Woody's legacy lives on at SXSW

By Thomas Conner
Tulsa World
March 22, 2000

More than 30 years after his death, musicians -- and, indeed, Americans -- are just now figuring out what Woody Guthrie was about. Greg Johnson, owner of Oklahoma City's revered Blue Door nightclub, summed it up ably during a South by Southwest panel discussion entitled "Made for You and Me: Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Legacy."

"Woody was about freedom and community," Johnson said. "He was about propping people up. Bruce Springsteen used to say it this way: `Woody was about the next guy in line.' " Veteran music journalist Dave Marsh led the panel, which also included Austin-based songwriters Jimmy Lafave and Michael Fracasso. The star of the panel, though, was Guthrie's youngest sister, Mary Jo Edgmon, who regaled the crowd with homespun tales of her proud father, her misunderstood mother and her iconic older brother.

"I was reared on music all the way up to here," Edgmon said, pointing over her head. "Woody taught me chords on the guitar. I got really good at that C chord, I guess it was." Edgmon spoke proudly of the "1,000 percent turnaround" in America's perception of Woody, particularly in his Green Country hometown of Okemah. She said she's thrilled to see the misunderstandings about Woody's political and spiritual beliefs clearing up.
"I want the world to understand that the Guthrie family was not trash, that Woody was as good a man as there is," she said.

Lafave and Fracasso both punctuated the panel session with performances. Fracasso sang Guthrie's "1913 Massacre" and one of his own songs directly inspired by Woody's songwriting (Fracasso's chorus: "From the mountains to the valleys / from the prairies to the sea / If you ain't got love, you ain't got a nickel"). Lafave sang a song about Woody called "Woody's Road," written by acclaimed Oklahoma songwriter Bob Childers, and then closed the afternoon event with a rendition of Guthrie's "Oklahoma Hills," joined by members of the Red Dirt Rangers and Edgmon herself.

Made For You and Me:

Woody Guthrie's Dustbowl Legacy Panel

By Breg Beets
Austin Chronicle
Austin Convention Center, Friday, Mar 17

I always consider it a good sign when the dean of rock scribes, Dave Marsh, is on a South by Southwest panel. In the past three years, he's walked off in a huff in the middle of a panel on drug use by musicians (1997), threatened to take an audience member outside for an ass-kicking (1998), and moderated an electrifying presentation on the history of the MC5 (1999).
Marsh's volatile mix of knowledge and piss pretty much guarantees a panel you'll be telling your friends about over dinner. However, as moderator of the Woody Guthrie panel, Marsh simply sat back and smiled as Austin faves Michael Fracasso and Jimmy LaFave played classic Guthrie folk tunes interspersed with remembrances from 77-year-old Mary Jo Guthrie Edgmon, Woody's youngest sister.

Edgmon was clearly the star of the show. Her fellow panelists responded to her heartfelt family history with reverence, and the audience responded with affection. Edgmon's words had less to do with dissecting her brother's legacy than reclaiming her family's good name from erroneous Guthrie biographers.

"Some writers made it seem like Woody was from the wrong side of the tracks and made it seem like the Guthrie family was trash," she explained. "But our father was not trash. He was a fine Southern gentleman."

Marsh pointed out Woody's optimism and faith in his fellow man, a trait Edgmon says he inherited from his father. "If you go through Woody's work, you see that he was very spiritual," said Marsh. "His views were actually very similar to the prairie politics of someone like Jim Hightower."

Unfortunately, anyone to the left of Douglas MacArthur was liable to be branded a communist or atheist (or both) in the Fifties. Oklahoma has only recently warmed up to officially honoring Guthrie for his substantial role in crafting the course of American music.

Edgmon says Woody's hometown of Okemah has done a "1,000-degree turnaround" and named one of its main roads after Guthrie. "That street used to be called Division Avenue," quipped Oklahoma City writer Greg Johnson. Though the realm of Oklahoma officialdom is not quite ready to hold Guthrie on the same echelon as Will Rogers, pressure to do so is building with each passing day. According to Johnson, Oklahoma-bred country pioneer Jimmy Webb initially balked at being inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame because, as Webb himself reportedly put it, "I don't want to be inducted into any Oklahoma Hall of Fame that Woody Guthrie isn't in." The Smithsonian's Woody Guthrie exhibit will make its way to Oklahoma City in 2002, and all panelists agreed that this would be an optimum time for Guthrie's belated induction. With that, LaFave and Fracasso were joined by Edgmon and the Red Dirt Rangers for a rousing, panel-ending rendition of Guthrie's "Oklahoma Hills" as a smiling Marsh looked on. Some things are just better said with music.

Channeling the spirit of Woody Guthrie into 21st century

By Michael Shannon Friedman
Charleston Gazette
Thursday February 10, 2000

"Serendipity" is the word Jimmy Lafave uses to describe his major role in what he excitedly calls "a kind of Woody Guthrie revival." Speaking from his home in Austin, Texas, Lafave says "the world is beginning to feel Woody's spirit again."

Not that the songs of Okemah, Okla., legend Woodrow Wilson Guthrie have ever gone out of style. But the last few years have certainly brought renewed interest in the troubadour/painter/social activist who wrote "This Land Is Your Land." For instance, last year British folk star Billy Bragg and American alt-rockers Wilco collaborated on "Mermaid Avenue, " setting to music previously unpublished Guthrie writings. And while there is scarcely a living songwriter who doesn't owe Guthrie some kind of debt (it's worth remembering that Bob Dylan began his career as one of many awe-struck Guthrie imitators before finding his own voice), Lafave's Guthrie connections are deeply personal.

Lafave cut his teeth in the early ‘70s, playing clubs in Stillwater, Okla., about an hour from Guthrie's birthplace. (West Virginia native Bob Childers was one of Lafave's mentors there). By 1988, Lafave was living in Austin, and along with reporter Greg Johnson, he organized a Woody Guthrie Birthday Party. The party, now an annual event, was captured on disc and the performers included Sara Elizabeth Campbell and Ray Wylie Hubbard. Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, somehow heard it. She and Lafave struck up a friendship, which led to Lafave performing at Guthrie's Rock ‘n' Roll Hall of Fame induction and at Nora's wedding.
Proud as Lafave is of being part of this revival (he is especially excited about Oklahoma's involvement, as there is now a Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival there every year), he also understands the responsibility that Guthrie's legacy demands of today's songwriters. "There was something he captured, something about travel and America, the way the sun sets in Nebraska, the way it goes down in New Jersey," LaFave says. "He was able to capture the scope of the land."

Lafave acknowledges that such distinctive and evocative description is getting more and more difficult in this age of interstates and strip malls. "But music," he insists, "seeps out of the landscape. Even if it's harder to find, we need to tap into that energy. " As the names of his recordings suggest ( "Austin Skyline," "Highway Trance," "Buffalo Return To The Plains," "Road Novel," "Trail" - all on Bohemia Beat Records), his own creative energy is fueled by a simultaneous reverence for history and geographic detail, as well as a romantic yearning for movement. This tension dominates Lafave classics like "The Open Road": "Border town in Dakota/where the Missouri runs wide/we'll cross the piggyback bridge/reach the other side/listen to the ghost dance/in the valley of gold/where the ones who understand/respect the buffalo."
Perhaps even more powerful and distinctive than Lafave's writing, is his intimate, tender vocal delivery, which recalls Ray Charles in its soulful mixture of suffering and ecstasy. Esteemed rock critic Dave Marsh calls it "one of America's greatest voices" - and it will be a real treat to hear that voice singing the words of one of America's greatest songwriters.