April 11, 2004

'Ramblin' Man': Coney Island Okie

wenty-four years after Joe Klein's superb biography, ''Woody Guthrie: A Life,'' comes a retelling of the life almost as admirable. Ed Cray, a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, had the advantage of unlimited access to a Guthrie archive that has expanded considerably since Klein did his research. But both books reveal pretty much the same man behind the myth. Both are fascinating not just because Guthrie's life was fascinating, but because Guthrie's vision of that life was so seminal, original and articulate.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in Okemah, Okla., in 1912. His father was a Democratic politician and real estate man whose luck went bad in the 1920's; his musically adept mother was a cattleman's stepdaughter who would die in a state mental institution of Huntington's chorea in 1930. In 1919, his older sister died in a fire she set while arguing with her mother; in 1927, his father was badly burned in a fire his mother apparently set herself. Between his father's failures and his mother's madness, Guthrie was an exceptionally footloose teenager who often lived off friends and was singing for change by the age of 14. But he did not leave his Oklahoma-Texas stomping grounds until he set off penniless to take a look at California in 1937, by which time he was married with a second child on the way. Six months later he had his own radio show in Los Angeles.

Fame came suddenly to Woody Guthrie. But his fame was always narrow, and his success was narrower. Before and after his radio gig he underwent genuine hardship in California, as Cray painfully details. And having migrated to New York, where he was one of Pete Seeger's Almanac Singers, he published the well-reviewed quasi-autobiographical ''Bound for Glory,'' worked with Norman Corwin at CBS, recorded for RCA and Folkways and -- next to his sometime benefactor, Leadbelly -- was the biggest attraction on the nascent folk circuit. He counted $180 a major payday -- $10 or $15 was what he was used to.

The period of his greatest renown, the early and mid-1940's, was interrupted by several tours in the merchant marine. By 1947 or so, the dementia of Huntington's chorea, which takes years to ripen, was nearing the surface. Always a phenomenally fast writer -- he produced 38 pages of ''Bound for Glory'' overnight -- he typed thousands of pages that never cohered into the books he had received advances for, and found hard to come by the deceptive simplicity of the songs he had once made up at will. The career he had walked into at 25 was over before he was 40. He was permanently hospitalized at 42 and at 55 died a cult figure, never anything like a star.

Those who resent Guthrie's doctrinaire leftism and staunch artistic populism are free to disparage his pretensions to authenticity and his claim to speak for the common man. A son of the failed middle class who was a Communist fellow traveler and union stalwart for almost all of his public life, he had limited personal experience of labor, although he certainly worked tough jobs and suffered privation. He was better read than he let on; he was a mooch, a womanizer and an alcohol abuser. Guthrie's salacious side spun out of control as his illness got worse, once landing him in jail on obscenity charges. He misused his first wife, and his marriage to the dancer Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia was as troubled as it was passionate; they, too, lost their first child in a fire. He delighted in shocking and sometimes exploiting genteel progressives who took him up as a true working man, rustic wit or son of the soil. He mythologized himself compulsively and shamelessly.

But Cray, who has written biographies of Earl Warren and George C. Marshall (as well as compiling a collection of sexually explicit American folk songs), makes even clearer than Klein did that Guthrie was worthy of the legend he created. His poverty was real, and while his deep-seated tendency to hit the road ended up having its beatnik aspect, it always freshened the intimate contact with ordinary Americans that nourished his art from the beginning. In his songwriting -- and also, as Cray's piecemeal celebration of his limited gifts demonstrates more forcefully than many more expert critiques, in his musical performance -- Guthrie's self-conscious and sometimes fanciful commitment to the vernacular, the regional and the traditional were a theory come true for several generations of folklorists, as well as the embodiment of folk music as the Popular Front conceived and promulgated it.

Just as important, Guthrie belonged to a long line of American self-creators that includes Davy Crockett, Walt Whitman and his fellow Oklahoman Will Rogers. He promoted himself not just just through music but also through the written word -- most lastingly in ''Bound for Glory'' and other late or posthumous books, and also as a voluble contributor to the left-wing press. His great inheritor and spiritual interpreter, Bob Dylan, understood and developed both halves of his art, and through Dylan (a qualification neither Cray nor Klein before him makes enough of), Guthrie changed popular music.

Although Klein's biography deromanticized Guthrie, Cray's version is even more hardheaded. While sympathetic to Guthrie's progressivism and unionism, and emphatic about his unsuitability for Communist Party membership, Cray is sharply contemptuous of the Stalinist hypocrisies in which Guthrie's loyalties embroiled him. Nor does Cray mince words about Guthrie's personal irresponsibility. This plain-spoken effect is intensified by Cray's narrative method, which piles incident on incident and supporting quotation on supporting quotation, rather than going for the smooth summations at which Klein excelled. As a result, ''Ramblin' Man'' can be a spiky read. But because it is so fact-filled, it vividly conveys how difficult Guthrie's life was and how heroic his achievement. And for seekers after writerly flavor, it is shot through with passages by Guthrie himself -- pithy, airy, acerbic, waggish, faux-folksy, self-serving, romantic, erotic, lyrical, imagistic, obscure and utterly unhinged.

Guthrie's prose was usually impulsive, sometimes affected and so word-drunk that it didn't necessarily connect up very well. But in the well-organized context Cray provides, it makes sense as further proof of a genius who meant to poke holes in the facade of received culture, and succeeded better than the genius in question was lucky enough to see.