My Relationship with Woody Guthrie by Court Carney
My introduction to Woody Guthrie came in fits and starts. I remember hearing “This Land is Your Land” in grade school, and I am sure I had some hazy idea that a guy named Woody Guthrie wrote and sang songs. In high school, I found my way into a more nuanced understanding of his life and career (a teacher hip to Springsteen talked about Bruce talking about Joe Klein talking about Woody). Soon came the Dust Bowl Ballads, the Columbia River Songs (which still find their way onto my course syllabi), and on and on. Then, in graduate school, Billy Bragg and Wilco released the Mermaid Avenue recordings, which completely reoriented my view of Woody and his songwriting. Songs such as “She Came Along to Me,” “One by One,” and particularly “Remember the Mountain Bed” (with its poetic evocation of love and the blurring of memory and melancholy) redrew my Woody map and illustrated his expansive vision in strokes of color. I began to grasp the largeness of Woody’s scope.
My academic work connected to Woody came through a Bob Dylan-shaped door. In 2012, I presented my first paper related to Woody and the sprawling nature of his influence. I gave this paper, “‘Freak Weirdo’: Bob Dylan, Wilco, and the Redefining of Woody Guthrie,” at the “Woody Guthrie at 100” conference at Penn State University. More recently, I presented “‘Alive as You or Me’: Bob Dylan’s Woody Guthrie” at the World of Bob Dylan Conference in 2019. This paper examined Woody’s impact on Dylan, focusing on the months after Guthrie’s death in 1967.
In 2018, I published “‘With Electric Breath’: Bob Dylan and the Reimagining of Woody Guthrie (January 1968)” with the Woody Guthrie Annual. This essay looked specifically at the 1968 memorial concert for Woody and the first stage performance of Dylan since 1966. This essay also allowed me my first week-long dive into the Guthrie archives in Tulsa. The archives played a pivotal role in this project—especially in laying out the heretofore mystifying chronology between late 1967 and early 1968. A forthcoming essay focuses on Dylan’s “Song to Woody”—expanding my interest in teasing out the connections between the two songwriters.
Overall, Woody continues to draw me into his world in curious and surprising ways. His writing remains inspirational in its simplicity and complexity, its humor and bawdiness, its heartfelt righteousness and cosmic knowingness. Woody grappled with issues that still reverberate across our contemporary landscape. He is forever relevant, forever compelling, forever present. Do you still sing of the mountain bed, indeed.
