Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon

Robert is joined again by Margaret Killjoy for part two of our holiday non bastard episode about Woody Guthrie. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to the Court of Robert Evans Bastard Guy Podcast. Yeah, that's right. Got a gavel. See? Take that, our engineers. They're not gonna be happy.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Who let you get a gavel?

• 0:17Robert Evans?

  I got sent this by the judge. Again, it works exactly like vampires made me. And it's lovely. It's beautiful gavel. Look at it.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can also buy that from like Toys R Us or whatever children's store has survived.

• 0:30Robert Evans?

  It would mean nothing at all in your hands, Sophie. You haven't gone through the extensive training and preparation to become a United States municipal judge like I have.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Cool. So cool.

• 0:41Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  I really hate that you have power of any kind.

• 0:45Robert Evans?

  I know. I know. Tremendous power. Unaccountable power. I'm now eligible through the Supreme Court, although I think technically anyone is.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Fuck. I actually think you would be a... No.

• 1:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'd be a great Supreme Court judge.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  You'd be better than what's...

• 1:03Speaker 01

  You'd be great Supreme Court like 90% of the time and then 10% of the time you'd be like, "I think that everyone should have a personal nuke."

• 1:09Speaker 02

  You'd be chaos monster. But here's the thing, I think you'd be better...

• 1:13Robert Evans?

  There's not gonna be any more home invasions, Margaret.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  You're better than the nine we have, you know?

• 1:18Robert Evans?

  That's very true. Quite accurate.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  So...

• 1:21Robert Evans?

  Well, speaking of someone who would have been better on the Supreme Court, Woody Guthrie. That's who we're talking about in part two of these episodes.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Margaret's dead, though.

• 1:30Robert Evans?

  Not, not his Klansman father.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Before we jump into this, though, I want to plug something really fast, if that's okay.

• 1:38Robert Evans?

  Uh oh.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  I just want to plug a series that our colleague and my dear friend Jamie Lofst has been doing on her podcast 16th Minute of Fame Ever Heard of It about the Manosphere. I think the Behind the Bastards audience would really enjoy it. Jamie has worked very hard on it. The writing is incredible. So check that out on 16th Minute of Fame.

• 1:57Robert Evans?

  The Manosphere, if you're not aware, is like the kind of colloquial term for this network of far-right, generally like masculinity influencers, all whom have fed into the Trumpist movement and groups like the Proud Boys. It's a very important, like, social phenomenon that explains a lot of why we are where we are right now, and Jamie does a great job of breaking it down. So check that out on 16th Minute.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Robert is interviewed on one of the parts.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 2:24Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  I've only heard part one so far.

• 2:25Robert Evans?

  I am, I am. Um, well, speaking of part two, let's do the part two of these episodes, huh?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. I also haven't heard part two of this one yet.

• 2:35Robert Evans?

  Let's, uh, let's kill it. Let's murder it. Let's bury it in the woods in a tree stump, under a tree stump, so that nobody finds it. And then cash in at social security for you. I don't know what I'm doing here, Margaret.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Great.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 2:52Speaker 04

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• 3:23Robert Evans?

  Picture this: You're listening to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, and suddenly, wait, what did they just say? Well, the questions raised in those show-stopping moments will be answered in the all-new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. Hosts Gabe and Chris will dive deep on a specific topic covered in that week's Tuesday episode, from sexual health and HIV prevention to finding the right doctor. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences. Part two. So, Woody Guthrie had wed Mary in 1933, and by 1936, when he quit Texas for California, which is what you have to legally call it when you're talking about

• 4:05Robert Evans?

  the 1930s, she'd had one child with him and was pregnant with another. And he kind of abandons her, like, not entirely. Like, he doesn't, like, break up with her, and, like, she eventually moves to California with him. But he does just kind of bounce to go try and find a living, you know, in the West. And this is a thing a lot of guys are doing, and a lot of people have to do. It's also not a thing that the family's thrilled with. The specific project that he left for was a dam that was being built outside of Redding, California, in a place called Happy Valley. I have lived in and around there. I can assure you, it is not a particularly Happy Valley now, and it wasn't one then either. In fact, the name was kind of, like, ironic, like, because it was a shanty town that was miserable.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  So, like Greenland?

• 4:51Robert Evans?

  Like Greenland, yes. It's, I guess, probably a better place now, although I can't really in good conscience recommend anyone go to Redding.

• 4:59Robert Evans?

  So yeah, anyway, that's where Woody heads up to, and he's there for a little while. It's in this shanty town with like about 5,000 other work seekers who are all like, you know, showing up to try and queue in lines and get jobs every day, right? And there were a lot of spaces like this around the country. You know, there were a lot of these government work camps, basically, right, which is where Woody is. And there were also in areas like Sacramento and Seattle, these things called Hoovervilles. And Hoovervilles were essentially large campsites built by homeless workers and their families as they migrated around searching for work during the Great Depression.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Well, it's actually, in the US, they're called vacuum towns, Vacuenville.

• 5:37Robert Evans?

  That was, that was good. That was good, Margaret.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 5:39Robert Evans?

  That was good.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Thanks. I'll be here all day.

• 5:40Robert Evans?

  Electrolux cities? I don't know. I just think it's funny because the old catchphrase was "nothing sucks like an electrolux", and I've never heard an advertisement that was more clearly made before the internet. You couldn't get away with that today. Or you could, but it would be a different product.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  No, although in England, they had the "we put the D in bread" campaign only a couple of years ago.

• 6:00Robert Evans?

  That's pretty funny. That's not bad.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  I'm never gonna get over that.

• 6:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. So Hoovervilles were named kind of, it was an attack on President Herbert Hoover, right? Like, that's why they get their name, because he was this, this will not sound familiar to anything that's about to happen. He was this corrupt Republican president whose policies, which benefited the incredibly wealthy, fed into the Great Depression and like allowed for the kind of deregulation that made it much worse and were seen as having largely led the country into economic calamity. And so they named these massive homeless, camps for like homeless families, basically, Hoovervilles. The largest and longest lasting, I'm not sure if it was absolutely the largest, but it was the longest lasting and among the largest Hoovervilles, was outside of Seattle,

• 6:46Robert Evans?

  and it stood from 1931 to 1941. As an interesting side note, it was operated on land next to Elliott Bay South, which I believe is where Frasier's condo was meant to be located in the TV series. That doesn't mean anything. I just thought it was interesting. So Woody missed out on the big West Coast Hoovervilles, but he was in and around, you know, Reading is people who are heading up to Seattle or coming back down from Seattle. He's talking to them. There's a big one in Sacramento. He's talking to them and he's in this work camp in Happy Valley. That's kind of similar to Hooverville, right? And he's supposed to be up there working on this big dam project, but he does a lot better and it's a lot more stable for him to just busk for music, right? And so that's what he actually spends most of his time doing.

• 7:29Robert Evans?

  Now, I say he's better at this than he is at laboring. He's not great at it and he's only able to send the occasional very small money order back home to his wife and two kids. So he is not, the idea is I'm coming out here to support my family, but he's not able to support Mary. She and her now two kids are utterly dependent on her parents, which was a very embarrassing situation for her. Mary later said, "I know it upset my dad a lot, my mother too. Woody wasn't doing the manly thing." And I think it's both worth like saying that that's her impression and the family's impression of this. This is not an uncommon position for people to be in. And I don't know that Woody was doing very well back in Texas. So it's kind of unclear to me,

• 8:13Robert Evans?

  you know, what the right thing to do here was. Ultimately Woody, like a lot of people, was put in a very difficult situation of trying to do something he hoped would allow him to support his family and it didn't work very well for a while, right?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  I mean, it was the Great Depression.

• 8:30Robert Evans?

  It was the Great Depression, yeah.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  We see a lot of this now where like people are like, "Oh, I'm failing under capitalism. I must personally be a failure." And you're like, "No, times are really hard right now."

• 8:40Robert Evans?

  Well, and we also on this show, like we've had like guys like Steven Seagal, who-

• 8:45Speaker 01

  As a guest.

• 8:46Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. Friend of the pod, like absolutely abandoned his family to start his Hollywood career. That is a story we've told a few times. Woody is, his family feels like he's doing that at the start. That's not actually what he does here, right? Because he's not actually like cutting ties with them, but they're not happy with him either.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  I mean migrant laborers do this all the time today. Like migrant laborers come to the United States. They're not abandoning their family to try and-

• 9:11Robert Evans?

  But they're usually not going out there to play guitar.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 9:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think that's kind of part of why-

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 9:17Robert Evans?

  Because he's not really doing the work that, you know, a lot of these other guys were. You know, he's doing some of that, but that's not how he really makes most of his bread.

• 9:25Robert Evans?

  So in short order, Woody left Reading for Glendale, which I've also done, and I can tell you, good call. Much better place to be than Reading. He vaguely knew that he had an aunt in the area, and as was often the case, he just sort of, they're not like sending letters usually back and forth. They certainly don't have phones or whatever. You're usually just like, "I was told once by a relative that I have an aunt in Glendale. I'm just gonna show up and figure out where she is, and hopefully she'll take me in." And social ties were such that when he shows up on her doorstep, she's like, "All right." He is 25 years old when he makes it to the Los Angeles area. After several months of stress and internal recriminations, because Woody's not thrilled with himself either. He had wanted to be doing better. He knows how little he's sending back to his family.

• 10:10Robert Evans?

  He's not happy about this. He gets a lucky break, courtesy of his cousin Leon, who everyone else either called Jack or Oki Guthrie. And Oki is like a, it's kind of a pejorative term for someone from Oklahoma.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:24Robert Evans?

  Both was used as an insult and also as like a term of pride by people from Oklahoma, right? The Guthries are all Okies, right? So calling him Oki Guthrie must have been a little bit confusing to like Woody, who is also an Oki.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 10:37Robert Evans?

  Jack and his family had left home back at the start of the Depression and moved to Sacramento. Like many Guthries, he was musically talented, and so was his wife, and they'd built a reputation for themselves as good musicians and performers. He suggested teaming up with Woody to try and start an act in Los Angeles. This was not the obviously good idea that it would later seem, as Ed Gray explains in the book, "Ramblin' Man." Jack was a Western singer. His songs were heavily influenced by popular music. Woody was a country singer, his music born of an older oral tradition. In practice, they could neither sing nor play guitar together. Indeed, Woody privately despised the treacly sentiment of Jack's sagebrush serenades. Jack the guitarist used the jazz-influenced

• 11:20Robert Evans?

  chords of popular music and played up the neck of the instrument. Woody disdained chords beyond the minimal tonic, subdominant and dominant. So this is not a great pairing, and Woody's a little bit of like- He's a little bit of a snob, right? He's like, "Oh, your music's all popular and jazzy. You're not doing the cool punks." You know, it's not really punk, but that's... It's very similar in attitude to that kind of guy, right?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I mean, he's doing folk punk before it's folk punk, you know?

• 11:45Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah. At least he's about to be starting to do folk punk.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  It's interesting, because country-western, I had never occurred to me that those were separate categories.

• 11:53Robert Evans?

  Yes. Because, I mean, it's this mix of these songs that are like folk songs that are, we would call, "Western," because they're like songs about the West and about, you know, being a cowboy or whatever, and songs that are like, "Western" songs that are made for like, the different kinds of like, floor shows and entertainment, you know, radio and whatnot that's popular at the time. Like, those are kind of different beasts. So, in better times, these guys probably would never have worked together, but desperation made, you know, some kind of collaboration necessary. And they developed a fairly successful act and were able to book recurring gigs on the radio through a station called KFVD. Woody found himself increasingly drawn to folk music with a sense of class consciousness,

• 12:36Robert Evans?

  like Goble Reeves' 1934 tune, "Hobo's Lullaby." And here's Woody Guthrie singing a portion of "Hobo's Lullaby," which is, again, a song by another guy, and this is a folk song. It's also kind of punk, as you'll catch from this section.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Oh, I used to listen to it while riding trains. My friend would play it on guitar.

• 12:54Robert Evans?

  Oh, there you go.

• 12:55Speaker 05

  (singing) I know the police cause you trouble. They cause trouble everywhere. But when you die and go to heaven, you'll find no policeman there. So go to sleep, you weary hobo.

• 13:20Robert Evans?

  Okay, that's good.

• 13:24Robert Evans?

  It's a good little bar. So I would also be remiss, because that's pretty cool, if I didn't expound on the fact that racism too was a recurrent part of Woody's act and often on his mind while living in Echo Park and fighting on behalf of poor white people, because he's like an activist, you know, helping like rent strike type stuff, right? Like, he is an advocate for like poor, downtrodden white people living in Los Angeles. He also is drawing cartoons of people he called jungle blacks and monkeys. And like, that's bad. He wrote poems so racist that I don't even feel like I should describe them on the air to you. They're bad.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 14:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Found a good LA Weekly article on the subject by an author named Johnny Whiteside, and I'm going to read a quote from it now. Broadcasting on Pasadena's KFVD, Guthrie often indulged in on-air employ of abonics and was stunned when a black listener characterized the singer as unintelligent after hearing Guthrie perform songs with titles like Run N-Word Run and N-Word Blues. Fortunately for Guthrie, recordings of these tunes do not survive. Later Guthrie said, "A young Negro in Los Angeles wrote me a nice letter one day telling me the meaning of that word, the N-word, and that I shouldn't say it anymore on the air. So I apologized. He next tore all the N-word songs out of his songbook."

• 14:43Robert Evans?

  Huh. So you can take that however you want, right? The fact that he is singing that kind of stuff on the air and like, just writing poems about it? Not great. But he's also not unable to change or immune to criticism. So he's willing to like, listen to this criticism that a black man gives him and be like, "Oh, you know what? That is kind of fucked up." And that ain't nothing for the son of a Klansman, right?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:07Robert Evans?

  You know, again, that's kind of up to your personal take. When we talk about like, how do you judge people? You know, to what extent do you judge them based on their time or based on some sort of concept of objective morality? One thing that always matters to me is, where did they start versus where did they end up?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:26Robert Evans?

  Someone who was raised in a slaveholding household and becomes an abolitionist, but is still racist, is a lot more impressive to me than a guy who just like isn't outwardly racist because he grew up in the 1990s, but like crosses the street when he sees a black guy, right?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 15:44Robert Evans?

  Because one of those is a person who like went on a journey, recognized a bad thing about themselves and made changes, you know?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  There's people that like will never get my pronouns right, who I suspect would kill someone who tried to hurt me. And there's other people who would absolutely always get my pronouns right and be super respectful and would be like, "Oh no, a bad thing is happening," if they watch me get murdered in front of them, you know?

• 16:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  I'm not trying to be like, "It's therefore okay." Like, I'm not trying to-

• 16:11Robert Evans?

  No, there's a reason I included this, because it is pretty bad and you should know that about the guy.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not trying to, yeah.

• 16:16Robert Evans?

  But this is not a part of his entire life or his whole creative life. He writes anti-racist songs later in life. Like, it does seem like he makes a change. And I do think it's worth noting, like, this is a guy who was raised by a Klansman in like the 30s, 20s and 30s, you know? So, you know, again, you can figure out morally wherever you want to figure that out, but I do think it's worth kind of looking at the whole sweep of the personal journey the man went on there. In 1937, Woody's wife Mary and two children moved to Los Angeles to be with him. Jack wound up leaving the act and show business for a while, but Woody paired up with Maxine Christman, whose family was friends with his cousin and had taken Woody in too. He dubbed Maxine "Lefty Lou."

• 17:00Robert Evans?

  The two played songs by other artists that spoke to the poor and downtrodden, like "Hobo's Lullaby." But they also started playing Woody's original compositions, like "The Talking Dust Bowl Blues." This song really embodies what people were starting to love about Woody. His music had a warts and all description of life during the Depression and the struggles of the hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to move west during the Dust Bowl. He sung about relatable, nuts and bolts issues that are still familiar to a lot of people today. If you were a poor punk kid who like, like, lived on a semi-permanent road trip for a while, basically, and had the experience of trying to coast by turning your car off on downhill runs because you can't afford gasoline, here's Woody Guthrie singing about the same thing.

• 17:45Speaker 05

  Way up yonder on a mountain curve, it's way up yonder in the piney wood, and I give that rolling Ford a shove, and I was gonna coast as far as I could. Commenced coasting, picking up speed, was a half turn, I didn't make it.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  Man alive, I'm telling you, the fiddles and the guitars really flew. That Ford took off like a flying squirrel, and it flew halfway around the world. Scattered wives and childrens all over the side of that mountain.

• 18:21Robert Evans?

  Oh, man.

• 18:24Robert Evans?

  I don't know.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  I love his talking blues.

• 18:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I love his talking, I love the way he says "children", like, it just tickles the hell out of me. It reminds me of the good parts of living in fucking middle of nowhere Oklahoma. Like, I do like that about him. You know what I like even more, Margaret?

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Is it the sponsors of the show?

• 18:41Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  They're all great.

• 18:43Robert Evans?

  They're all great, and they've all had the experience of having to coast in their Ford truck to save gas money, too. Look, it's hard times for everyone, even large brands.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  They've probably driven stuff off of the road before.

• 18:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, absolutely. We could talk about what truck drivers are forced to do in order to make their times. Anyway, whatever, we're done.

• 19:02Speaker 04

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• 20:08Robert Evans?

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• 21:08Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872. Margaret!

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Yes?

• 21:17Robert Evans?

  I do find it fun how much of like his Dust Bowl songs are very relatable to like punk life today.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 21:26Robert Evans?

  Hate the cops, fucking coasting in my car, you know, camping out in the woods and shit like, uh, yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Did he do Big Rock Candy Mountains as someone else?

• 21:34Robert Evans?

  In my head, he did Big Rock Candy Mountains, but I didn't double-check on that.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  I mean, he might have just sung it.

• 21:40Robert Evans?

  I'm fairly certain I've heard a version of the song by him. Harry McClintock was the guy who first recorded and wrote it. Yeah, yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  One of the first people I ever rode trains with, I haven't ridden trains nearly as much as it's gonna make it sound like when I do these episodes, but was this folk singer named Ryan Harvey. And so that's why I have a lot of these associations with riding trains in particular. But we used to sit around and sing Big Rock Candy Mountains, but change the words very slightly to be like modern anarchy. And you didn't have to change much. And my favorite was, "And the hens lay vegan eggs," was my favorite line.

• 22:13Robert Evans?

  That's good.

• 22:16Robert Evans?

  Oh, man, that's funny.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  You're like, wait a second.

• 22:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And the police dogs can't sniff your weed.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 22:26Robert Evans?

  So Woody had attained a degree of local fame by 38, 39, right? 1938 to 1939, he's doing reasonably well. In fact, he and Lefty Lou were so beloved that the radio station where they played received thousands of fan letters over the course of just a few months. They were doing okay in terms of money, but not great because again, he has a lot of fans, but they're broke ass Dust Bowl refugees. Yeah. So he's not getting rich off these people, right? And he's also not very interested in getting rich. He seemed to feel like he had a responsibility to reach and provide relief for his people suffering in government work camps and embarrassed by their situation. From a write-up by the Library of Congress, quote, "He also sang at government camps that gave these people some measure of dignity, health and safety.

• 23:10Robert Evans?

  Joining him was Will Gere, an actor and earnest left-winger who helped Woody better understand the injustice of an economic system that would allow Americans to live in such poverty." And this is where he starts getting pilled on socialism, right? And eventually becomes a communist. He will call himself a card-carrying communist, as we'll talk about, he never actually has a card and he could have gotten one. [laughing] But Woody's a little bit of a fabulous, right? He lies a little bit, not in a way that is massively meaningful because he was a communist and very committed, but you know, he also, he's a little bit of a tall tail spinner. Yeah. So, yeah, and you know, it's to his credit that he's, again, rather than focusing on making money off of this growing fame, he's giving a lot of free shows to provide relief for his people, right?

• 23:55Robert Evans?

  He is very dedicated to his people in a way that I think is pretty admirable. Woody's popularity and by now fairly mature class consciousness started to make him more connections with the radical political set, including various left-wing writers, journalists, and socialist and communist activists. He began writing songs that spoke not just of left-wing politics, but of the rage of the working class and increasingly his own hatred of the people that maintained the system that kept his people downtrodden. In 1939, he wrote one of his most famous songs, "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd", about an Oklahoma outlaw active in the early 1930s who regular listeners will know- Was my cousin. Now, my great grandmother knew him as a girl.

• 24:39Robert Evans?

  I grew up hearing songs about him from her. And my family, they're very, as I talk about often, very conservative people. But my great grandma particularly would always tell us, you know, you got outlaw blood in you. Right? Like, it was something she was very proud of. In a way that's a little weird if you heard the way these people tended to talk about other, like, urban crime, right?

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:59Robert Evans?

  Outlaw crime was very different to them. And I'm talking particularly my relatives who were survivors of the Great Depression. Outlaws are very different than modern criminals in their eyes, right? I'm not saying that's actually a fair, but their conception of these people is extremely different. And a big part of why is not just Woody, but songs like this that Woody made, who turned these guys who were bank robbers and gangsters into Robin Hood figures, right? And Floyd was a fairly easy one to turn into a Robin Hood character, because he kind of was at least a little bit that guy. There's a debate as to like, how much of that sort of character was real and how much of it is kind of myth-making that Floyd did, but some of it's certainly true.

• 25:42Robert Evans?

  Floyd was born in Georgia, but had moved with his family to Aikens, Oklahoma in 1911. And his career as a criminal had started early when he was arrested at age 18 for stealing $3.50 worth of, I think, stamps from a post office. A few years later, he robbed a payroll in St. Louis. So he goes from like, stamp theft to armed robbery fairly quickly.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 26:04Robert Evans?

  And he does three years or so in prison for that. After he's released, he becomes a Kansas City area bank robber. One thing you get about Floyd is he, he doesn't seem to have ever considered not being a criminal.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:19Robert Evans?

  Just immediately like, no.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  You know, he found this thing that sort of works.

• 26:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Well, I guess it didn't really work. That's the other weird thing about it.

• 26:25Robert Evans?

  Uh-huh. No. But he, he never really thinks about doing anything but being an outlaw. And he quickly gains, he starts robbing banks in Kansas City. And he earns the nickname Pretty Boy, which eventually becomes Pretty Boy Floyd, because people thought he was very good-looking. He hated this nickname, so he's gonna pull up a picture of the man. You can decide yourself how good-looking he was.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  It's just a picture of Luigi.

• 26:48Robert Evans?

  Americans do love their sexy criminals.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Huh, not my type, but you know.

• 26:57Robert Evans?

  The standards were not as high back then.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  He's got like a soft gaze that's kinda nice, you know?

• 27:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, prominent nose, good jawline.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's not bad looking.

• 27:07Robert Evans?

  Certainly not.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:09Robert Evans?

  Nice hair, yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's better looking than Woody Guthrie if we go A B real quick.

• 27:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He is a hardened criminal. He killed at least one federal agent. He also killed the sheriff of McIntosh County. Other members of his gang killed several police officers and other criminals as well. There are multiple police officer murders that he is also a suspect in that we don't fully know, did he kill all those cops? But he killed a number of cops, you know? Like, he shoots a lot of police. In the early depression years, he took to robbing banks in Oklahoma, where in addition to taking money for himself, he would destroy mortgage documents in order to free poor farmers from debt.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 27:52Robert Evans?

  Now, we don't fully know if this happened, right? It's not the kind of thing, how would you prove it? For one thing, right? People told stories about it. I will tell you that everyone I knew in the towns in Oklahoma, like where he had been active, and again, including my family members who knew him, would tell you that this is what he did. I don't know, it's not provable. It's one of those things where it would make sense for him to do it even if he was not really morally a Robin Hood character.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:20Robert Evans?

  Because if you're destroying people's mortgages, they will hide you from the cops.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:26Robert Evans?

  Like...

• 28:27Speaker 01

  I can tie this back to Italy in the 1870s. Mala testa and all these other anarchists in Italy in Benevento province would go, and their idea of how to do propaganda of the deed was to go and they'd march on these small towns and they would destroy the tax and ownership records. And they were like, and then everyone would come out and be like, you have freed us. The priest was like, came out of the church and was like, these people have been sent by God to free us. And then they all got arrested. But then they actually only spent like a year in jail because everyone was... Going so crazy in Italy at that point that they were like, you know, we better just let these people out.

• 29:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we can't go too hard on these people. Everyone really likes them for some reason.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  And so that's like, there is a specific point. And if you're going to be a criminal, if you go hard enough and make everyone like you, there's a certain safety in that.

• 29:12Robert Evans?

  One of my favorite Floyd stories is that he had a gang and his gang decided they wanted to rob a bunch of people on like Black Wall Street at one point, which was very well armed. And Floyd was like, well, you guys can go do that. I'm not fucking with that. And sure enough, they got fucking like shot to pieces. So he was a smart man.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:35Robert Evans?

  My other favorite story about him is I mentioned in my high school AP English class that he was a cousin of mine. And my teacher, who was, you know, in her 50s or something, said, he shot my grandfather in the leg.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Oh, what grade did you get in that class, buddy?

• 29:52Robert Evans?

  No, no, she was like, it's okay. Again, because she was raised in the same culture. She was like, it's okay. Like Pretty Boy said, no move and my grandpa moved. He didn't kill him. He just shot him in the leg a little. Again, there's a lot of tolerance for these specific sorts of outlaws in that part of the South. Like it's.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  That you probably wouldn't find today. Just to be clear, anyone listening, that you probably wouldn't find today.

• 30:17Robert Evans?

  You will not find today.

• 30:20Robert Evans?

  So again, fascinating character. And yeah, I can't say how much of the whole Robin Hood thing is true. But I think a lot of the Robin Hood image that he has comes from Woody. Although it's also worth noting, he is part of why it takes so long for him to get caught. Cause he's like one of the last gangsters to get caught and killed by the government. His death is generally agreed to have heralded the end of the gangster era.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Huh, okay.

• 30:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Cause I think 34 is when he's gunned down. And like, there's a lot of stories of him like hiding with little old ladies and lying to the cops. And then when he like leaves, there's a hundred dollar bill under the plate where she'd fed him dinner or something like that. So in 1939, you know, about five years after his death, when memories of this guy are still very strong, Woody writes the song that is very much responsible for crystallizing this image of Pretty Boy Floyd as this kind of like banded outlaw king of the American South. And we're just going to listen to that song because. It's Christmas, and it's a song about my cousin.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Hell yeah.

• 31:28Speaker 05

  If you'll gather around me, children, a story I will tell. About pretty boy Floyd, an outlaw, Oklahoma knew him well.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  It was in the town of Shawnee, a Saturday afternoon. His wife beside him in his wagon, as into town they rode.

• 31:58Speaker 05

  There a deputy sheriff approached him in a manner rather rude. Vulgar words of anger, and his wife she overheard.

• 32:17Speaker 05

  Pretty boy grabbed a log chain, and the deputy grabbed his gun. In the fight that followed, he laid that deputy down.

• 32:28Speaker 05

  Then he took to the trees and timber to live a life of shame. Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name.

• 32:46Speaker 05

  But a many starving farmer, the same old story told. How the outlaw paid their mortgage and saved their little homes. Others tell you about a stranger that come to beg a meal. Underneath his napkin left a thousand dollar bill.

• 33:17Speaker 05

  It was in Oklahoma City. It was on a Christmas day. There was a whole carload of groceries come with a note to say. Well, you say that I'm an outlaw, you say that I'm a thief. Here's a Christmas dinner for the families on relief. Yes, it's through this world I've wandered. I've seen lots of funny men.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  Some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen. And it's through your life you travel. Yes, it's through your life you roam. You will never see an outlaw drive a family from their home.

• 34:28Robert Evans?

  I love the way that song ends.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  It's beautiful. Anderson likes it too.

• 34:33Robert Evans?

  Some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  That's a line I hear all over the place.

• 34:40Robert Evans?

  It's a great fucking, this is one of his more famous songs.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:44Robert Evans?

  But it's a damn good line.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  I enjoyed that thoroughly.

• 34:47Robert Evans?

  I also like that, look, I've seen a lot of outlaws. I'm not saying, I'm not defending the things they've done. But it's not the outlaws I see forcing people to be homeless, you know? That's the banks.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Yup.

• 35:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, I disagree with my family about a lot, but our shared pride in our cop-killing ancestor is not one of those things.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:09Robert Evans?

  Anyway, as is often the case for people who come to Los Angeles for the music industry, Woody wound up having to take his family back home to Texas and then leave them again to move to New York City in 1940, chasing what had become for him a dream of folk star. By this point, he'd become a little bit of a legend, enough that the Library of Congress had him sit down and record his Dust Bowl songs for posterity. He laid down tracks with Pete Seeger and became an influential part of the urban folk revival of the time. In a letter to Alan Lomax, another influential pillar of the urban folk revival, he described his thoughts on what folk music ought to be, and I'm interested for your thoughts on this, Margaret.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:50Robert Evans?

  A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it, or it could be who's hungry and where their mouth is, or who's out of work and where the job is, or who's broke and where the money is, or who's carrying a gun and where the peace is. That's folklore, and folks made it up because they seen that the politicians couldn't find nothing to fix, or nobody to feed, or give a job of work.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  That's good. That's, it's so interesting to me because I, if you'd say folk music in different places, you mean something so completely different, right? American folk music is this like Woody Guthrie kind of vibe thing, whereas in almost any other country, you're looking at stuff that's a little bit more like technically interesting, like musically.

• 36:32Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  I don't know. I have a lot of thoughts about like folk and folk instrumentation and music and all that, but I think what he's describing is great. And specifically that thing that it's like, this is the stuff that people make up, you know, it's not fancy.

• 36:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's also how poor people, without really any other idea of how to have a voice, talk about, in a lot of ways, the kind of issues that today we ascribe to like the job of journalists, right? Who was hungry and where their mouth is? Who's carrying a gun and where the peace is, right?

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, totally. It's gossip.

• 37:03Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, it's gossip and it's agitation, right? You look at a lot of folk songs and a lot of folk stories, and that's the first safe place to attack the wealthy and the powerful, right?

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 37:16Robert Evans?

  A little bit, you know?

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 37:19Robert Evans?

  Oftentimes, you know, there's also plenty of folk stuff that reinforces some of those things, but it is where you see a lot of subversive stuff.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about like populist and popular stuff, is it can really go either way.

• 37:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  But it's like, yeah, still on some fundamental level, interesting.

• 37:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, it's worth spending some time on just how radically folk music changes. As you noted, in other countries, it's very different. And part of why it's different in the US is Woody Guthrie. He changes what folk music is in the United States in a fundamental way. In an article for The New Yorker, David Hodge do writes, quote, "Folk music, including country, blues, and other vernacular styles, was supposed to be anonymous. A collective art passed along warily from singer to singer, generation to the generation, sometimes culture to culture. From the vantage point of today, when kids with their first guitar start writing songs before they learn to play other tunes, it is difficult to process how exceptional it was for a folk artist such as Woody Guthrie to have created a vast repertoire of deeply idiosyncratic works.

• 38:20Robert Evans?

  Many Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood songwriters of the 30s and earlier were as skilled and prolific as Guthrie, but they were working in a different vein, writing to order for professional singers. Guthrie brought the authorial imperative to vernacular music in America." And I think that's also very interesting.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Just to keep going with all the weird family connections, my great grandfather was a Tin Pan Alley songwriter. And yeah, he just wrote, he wrote music that he didn't own the copyright to. He wrote the B-sides for more popular musicians, like.

• 38:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, that makes total sense. I'm not surprised that that's your family connection.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:59Robert Evans?

  So by this point in time, Woody was what you would call a left-wing radical, although not, again, a card-carrying one. He played benefits for and was associated with the American Communist Party, but he never got around to joining. And you'll find several different theories as to why. The leading one that you'll hear is that he liked his independence a little too much to be a joiner. Now, this sounds good, especially to people like you and me, but it leaves out a crucial fact, which is that Woody was his era's equivalent of like a tanky, right?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 39:29Robert Evans?

  I mean, it also leaves out the fact that like, he vocally took, claimed to have a card, like, claimed to be a member of the party, right? And that it was the best thing he'd done, which he hadn't. Again, he wasn't immune to the worst impulses of the American left during this period. He had been enthusiastic about FDR early on, but once the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed and the USSR locked into a treaty with the Nazis, he attacked Roosevelt as, quote, "Churchill's lapdog" for his anti-Nazi stance and support of Great Britain during the early months of the war. He argued that the developing world war was a capitalist fraud. When Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland together, Guthrie supported Stalin to an extent, and with such vociferousness, that biographer Will Kaufman called it shocking.

• 40:14Robert Evans?

  In "Ramblin' Man," Ed Cray goes into more detail about a left-wing anti-war song he wrote called "Why Do You Stand There in the Rain?", based on the title of a New York Post article. And I'm gonna read from that section from "Ramblin' Man" here. "Just days before, some 6,000 delegates of the American Youth Congress had gathered in Washington to advocate jobs and peace. At the invitation of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the delegates gathered in front of the South Portico of the White House in a cold drizzle to listen to a half-hour speech by the President. FDR threw down the gauntlet, aware that the young Communist League had taken firm grip on the once broadly-based Popular Front AYC. The Soviet Union, as everyone who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by

• 40:56Robert Evans?

  a dictatorship and as absolute as any dictatorship in the world. It has allied itself with another dictatorship and has invaded a neighbor, Finland, so infinitesimally small that it could do no conceivable harm to the Soviet Union, a neighbor which seeks only to live in peace as a democracy, and a liberal, forward-looking democracy at that. Roosevelt heard the boos and hisses through the cold rain. People's World columnist Woody Guthrie knew where he stood. He chided the President in song. "Now the guns in Europe roar as they have so oft before, and the warlords play the same old game again: they butcher and they kill. Uncle Sam foots the bill, with his own dear children standing in the rain. Why do you stand there in the rain? Why do you stand there in the rain? These are strange, carrying on, the White House Capitol lawn.

• 41:40Robert Evans?

  Tell me, why do you stand there in the rain? Then the President's voice did ring. Why, this is the silliest thing I have heard in all my 58 years of life. But it just stands to reason, as he passes another season, he'll be smarter by the time he's 59."

• 41:55Robert Evans?

  So he's being like real, real shitty to Roosevelt there specifically about his support of England in the war that is developing and very defensive of the USSR and invading a much smaller neighbor and invading Poland. And it's one of those things where this is both like horrifying, given what we know happens, you have to, to an extent, while still saying he was wrong, look at his level of knowledge and what had actually happened previously. World War I was the touchstone here. And in World War I, the US did enable further butchering, right? Like, we were arming and profiting off of a hideous war that

• 42:39Robert Evans?

  we had no business sticking our noses into.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:43Robert Evans?

  And he's pissed about that. It's also, there's a lot less information about what was going on in the Soviet Union. Now, I will also say, more than enough that he should have known, right?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the internationalist newspaper stuff was pretty...

• 42:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Sometimes they were better at knowing what was going on around the world than like a modern leftist is today. But he's holding the party line. They got told very specifically. Like, I mean, this is the problem with the commenter in the Communist International.

• 43:12Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Is that someone in the American Communist Party during this era is literally taking orders from Russia.

• 43:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  And that's like one of the parts that we don't want to talk about with the Red Scare, because the Red Scare was bad, right?

• 43:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  But when they're like, oh, these foreign agents acting under a foreign national... They were.

• 43:28Robert Evans?

  There was literally like, they were taking direct, like propaganda, direct orders, like from Moscow. Well, not from Moscow, but like from the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. And they were really wrong on some things as a result of that, because it turns out Hitler's not an ally of international communism.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Turns out, no.

• 43:51Robert Evans?

  And, no, no, that goes very badly, very quickly.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:54Robert Evans?

  And you know, Woody had been, had been describing himself as an anti fascist at this point, but also I think he probably would have said that like, well, you know, the Communist Party knows its business. If they think that's what they've got to do to secure themselves, what matters is, you know, the survival of communism, which, you know, at that point had weathered a number of attacks from the international capitalist community, like during the Russian Civil War. And I'm not saying that because I think that's a good argument. I'm saying I think that's the argument he would have made. I'm pretty firmly on the stance of Stalin bad and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact inexcusable.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:30Robert Evans?

  But also, I always emphasize inexcusable on behalf of the Soviet leadership. You know, I've got nothing but respect for the guys who wound up dying by the millions to stop the Nazis.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 44:39Robert Evans?

  Totally in the right, those guys.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:42Robert Evans?

  And ladies. So it is impossible to look at this situation without seeing commonalities between more modern failures of the left to condemn dictators seen as anti-imperialist for very flawed reasons. I might suggest that we also not forget at the time, one of the complicating factors here is how the US government deals with what it considers communism and what things it considers communism, right? Because that's important, too. Woody had an extensive FBI file, and in 1941, after he joined the Merchant Marine, one of his shipmates was cited as saying, Woody, quote, "followed the Communist Party line" and that they were very pro-Russian and advocated racial intermarriage. So again, that is what

• 45:23Robert Evans?

  the guy who informs on him and the FBI considers evidence of his communist sympathies, is he thinks that black people and white people should be able to get married. So keep that in mind, too.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. The Communist Party was absolutely right about racial politics in the United States during this era.

• 45:39Robert Evans?

  Yes, 100%.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  And they were one of the only non-black organizations. It was actually heavily black, but one of the only not-majority black organizations that was right about this.

• 45:47Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And so like, when we talk about like criticizing him, don't leave out the fact that he's, he's also very much correct about this.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Right, totally.

• 45:57Robert Evans?

  After the war, he would be accused by the California State Senate's far-right Committee on Un-American Activities for being Joe Stalin's California mouthpiece, which was at one point true.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:08Robert Evans?

  But also for being a member of a factionalist sabotage group, which was absurd. Woody never sought or attempted to do anything but sing songs and write articles for socialist papers.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:19Robert Evans?

  He was not sabotaging anything.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  I have a feeling the reason he didn't get a card is he was like, I don't want to be on that list.

• 46:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I mean, that may have been it. I think he also just might have been too lazy.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, didn't want to pay the fees, whatever.

• 46:32Robert Evans?

  He's an artist. He's not

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:34Robert Evans?

  good at signing papers.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:36Robert Evans?

  Marjorie Guthrie, who is his second wife, he starts a family with her after he divorces his first wife, Mary, and moves to Coney Island, sums things up this way. "I don't know what happened prior to my time, but from my time in Coney Island, he was not welcomed by the party because he didn't want to follow a party line. You couldn't tell Woody what to think, and so we were not members of the party in Coney Island."

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:00Robert Evans?

  And again, I include that because she was his wife, she knew him, but also that isn't entirely true because he certainly followed the party line on some very fucked up things.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  But actually, that's still like, even when we talk about the way that people have arcs, right? One of the things I've read a lot, I've read a lot about the UK communists at this era, where a lot of the communists left the Communist Party, once they realized that they were just being mouthpieces for Stalin, you know?

• 47:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, and again, there is a degree to which the fact that there's so much disinformation being pumped out about the Soviet Union, there's so much bad, like, certainly more reasonable then for someone to doubt a lot of the official narratives coming out, and to doubt a lot of the information that makes Stalin look bad, from their position in the United States.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 47:46Robert Evans?

  Right? Again, I think enough that a man as obviously intelligent as Woody should have been better informed, but he's not the only one who makes this mistake, and it's a more understandable mistake then than it is now, is what I'll say.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  That's totally legit.

• 48:00Robert Evans?

  Without forgiving it, you know? So, uh, yeah, however you want to mark this down morally for Woody. His, uh, the US shouldn't be getting into this capitalist war. They're all cooking this World War II thing up. That attitude ends for Woody on June 22nd, 1941, when Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union. This is Operation Barbarossa. Woody ran to his friend Pete Seeger after this, like, breaks and told him, "Well, I guess we're not gonna be singing any more of them peace songs."

• 48:35Robert Evans?

  Woody was not the only man forced to change his tune rapidly due to world events.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Ah, change his tune, anyway.

• 48:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  Well done, well done.

• 48:43Robert Evans?

  Winston Churchill, who was one of the world's loudest anti-communists, was forced by sheer necessity to make temporary amends and even express support for the cause of Soviet soldiers. When Woody heard this, he told a friend, "Churchill's flip-flopped. We gotta flip-flop too."

• 49:03Robert Evans?

  You know who doesn't flip-flop, though, Margaret?

• 49:05Speaker 01

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• 49:10Robert Evans?

  That's right, that's right. Our sponsors have never once changed their opinion, which is why today, tomorrow, and forever, they advise you to vote Millard Fillmore for president.

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• 49:53Robert Evans?

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• 50:52Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872. We're back. Our sponsors are all old hair tonics from the 1800s. Anyway, vote Fillmore. Much of the Woody that we know, the famous Woody Guthrie, you know, you brought up as soon as I said, what do you know of him? That the picture of him with a guitar that has a "This Machine Kills Fascists" sticker slapped across it?

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:17Robert Evans?

  By the way, that sticker was like, put out by the US government.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Huh, that makes sense.

• 51:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it was a propaganda.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Strange bedfellows.

• 51:24Robert Evans?

  Good piece of propaganda. There were a lot of machines we were using to kill fascists. Perfectly reasonable to put some stickers on them.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Wait, did they? Oh, that was like a, the government was putting that on machines to raise morale? And he took one of those and was like, I'm putting this on my guitar?

• 51:38Robert Evans?

  I think it's something like that. I read it in that article in, I think, LA Weekly, by the fellow who was writing about like Woody's history with racism, where he was like, this, you know, this thing was like a product of the government that he...

• 51:47Speaker 01

  That makes so much sense. I never quite understood that. I always really liked though, when people carve into their AKs wooden stock, "This machine makes folk music."

• 51:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I know. There's been some good ones of that coming out of Syria, yeah. So, he changes his opinion very rapidly. And once the Nazis invade the USSR, he starts getting much more patriotic. And again, he had been making anti-Nazi music, and been anti-Nazi prior to this. And if you're saying, well, that's incoherent for him to be against the war and, you know, whatnot, yes, lots of people have incoherent politics. But his politics get a lot more cohesive after Operation Barbarossa. An article for oklahomahistory.org notes, "In New York, he appeared on numerous popular radio shows before joining the Merchant Marines with Cisco Houston during World War II. Guthrie was on three torpedoed ships. And the day Germany surrendered, he was drafted into the US Army."

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Like he was on ships that were hit by torpedoes three different times.

• 52:42Robert Evans?

  Yes, he is, and the merchant marine is effectively a part of the military during a war, right? He is a combat veteran, you know? Like, that's like, he's on three ships that get hit. Now, he's not in the army very long. It basically immediately gets out because the war ends. But yeah, he does like his bit, you know? He is not, when we play songs of his where he's talking about wanting to fight the fascists, he goes and does it, you know? He is doing an important, dangerous job where he gets shot at. So you cannot, yeah, he's very willing to put his skin in the game.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, one blown up ship. If you quit after one blown up ship, no one's mad. You did your part.

• 53:17Robert Evans?

  Nobody will call you a coward.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:20Robert Evans?

  I don't know that, yeah. And so, from late 1941 to the end of the war, Woody Guthrie wrote several iconic anti-fascist anthems, including "Reuben James," about a US destroyer that was torpedoed and sunk by the Nazis in 1941. As you might expect from Woody and the kind of songs he wrote, this song focused on the lives and deaths of normal men at war. The refrain went, "Tell me what was their names? Tell me what was their names? Did you have a friend on that good Reuben James?" It's a good song, but if you want my personal favorite war years Woody Guthrie song, nothing beats this particular banger. Sophie's gonna put it up now.

• 53:56Speaker 05

  Put it there, boy, and we'll show these fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do.

• 54:14Speaker 05

  Well, I'm gonna tell you fascists, you may be surprised, people in this world are getting organized. You're bound to lose, you fascists, bound to lose. All you fascists, bound to lose. I said, all you fascists, bound to lose. Yes. All you fascists, bound to lose. You're bound to lose, you fascists, bound to lose. There's people of every nation, marching side by side, marching across the fields where a million fascists died. You're bound to lose, you fascists, bound to lose.

• 55:01Speaker 05

  All of your fights is bound to lose. All of your fights is bound to lose.

• 55:31Robert Evans?

  Ah. Banger. It's so good. It's a real banger. I enjoyed that immensely. Yeah, one of my favorites. So, near the end of Woody's wartime experiences, he would record the first official version of a song that he'd been working on since 1940, "This Land Is Your Land," which would go on to be undoubtedly his most famous work of music. It is definitely the one Woody Guthrie song everyone's fucking heard. Like, you basically can't get through school without hearing "This Land Is Your Land."

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Because it was so easily recuperated.

• 56:01Robert Evans?

  Yes. And in the decades since 1944, it's also been criticized for what many people interpret as an error of imperialism and support for manifest destiny, which is definitely present in the version of the song that is commonly sung. Given this, I think it's interesting to actually look into why Woody wrote the song and what its original lyrics were. "This Land Is Your Land" was initially something of a folk music diss track. It was a response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." This is a song Berlin wrote in 1918 after being drafted and re-released in 1941 as something of a cash grab. The lyrics, if you aren't familiar, go like this. "God bless America, land that I love. Stand beside her and guide her through the night with a light from above."

• 56:46Robert Evans?

  Woody fucking hated this song, and it's good he did because it's a fucking dogshit song. He considered it far too sweet a hymn for a nation that had just sent millions of its citizens into a depression. "This Land Is Your Land" was meant to be a retort, discussing the real America that Irving had tried to conceal. The original title was "God Bless America For Me." Writes of this first version of the song, quote, "It was more of a question than affirmation. In fact, it was a sarcastic retort." Woody later changed the refrain to, "This land was made for you and me," and the song to, "This land is your land." The verses he ultimately omitted from the final draft of the song include this banger. "There was a big, high wall there that tried to stop me.

• 57:30Robert Evans?

  The sign was painted, said 'private property,' but on the backside, it didn't say nothing. This land was made for you and me. In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple, near the relief office, I see my people. And some are a grumbling, and some are wondering if this land's still made for you and me." And that's a banger. That's very much not an imperialist song. That's more him talking about like this, the people that this country ought to be for are the ones being harmed by the system that governs it, right? Like, that's the original point of the song. That said, this is not a case of it being recuperated by someone else who changes the lyrics because they think that they can tweak it. They don't like Woody's original version.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:13Robert Evans?

  Woody changes it, right? And he changes it. He removes that verse about the relief office because late in the war, he decided it was too pessimistic. And he replaces it with lines like, "From the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me," which is not all that different from like some of the stuff Irving had been writing, right? The song becomes a massive hit. It is practically a new national anthem. And Woody does not initially bother to copyright it because this is, you know, that's not uncommon for him, right? He generally neglected to do that. Alas for Woody. The post-war optimism faded quickly. I mean, and it, so the first horrible thing that happens to Woody after the war, because things go downhill for him quickly.

• 58:54Robert Evans?

  In February of 1947, there is an electrical fire in his home and his little girl Cathy Anne dies.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Oh God, he has bad luck with fire.

• 59:02Robert Evans?

  He, like I said, he had horrible luck with fire. Now, he and Marjorie have three other kids, but yeah, like, that's obviously really fucks him up. Yeah. And like, that same year, 47, and then in 48, he gets repeatedly attacked as a communist, both in the State Committee of Un-American Activities in California and in the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities. Now, they were attacking him for being a communist, and he was, but he was not un-American. No one was more American than Woody fucking Guthrie. Right. He suffers as a result of this. He gets blacklisted. He had written an autobiographical novel at this point called Bound for Glory that had been set to be turned into a major Hollywood production, but that deal and others like it fell apart.

• 59:44Robert Evans?

  As unions were forced to take anti-communist stances in this new, more paranoid era, Woody stopped getting hired to play the events that had largely supplemented his income. Rather than fold, as many did, and denounce the things that he believed, Woody spoke out constantly against J. Edgar Hoover, writing at one point, quote, "The roaches crawl across my page tonight and make a noise that makes more sense than all that Hoover writes." (laughing) Which is a good bar. (laughing) He became less dogmatic on the Moscow line as well, although he never stops being a communist. He starts writing that his goal was to, quote, "Get this thing called socialism nailed and hammered up just as quickly as he can," and praises Eugene V. Debs, former chairman of

• 1:00:27Robert Evans?

  the Socialist Party, as, quote, "A pure cross between Jesus Christ and Abe Lincoln," which, again, is not really something that the Moscow Party wants you say. Yeah. Despite the consequences to his career, he continues to seek and sing his mind. Quote, "Fascism is being afraid. Fascism is fear bossing you. Fascism is worse than all of these things, and fascism is more closer to you than I can make you see. I'm trying to wake you up and tell you that you're sleeping with something ten times more dangerous than a poison fang snake in your bed. If fascism does come and if it does kill me, well, then you add me alone onto the hundreds of millions, which fascism has already dusted under, and it don't scare me so very much."

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  That rules.

• 1:01:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's a good line.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  All right, it might kill me. It's killed millions of people before, so it fucking goes.

• 1:01:16Robert Evans?

  I'll be in good company.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  That's hard. I like that.

• 1:01:21Robert Evans?

  Yep, that's hard. And this is unfortunately, Margaret, where the story gets awkward again.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  No, is he gonna heel turn again? He keeps dancing.

• 1:01:29Robert Evans?

  It's more complicated than a heel turn.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:32Robert Evans?

  He's about to do a bad thing. There is a mitigating factor that's pretty significant.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:01:38Robert Evans?

  But it's a pretty bad thing. Woody is at this point, and always on the verge of being broke, but also a famous and influential musician. And we know what comes with that, right? Which is the temptation to be a sex pest.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and you know, Woody does not commit like rape, but he does sexually harass someone very badly. And this is a very ugly story. The gist of it is that things with his second wife, Marjorie, go downhill, as his career does. She is the family moneymaker. She actually makes a very good living teaching dancing. She's an extremely accomplished dancer. And his career is not doing well. This leads to fighting, and Woody eventually moves out and rents a room for himself. He starts writing letters to his old music partner, Lefty Lou's sister. She is 28 years old, he is 36, so they're not like crazy far apart, but the bigger issue is, she had never insinuated that she was into him, right? He is just writing her letters about wanting to fuck her, apropos of nothing.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Oh, fuck.

• 1:02:37Robert Evans?

  Now, she, Woody had just kind of assumed that because she, like, they knew each other, right? They were like friendly, but she gets divorced, and he just kind of assumes, well, I'm getting divorced too, that must mean she wants to fuck, right? And his letters to her take on an air of obsession. He writes at least 12 long letters, suggesting they move out together, hit the road, and start having sex. These letters include long, rambling descriptions of the kinds of sex Woody wanted to have, and more. And I'm gonna quote from Ramblin' Man here. "Into the envelopes Guthrie stuffed pages torn from New York's tabloids with muddy magenta circles slathered around stories of grisly murders. The packets, sometimes two or three a week, frightened Mary Ruth by their intensity, the sexual proposals, and the suggestion of violence. She drove

• 1:03:21Robert Evans?

  to Los Angeles to show them to her sister, who knew Guthrie best of all. You have no idea how horrible it was, her older sister Maxine said. She in turn called the police." Now, the police get involved because they think Woody might be a budding serial killer. And given the kind of stuff he's sending, not an unreasonable thing to be afraid of.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Robert Evans?

  And given the fact that the feds are hounding him, I get why Woody is like, this is them going after me for my politics. But it really isn't.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Robert Evans?

  He's writing very upsetting things. Now, there's another part to this story, which does not make the things he's writing less fucked up or upsetting. But he is losing his mind.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:04:00Robert Evans?

  He is losing his mind in a degree that is very soon to be clinically diagnosed. Right? In episode one, I mentioned that Woody's mother went insane when he was quite young and was institutionalized. Right? This traumatized him and at the time, we didn't have an explanation for what she was going for. They just said madness, right? We now know what she had because Woody has it and it's diagnosable by the time he gets it. And it's called Huntington's disease.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:04:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. His mom and Woody gets it and he is starting to suffer the effects of Huntington's by the late 40s. This is a neurodegenerative disorder that Huntington's disease news describes as characterized by uncontrolled movements, loss of cognitive ability and psychiatric problems. The middle stages of the illness are associated with psychosis. Some patients experience delusions, which they tend to be convinced are accurate. And it also comes with these like sort of obsessive delusions, right? Which might explain the whole him thinking that this was something that was reciprocated.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:00Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  So this isn't a heel turn. This is just a degeneration. This is just a-

• 1:05:04Robert Evans?

  This is a very tragic degeneration. Right? You know, I don't know how, again, you want to parse it out morally, but like he is diagnosed. Like he is losing his mind. He is going to spend most of the rest of his life in an institution. So this is not just a case of like a powerful man in music being a sex pest.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Right, totally.

• 1:05:20Robert Evans?

  This is a man who was not like this before, so far as we know. Absolutely declining in becoming like increasingly delusional.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  And like Famous Men sex pesting is fans. Famous Men sex pesting is like, or everyone in your orbit, you just assume they wanna fuck you, which I guess he's like doing to this. No, yeah, the degeneration thing, that just makes sense. It's just.

• 1:05:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he probably always had a crush on her and then this, like, he becomes convinced that there is something going on there that there's not.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Right. But the fact that it was out of the blue to her means that he probably kept his fucking mouth shut about the fact that he had a crush on her.

• 1:05:54Robert Evans?

  One would assume, right? So it's not great. He is ultimately charged in 1949 with sending obscene material through the mail. He avoids prison time, but is sentenced to therapy. And he and his therapist do not have a good relationship. His therapist does not like him, but he's not diagnosed with anything quite yet. So his therapist is just like, he's kind of an asshole, which I can't blame the therapist for, cuz he's being an asshole. If you don't know the mitigating factor of the family mental illness that destroyed his mother and is destroying him. Woody eventually refuses court mandated therapy and his lawyer manages to narrowly get him out of a six month sentence. His lawyer, who is one of his shipmates, right? He and this guy are torpedoed together and this lawyer, who is a very good friend, who was like, "I'm not gonna let my, my war buddy go to a fucking jail."

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:39Robert Evans?

  Woody was mostly angry. When his sentence gets like cut off, he's kind of pissed because he had been planning a Christmas Eve show for the inmates that he doesn't get to do now. So there's still that piece of him in there, right? By the mid 1950s, Woody was disabled with Huntington's badly enough that his second wife, Marjorie, who, again, he has separated from, had to take charge of his affairs. And it does say something that this person who he was not nice to at the end, had enough affection for him still that she makes sure he's taken care of, right? Which included, she registers a copyright for "This Land Is Your Land" for the first time, right? And for a number of his other songs. And she's doing that because like, we're gonna need some way of taking care of him.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Robert Evans?

  You know? And this makes sense, right? One of the fun side effects of this is that his family is going to wind up in a lawsuit with Donald Trump about "This Land Is Your Land" cuz Trump kept trying to play it. It is now in the public domain, but it wasn't for a while. So that same year, 1956, he was involuntarily committed to Greystone Park, a New Jersey mental institution. Over the next five years, he lost the ability to play music or even to type. But, and again, this really says something about the amount of love there was still for him. He is not cut off or alone. His family visits him regularly. They take him out and he stays with them for weekends and holidays. He's taken out and, you know, taken to shows and trips by his friends and by fellow artists.

• 1:08:06Robert Evans?

  Bob Dylan, who at this point is not particularly famous, starts visiting Woody at the asylum in 1961. And Dylan starts working with other performers over the 60s. They like, they play shows, they take Woody to some of these shows where they're playing his music to this new generation of newly radicalized Americans. And Woody lives long enough to see his music honored in like sold out shows by some of the, you know, by fucking Bob Dylan, some of the most beloved up and coming musicians of the 60s. So he does go out, knowing that his music doesn't just live on, but is like influenced this new generation of people who are going to become incredibly famous and influential musicians in their own right. Which as far as being an artist goes, is about as much as you can hope for.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:08:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Especially for someone who's at the kind of beginning, not the very beginning of recorded music, but like.

• 1:08:57Robert Evans?

  Pretty close to it. Yeah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Robert Evans?

  He dies in October of 1967. At that point, he is unable to communicate by any means besides pointing at cards that said yes or no. But he left behind, again, a pretty incredible legacy. Two novels, hundreds of articles, more than a thousand songs and poems, 500 illustrations, and a central role in the folk music revival that changed American music forever. We've listened to a lot of Woody Guthrie's music in these episodes. And while I do hope you all take the opportunity to listen to more, I want to leave you with a quote of his that I think is quite relevant for our times, which Ed Cray picked out to open his 2008 biography of the man. "About all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine."

• 1:09:42Robert Evans?

  And I like that. I also like this quote from Bob Dylan, who was asked in 1963 to sum up his feelings on Woody Guthrie in 25 words for a book on the man. As history.com notes, Dylan, quote, responded instead with a 194 line poem called Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, which took as its theme the eternal human search for hope. And where do you look for this hope you're seeking? Dylan asks in the poem before proceeding to a kind of answer. You can either go to the church of your choice, or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital. You'll find God in the church of your choice. You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:10:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Anyway, that's Woody Guthrie.

• 1:10:27Speaker 02

  That's an awesome, that was awesome.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I knew so little about him. I know about some of his music and it's been super influential, but that's awesome. I'm.

• 1:10:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It was one of those, like, again, it's a messy story, but yeah.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Honestly, it was better than I would have guessed.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, great pick for the non-bastard holiday episode.

• 1:10:48Robert Evans?

  A relevant kind of guy to know about for the kind of times we're heading into.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. And speaking of somebody people should know about, I adopted a second dog.

• 1:10:58Robert Evans?

  Yes, you did.

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  I did. This is Anderson's sister Truman.

• 1:11:02Robert Evans?

  Woo, woo.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  She's learning how to be a dog, but she's a good girl.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  She's already a good podcast dog, which is a hard level for a dog to reach.

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  It's a hard job. Yeah, especially a herding dog.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. You're a good girl. Yeah. Yeah, I guess just to say, happy holidays, everyone.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Happy holidays.

• 1:11:25Robert Evans?

  Happy holidays. And I don't know, listen to some Woody Guthrie.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. We'll be back in the new year or the first week of the year. We'll have a couple of Q and A episodes.

• 1:11:36Robert Evans?

  We'll have some Qs. We'll answer some As. It'll be a good time.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Any final thoughts, Magpie? Anything you want to plug?

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Well, if you want Christmas every week, I have a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, where I talk about cool people did cool stuff. And then either this week or next week, depending on when everything gets released, I also will be covering the history of the song Bella Ciao, because I got excited by this recording last week of part one. And I thought, I'm gonna do a song too.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  It will be the week after you'll be releasing that.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  So next Monday, you all can hear me talk about the history of Bella Ciao.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Awesome. All right.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Merry Christmas and/or whatever you want. To have happy, happy.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  Well, that'll do it for 2024.

• 1:12:26Robert Evans?

  2024, yeah, more or less.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  More or less. All right.

• 1:12:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  Be well. Bye-bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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