is internally driven and externally imposed. The conditions of injustice, exploitation, abuse, discrimination, inequality, violence, and oppression force the issue, but Robeson will not accept being condemned to suffer the indignity of being treated as an object of history, domesticated by dehumanizing, exploitative, and demeaning structures of authoritarian power. Instead, he claims his position as subject and producer of history, fundamental to the work of an engaged and radical artist, a singer of elevating and enlivening people’s songs.
Woody said he worked to write people’s songs that were “living songs,” (to combat the all too many deadening songs in the commercial arena). For Woody, people’s songs that are living songs are songs that make the world a better place for the workers and toilers of the world, songs that nurture and nourish the struggle to overcome conditions of exploitation and humiliation, songs that tell the truth about the everyday life of those victimized by systems of oppressive/authoritarian power, and songs that help us realize that the world belongs to us, not to an anti-democratic elite-minority ownership-class. For Woody, creating people’s songs that were “living songs” was a “must,” and again, it is a moral and rational requirement. It was commercial corporatized pop songs Woody tried to avoid, despite his short stint on Pipe Smoking Time, in 1940.
As most of the purveyors of people’s songs understand it, people’s songs are grounded in the material realities of working people’s daily lives, toil, struggles, and troubles, but they also elevate into the domain of the spirit so that base and superstructure, roots and branches come together in a dialectical dance. People’s songs were attempting to bring a radical sensibility and sensitivity not often present in the commercial arena of “popular songs,” i.e. “pop” songs for profit and not for people. And while there is no clear line of distinction or demarcation always present between “pop” songs and “people’s songs,” and we must be careful not to create false dichotomies, consider the following possible malleable distinctions as an opening guide in the creation of people’s songs:
Popular songs might sing about romance while people’s songs might sing about resistance (and still appreciate and welcome romance); popular songs might sing about transgression, while people’s songs might also sing about transformation; popular songs can exist primarily in the commercial sphere while people’s songs can remind us of the existence and importance of the public sphere, people’s struggles, and the common good; some popular songs reveal the success of capitalist civilization (as defined by the capitalists) while people’s songs reflect the failure of a capitalist civilization that produces the need for people’s songs in the first place; some popular songs can serve as a distraction from the troubles of life and thus serve to protect dominant systems and downplay and subdue social transformations while people’s songs can remind us of the vital role that music can play in struggling for the kinds of social changes needed to fuel music as an uplifting and transformative force; some popular songs might sings about matrimonial unions while people’s songs sing about the power in the union of working people; some popular songs might sing about rebellion while people’s songs might also sing about revolution (a difference between singing against unfairness, injustice, and inequality and struggling for fairness, justice, and equality); some popular songs celebrate cultural diversity while people’s songs can also remind us that a culture of colonialism or culture of racism is an abomination to be overcome; some popular songs can be instrumental in that they serve as an instrument to serve some other end (for example, profits and celebrity) while people’s songs can remind us that music can be experienced as a good in itself; pop songs, in focusing too narrowly on interpersonal love, can negate the need for social revolutionary love while people’s songs can affirm the power and fundamental requirement for social revolutionary love in the struggle for self-realization; popular songs can function as a perfumed defoliant while people’s songs can remind us that though they may try to bury us, we are seeds; popular songs can be used to serve capital’s drive for accumulation and expansion while people’s songs can be experienced for the purpose of individual and collective delight, fulfillment, and aesthetic pleasure; popular songs might sing about criminals, outlaws, and terrorists while people’s songs will remind us that the real criminals and outlaws are not those robbing banks but those running and owning the banks (those who will “rob you with a fountain pen” as Woody sings in “Pretty Boy Floyd”), and the real terrorists are in the White House and Pentagon; some popular songs can ground us in current realities while people’s songs can also help us transcend those current realities, and provide a momentary escape into a zone of transcendence that provides a glimpse of a world of collective joy that could be realized if we sing and work collectively to make it real; some popular songs might remind us of the importance of inclusion while some people’s songs will also remind us of the importance of exclusion, for example, excluding fascists and white supremacists from shaping public policies or running pre-schools; some popular songs celebrate diversity while some people’s songs also remind us that class diversity is rooted in exploitation, abuse, and dehumanizing inequality and should thus be overcome; some popular songs might call on us to subsume politics into culture as a way to hide the political while some people’s songs will remind us that it is a distinct form of politics we are hoping to overcome (e.g. authoritarian) and another form of politics we are hoping to generate (e.g. substantively democratic); some popular songs might express anger in the face of injustice while people’s songs might connect that anger to radicalized expressions of love for the victims of injustice; some popular songs reflect the need for variety in the world and some people’s songs also reflect the need for consensus in getting rid of structural indignities such as child labor, poverty, eco-system destruction, nuclear weapons, and enslavement; some popular songs celebrate cultural differences while some people’s songs also remind us of the need to abolish class differences; some popular songs might sing about the importance of embracing minorities while people’s songs will also remind us to work to overcome the minority of the ruling class; some popular songs can take us into the known and familiar while people’s songs can also awaken the imagination in order to venture courageously and adventurously into the unknown and unfamiliar; some popular songs can remind us of the horrors of the past and present while people’s songs can also envision and embody a different and better future; some popular songs might talk about differences that produce injustice and inequality while people’s songs might also sing about commonalities that produce justice and equality; some popular songs might sing about indignities rooted in identity while some people’s songs might also sing about indignities rooted in cultures of poverty, militarism, and economic exploitation.
Philosophers have sought to understand the world.
The point, however, is to change it.
--Karl Marx, 11th thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary
is guided by a great feeling of love.
It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
― Ernesto Ché Guevara
Throughout[WB3] his relatively short productive life Woody Guthrie composed more than 3,000 songs, and he demonstrated powerfully what it means to be a singer-activist/activist-singer and employ the insurgent power of people’s songs as part of a larger revolutionary project of political and social transformation through which it is recognized that constructing a better future is in many ways rooted in how we come to work, think, hope, imagine, live, envision, resist, organize, construct, know, create, and sing together in the present. Woody’s work captured the visionary yet soberly realistic nature of people’s songs. He revealed how a combination of realism—seen and heard as the need to look honestly at harsh realities without falling into cynicism or fatalism—and vision—seen and heard as the need to see the revelatory light of potential transformations immanent in the present—inform the dynamic fullness and defiant strength of relevant people’s songs. People’s songs are willing to stare in the face of, reflect upon, and point fingers at the most harrowing conditions, knowing that doing so is part of the struggle in overcoming such horrifying realities. Sometimes pointing fingers is our best option, but behind the fingers are hands, and arms, and brains that must be provoked and mobilized to overcome that toward which the fingers are pointing. People’s songs are too down to earth to be blinded by idealism, but too idealistic to fall victim to pessimism and despair suggested by dismal and sordid realities. People’s songs are always historical, they live and breathe history in that they see history as an interpenetrating set of past, present and future processes and relations (political, cultural, economic, social, ideological, biological, ecological, etc.).
When Steve Earle sings about losing the trail of Woody Guthrie so that he is lost “stumbling through the haze,” he points to the need for staying awake, alert, and attuned to those historical interpenetrations and legacies, and the down to earth idealism that infused Woody’s people’s songs. It is not a call to sentimentality about the past or nostalgia (too often heard in commercial pop songs), but a demand for a genuine radical obligation to, and critical engagement with, the past for the purpose of exciting and activating feelings of solidarity and flames of resistance required for ensuring that “a better world is coming” in the future. People’s songs can do that; Woody’s songs often do that.
Perhaps the authorities understand better than the singers that people’s songs are dangerous, hence the marginalization (or worse, e.g. the murder of Victor Jara in Chile in 1973 by Pinochet’s U.S. backed henchmen) of purveyors of people’s songs. They understand what Don McLean noted: “A dangerous song is the most dangerous form of art there is; you can never kill a song.” And that is why IWW bard Joe Hill believed that a song was better than a lecture, i.e. the song has staying power.
One of Woody's mentors, Ed Robbins (West Coast communist in the 1930s) said "Woody believed that what is important is the struggle of the working people to win back the earth, which is rightfully [ours]. He believed that people should love one another and organize into One Big Union." Woody, driven by working class solidarity and love, was outraged that so many people were living under bridges, were unemployed, dispossessed, starving, and living in migrant camps, oppressed, exploited, and abused. Woody was singing about what should be, i.e. this land should belong collectively to the people, not to the anti-democratic minority ownership class, and about what is, i.e. the breadlines forming in the shadow of the steeple, the relief office, and the private property signs. It is, again, an example reflective of how Woody was both a rebellious singer (singing against what is) and a revolutionary singer (singing for what ought to be). Woody kept hearing Kate Smith singing "God Bless America" on the jukebox wherever he went, and everywhere Woody went he did not see people who were blessed by God or anything else, but people who were coarsened, cursed, and crushed by a brutalizing system, i.e. the system of private ownership and control of the material and ideological means of production and distribution, the system that destroyed the commons.
Woody arguably wrote “This Land is Your Land” because "this land" is owned by the wealthy, anti-democratic minority class of owners, but in Woody's socialist/communist view of “commonism,” that is an abomination, the obscenity of capitalism. When Woody sings of the "freedom highway" in the last verse of the song, that is his reference to socialism/communism/commonism. "Nobody living can make us turn back [from building the "freedom highway" of socialism]," is Woody's call for engaging in the urgently needed and long-term struggle to bring the notion of the common good into reality (a point much more poignant in the age of eco-system destruction that is destroying the global commons). It is Woody’s version of: “keep fighting until we’re dying.” Woody was in line with the CIO's "equal rights stance" in the late 1930s, a stance informed by the influence of the Communist Party - and former Wobblies in the CIO at that time). The basic point of Woody's tune is linked to Rousseau's line from the "Disquisition on Inequality" - "the fruits of our labor belong to us; the fruits of the earth belong to everyone; and, the earth itself belongs to no one, i.e. "this land is made for you and me." Might it be added that this is a very Native American way of looking at things?
Woody talked about how songs are weapons. Songs, people’s songs, he suggested, can be used by slaves in the struggle for liberation from slavery; by workers in the struggle for emancipation from exploitation; and, songs, commercial songs, can be used by the ownership class to control, distract, indoctrinate, subdue, and dominate the people. Woody carried a copy of the Wobblies “Little Red Songbook” in his pocket, and shared in the Wobbly vision of what Joe Hill called “the Worker’s Commonwealth” where workers will arise in “splendid might…take the wealth” we are always producing, because “it belongs to [us] by right,” i.e. “this land is made for you and me.” Again, Woody called it “commonism,” a world in which “there is no hunger and want because everything is shared in common.” It is through that struggle for the workers commonwealth that we will be “born again” in Woody’s materialist conception of the world, where the spiritual is deeply grounded in human capacities for creativity, rebelliousness, artistry, commitment, knowledge, sensuousness, love, affection, compassion, laughter, and abundance.
As noted, Woody’s mentor and comrade Ed Robbin said that Woody looked at the world and politics through a lens that directed us to struggle for the One Big Union, take back the earth that rightfully belongs to the workers (not the owners), and also create the conditions and provide the resources so that it is possible for people to love one another in the context of reciprocally creative and fruitful lives. It is such sentiments that reveal why Woody’s two favorite philosophers were Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, two philosophers who understood the importance of revolutionary love, and who see love as necessary to create the conditions for mutual flourishing and fulfillment, mutual happiness and creativity. The lessons are revealed powerfully in Woody’s song “Jesus Christ” where the rich are told to give their wealth unto the poor, and when Jesus comes to town the “workers believed what he did say” about this “commonist” ethic that works to overcome the root causes of inequality, and to embody the struggle to love one another.
Woody, like other singers of people’s songs, saw himself as a political artist and as a radical educator, a contributor to what Boots Casetta called “the age long struggle for the liberation of [hu]mankind.” In that struggle, we cannot ask or expect too much of the power of people’s songs, but we can also not ask or expect too little. While songs have a spiritual component, they are not magic, they are always grounded in, and in some ways reflective of, the material conditions of life; people’s songs are attempting to build the future, but on the materials of the present and past, as Rosa Luxemburg might put it.
Possibilities for a better future are grounded in keeping one foot in the past. We see this commitment in Woody’s songs such as “Two Good Men,” about Sacco and Vanzetti, where in the lines “[Vanzetti] taught the workers to organize, and in the electric chair he dies,” Woody reveals the bloody horror that faced many union organizers in the long and ongoing struggle for liberation from capital’s exploitation and abuse of labor. He also keeps alive the revolutionary spirits of Sacco and Vanzetti much needed to sustain struggles into the future. In the “Ludlow Massacre,” where Rockefeller goons killed (burned alive) eleven children and two pregnant women in Colorado in April, 1914 as part of a larger assault on striking miners and their families, Woody keeps alive the urgently needed revolutionary spirit of the miner’s union (“God bless the mine workers’ union,” he sings) while also reminding us of the violence and repression systems of state power will employ to protect the ownership class and its interests. In “1913 Massacre,” about copper miners making “less than a dollar a day,” Woody sings “such a terrible sight I never did see…the scabs outside still laughed at their spree, and the children that died there were seventy-three,” and he keeps alive the rebellious outrage experienced by workers and families assaulted by the vicious forces of capital. In “Harriet Tubman’s Ballad,” he sings about how Lincoln only “crippled that snake of slavery; We've got to fight to kill him dead” and here Woody keeps alive the burning revolutionary spirit required to address and overcome all forms of exploitation, dehumanization, racism, and slavery. He starkly evokes the horrors of slavery in “Hangknot” when he sings “my brother was a slave, he tried to escape; they drug him to his grave on a hangknot.” In “Jesus Christ” Woody tells of how Jesus was laid in the grave when “he said to the rich ‘give your money to the poor,” keeping alive the exalting revolutionary spirit of Jesus and pointing to the system that creates the widening gap between rich and poor that must be overcome. There are many hundreds more songs.
David Dunaway tells us that people’s songs work mostly to “evoke not the bitterness of repression,” however brutal and traumatic that may be, “but the glory of a world remade,” and in that sense too Woody’s people’s songs carry a rebellious and revolutionary character directed toward both understanding problems and crises and overcoming them. Woody’s people’s songs, whether singing against lynching, against war, against poverty, against executions, or for freedom, justice, peace, and dignity, always work as a form of mediation between the bitterness and the glory, the particular and the universal, moral argument and political engagement, crushing realities and critical dreams, individual difference and our common humanity, the will to fight back, the knowledge that fighting back is an obligation, and the ability to realize victories. Woody’s people’s songs undermine and construct, they work to undermine the injustices imposed by systems of domination and violence, and they build toward a liberated humanity, they are songs, reflective of Robeson’s call to “fight until we die,” that tell us we must “work in this fight and fight ‘til we win,” as Woody sings in “Pastures of Plenty.” And in the same song he even tells us that it may be necessary to defend this land that belongs to us with our lives, expressing again “the true spirit of Christ,” i.e. the willingness to sacrifice all for justice, freedom, dignity, and humanity.
In short, whether Woody sang or wrote about realities incompatible with the principles of substantive democracy, the feudal and dehumanizing nature of capital, imprisonment, vigilantes, slavery, lynching, mine catastrophes, segregation, discrimination, massacres, wars and peace, ecological disasters, strikes and union organizing, systemic corruption, opposing fascism and tyranny, liberating women, civil rights, unrequited struggle or unrequited love, or new and better worlds, his music is rebellious and revolutionary in that it works to generate hope and glorify possibilities for liberation from oppressive and exploitative conditions that often seem hopeless and impossible to overcome. In that sense, Woody’s form of people’s songs is about the presence in the present of the past and future, of thought and emotion informed by reflection and inflamed by imagination.
Pete Seeger reminded us that some songs helps us escape from our troubles; some songs help us understand our troubles, and some songs help us overcome our troubles. Sometimes we ask for escape because we need escape as a form of regeneration, resistance, or relaxation; sometimes we seek escape as a form of denial; sometimes we seek escape as a form of protection from the horrors of reality; sometimes we seek escape so as not to be reminded of our own crass materialism, crushed idealism, and hopeless cynicism. The need for escape should not be denigrated or dismissed. We should ask “what are the objective conditions that produce the desire for escape?” One thing it feels safe to say is that whatever power people’s songs might have to help us escape, or to understand, or to be awakened, inspired, and revolutionized, it is never enough. Despite Irwin Silber’s hopes, we will not save the world only through songs.
Woody wrote in his diary that he had a bad day because he only wrote three union songs, three people’s songs in support of and solidarity with the workers of the world. He was passionately driven to create music in the battle to keep alive and stir the flames of discontent against the forces working relentlessly to keep us tired and scared. He said that he never heard songs that told of the troubled lives and empowering struggles of working people coming out of the radio, or in the cinema, or on the jukebox, i.e. people’s songs had no space in what should be public spheres. It was as though in the wider culture working people had no history, no turmoil, no voice, no desires, no dreams, no songs…had no life. He said it was because the boss class did not want to hear about the history of people’s struggles, about the sweat and blood and toil, the fatigue and fears, about the sickness and disease, the blisters and calluses, and the struggles for the One Big Union, for free speech and, as Woody put it, to “construct a family of nations.” The family of nations, and the idea of the One Big Union, again point to Woody’s belief in “commonism,” i.e. a world where, in Woody’s Christ inspired view, the rich give all of their goods to the poor, workers control and organize workplaces, war is abolished, and citizens organize and control communities while setting social priorities and policies.
Woody’s songs are prosaic and sublime, rooted in the commonplace but also transcendent. One can taste the dust, smell the blood, feel the noose, and hear the screams of agony in Woody’s people’s songs, as he immerses the listener in the texture of life of the toilers and victims, revealing a struggling yet resplendent humanity within the daily trials and also in a hope beyond them. When in “Born Again” Woody sings of breathing in the spirit of both Jesus and John Henry, he is pointing to the idea that the spiritual is not a disembodied affair, but an approach to life through which we are connected as material beings to the rest of nature and to one another – again it is reflective of “Solidarity Forever” where the solidarity extends into the IWW call to “live in harmony with the earth.” The spiritual is grounded in visions of hope and the reality of struggle, in the power of the connection between the collective human brain and hand.
In “Born Again,” Woody sings of feeling at home in the universe and united with both mountains and the sky where “the great eternal moment is the great eternal dawn.” In “Born Again” it is the warmth of the sun and each new day that lifts his spirit, along with the desire to support, and be supported by, friends and comrades in the ongoing struggle for the world of kindness and love. Transcendence is found not in some “deathly distant land” of “pearly gates,” and “streets of gold,” but in the comradeship and solidarity that makes us feel we can stand “above [our] troubles,” and autonomously “stand on [our] two feet” with unlimited power in our collective minds and hands. Intimated strongly in the song is that we are truly “born again” through acts of solidarity, human love, and in the union Promised Land. It is in that “promised land” that the daily fatigue and fear of the working people will be overcome.
Woody understood well that the most significant and vital questions are confronted in the material struggles of people’s everyday lives, not in otherworldly disembodied realms. Woody wrote “I give myself, my heart my soul, to give some friend a hand; this morning I am born again, I’m in the Promised Land.” As Bruce Springsteen says in his song “Promised Land,” in order to “believe in the Promised Land” we must take each “moment into [our] hands” and when necessary “blow everything down” that is standing in the way of a decent existence, especially the false “dreams” and the “lies that leave [us]…lost and brokenhearted.” They want us to lose our way in hopelessness, prevarications, fatigue, and fear, but we must find and construct our way in the promise of hopeful possibilities in struggle.
The sublime, that feeling of losing the self in something outside of and larger than the self only to find the self “born again” at a higher level of humanness and solidarity, can be found in the simple reality of helping one another and sharing our world in common…”the union promised land,” as Woody sings. Again, it is an expression of revolutionary love. “The union promised land” is where we can and must “learn to love one another,” and why he said that love is “the secret of secrets” necessary for overcoming “fear and greed,” the two main causes of trouble in the world (in Woody’s view). It is a love rooted in a basic fact of human life: we are dependent on one another for our survival, our joy, our fulfillment, our happiness, our creativity, our songs, and our well-being. This kind of revolutionary love (or social love animated by social/historical individuals), to which Woody is pointing, refers to the necessary desire and requisite work through which we create conditions for what Murray Bookchin called “an ethic of complementarity” grounded in a recognition that we are not equal individuals but equally individuals, and what the Cubans call “an ethic of care,” where care and love are seen as both an individual and social right and duty necessary for the free and creative development of the multiple creative potentialities of each and all. Marx called it “true wealth” or “the true realm of freedom.” For Marx, Guevara, Bookchin, Robeson, Woody, and other singers of people’s songs, this world of revolutionary love could not be created in a capitalist system because of the vast poverty amidst massive wealth capital is structurally driven to create, the execrable gap in life possibilities between rich and poor concomitant with capitalist development.
The “great high wall,” the great obstacle to the freedom highway of socialism, with the sign that says “private property,” sung in one of what Pete Seeger calls “the good verses” from “This Land is Your Land” captures a structurally determined requirement for capital: it must remain tyrannical, it must create obstacles to human freedom, and that means capital is disqualified from producing the forms of collective time and space required to construct substantive forms of economic and political democracy, i.e. capital cannot live into the other side of the sign that “didn’t say nothing.” That side, where there is no private ownership of the means of production, was “made for you and me,” the side for cooperative production designed to satisfy human needs with a minimum of onerous labor and in ways that, these days, must be ecologically rational and environmentally sustainable.
Along with Robeson, Seeger, and other sings of people’s songs, Woody was committed to fighting until the day he was no longer able to fight. Even when suffering the harsh realities of Huntington’s Disease, in 1961, Woody handed Bob Dylan a note that said, “I ain’t dead yet,” i.e. still in the struggle! It is this spirit of tenacious resistance and visionary persistence that people’s songs can awaken, nurture, and nourish. Robeson, Seeger, and Guthrie, aware of people’s songs’ roots in harsh realities and its branches in new possibilities for a better world, dared to challenge long-held myths about U.S. commitments to peace, justice, freedom, and democracy. When Guthrie sang “why do your ships bring death and destruction…why do your death bombs fall from my sky,” and said “I’ve got to know” because “hungry lips ask me wherever I go,” in his song “I’ve Got to Know,” he was critiquing powerfully the myth that U.S. power sends its forces to spread freedom and democracy around the world. The truth is much more abrasive: death, destruction, hunger, trauma, brutality, exploitation, misery, and poverty.
Abrasive excavation is often necessary to arrive at the truth for it is seldom left out in the open. John Steinbeck recognized Woody’s necessary abrasiveness in his search for the truth, in his fight for freedom against slavery, in his hope that somehow songs might contribute to helping us save the world. Steinbeck, writing an introduction to a book Woody put together with Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, Hard Hittin’ Songs for Hard Hit People, said “there is nothing sweet about Woody, and nothing sweet about the songs he sings,” and added “but for those willing to listen there is something more important,” and that is “the will of a people to resist” systems of exploitive, oppressive and violent power and domination. Let us hope enough of us are willing to listen. Woody lives!