Woody Guthry at 100

"There is just one way to save yourself, and that’s to get together and work and fight for everybody.”

Woody at 100

Where's Woody when we need him?
In these times of tin­kle-down eco­nom­ics — with the money pow­ers think­ing that they're the top dogs and that the rest of us are just a bunch of fire hy­drants — we need for the hard-hit­ting (yet up­lift­ing) mu­si­cal sto­ries, so­cial com­men­taries and in­spired lyri­cal pop­ulism of Woody Guthrie.
This year will mark the 100th an­niver­sary of the birth of this leg­endary grass­roots trou­ba­dour, who came out of the Ok­la­homa dust bowl to rally Amer­ica's "just plain folks" to fight back against the elites who were knock­ing them down.
As we know, the elites are back, strut­ting around cock­ier than ever with their knock­ing-down ways — but now comes the good news out of Tulsa, Okla., that Woody, too, is being re­vived, spir­i­tu­ally speak­ing. In a na­tional col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the Guthrie fam­ily and the George Kaiser Fam­ily Foun­da­tion, a cen­ter is being built in Tulsa to archive, pre­sent to the world and cel­e­brate the mar­velous songs, books, let­ters and other ma­te­ri­als gen­er­ated from Guthrie's deeply fer­tile mind.
To give the cen­ter a proper kick-start, four great uni­ver­si­ties, the Grammy Mu­seum, the Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion and the Kaiser Foun­da­tion are team­ing up to host a com­bi­na­tion of sym­po­siums and con­certs (think of them as Woody-Paloozas) through­out this cen­ten­nial year. They begin this Sat­ur­day, March 10 at the Uni­ver­sity of Tulsa, then they move on down the road to Brook­lyn Col­lege and on to the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia and Penn State Uni­ver­sity.
If Woody him­self were to reap­pear among us, ram­bling from town to town, he wouldn't need to write any new ma­te­r­ial. He'd see that the Wall Street banksters who crashed our econ­omy are get­ting fat bonus checks, while the vic­tims of their greed are still get­ting pink slips and evic­tion no­tices, and he could just pull out this verse from his old song, "Pretty Boy Floyd":
Yes, as through this world I've wan­dered,
I've seen lots of funny men.
Some will rob you with a six-gun,

And some with a foun­tain pen. And as through your life your travel,
Yes, as through your life your roam,
You won't never see an out­law

Drive a fam­ily from their home. Also, wit­ness­ing the down­siz­ing of Amer­ica's jobs, dec­i­ma­tion of the mid­dle class and stark rise in poverty, Guthrie could reprise his clas­sic, "I Ain't Got No Home":
I mined in your mines, and I gath­ered in your corn.
I been work­ing, mis­ter, since the day I was born.
Now I worry all the time like I never did be­fore,
'Cause I ain't got no home in this world any­more.
Now as I look around, it's mighty plain to see,
This world is such a great and a funny place to be.
Oh, the gam­blin' man is rich, an' the workin' man is poor,
And I ain't got no home in this world any­more.
Guthrie un­abashedly cel­e­brated Amer­ica's work­ing class, see­ing in it the com­mit­ment to the com­mon good that lifts Amer­ica up.
He drove The Pow­ers That Be crazy (a pretty short ride for many of them back then, just as it is today). So they branded him a union­ist, so­cial­ist, com­mu­nist and all sorts of other "ists" — but he with­ered them with humor that got peo­ple laugh­ing at them: "I ain't a com­mu­nist nec­es­sar­ily, but I have been in the red all my life."
Going down those "rib­bons of high­way" that he ex­tolled in "This Land Is Your Land," Guthrie found that the only real hope of fair­ness and jus­tice was in the peo­ple them­selves: "When you bum around for a year or two and look at all the folks that's down and out, busted, dis­gusted (but can still be trusted), you wish that some­how or other they could ... pitch in and build this coun­try back up again." He con­cluded, "There is just one way to save your­self, and that's to get to­gether and work and fight for every­body."
And, in­deed, that's ex­actly what grass­roots peo­ple are doing all across our coun­try today. From Oc­cupy Wall Street to the on­go­ing Wis­con­sin up­ris­ing, from bat­tles against the Key­stone XL Pipeline to the suc­cess­ful local and state cam­paigns to re­peal the Supreme Court's atro­cious Cit­i­zens United edict, peo­ple are adding their own verses to Woody's mu­si­cal re­frain: "I ain't a-gonna be treated this a-way."
Where's Woody when we need him? He's right there, in­side each of us.

Copy­right Creators.​com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ABOUT Jim Hightower

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

 

 

Source:

 http://www.nationofchange.org/woody-100-1331137121