Nora Guthrie Interview Part One: “We Brought the Protest Inside”
Talking about tornadoes, Washington and 100 years of Woody
By Douglas Heselgrave
One hundred and one years after his birth, the spirit of Woody Guthrie still looms large in the North American psyche. Gentle, lyrical and humorous one minute, tightly wound, irritable and ready the lash out the next, his songs and persona reflect the concerns of the everyman and the deeply held belief that one person who refuses to be bought off or deflected can still realize great change in the world. I reached Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter at the Woody Guthrie museum ostensibly to discuss the newly released ‘Woody Guthrie At 100! Live At The Kennedy Center’ DVD, but as we spoke less than a week after a devastating tornado hit the Guthrie’s home state of Oklahoma, our conversation took many unexpected twists and turns. As a representative of the Guthrie legacy, Nora is the perfect embodiment of everything that is appealing about her father – warm, witty and effusive – we spoke, laughed and shared stories well beyond the thirty minutes we’d been allotted together. Nora is the read deal and sharing time with her was one of the greatest pleasures I’ve experienced in nearly two decades of interviewing people. Here is the first of a two part interview.
Nora: Hi Doug! How are you?
DH: I should be asking you how you’re doing, I think?
Nora: Do you mean which hospital bed am I in to recover? (laughs)
DH: Well, I’m calling you from Canada and I don’t think we have a very clear idea of what’s going on in Oklahoma at any given time.
Nora: Well, it wasn’t just the storm that could’ve put me in the hospital. It’s been the whole year!
DH: Maybe you’re speaking personally, but when I think of Oklahoma, it really seems that you’ve endured more than your fair share of hardships over the last century or so….
Nora: Yeahhhhhh…… We’re in slow recovery now, but I think everybody is asking themselves what normal is supposed to feel like. For us, it’s like drug addicts or something – everybody has been racing around so much for the last three years. We’re just calming down now.
DH: Three years is a long time to be on high alert, Nora!
Nora: It is! We’ve all been shaking our fists and saying ‘Damn you, Woody Guthrie!’ (big laugh)
DH: So, the museum is in good shape? It wasn’t flattened out by any of the aftermath of the storm? You know, when I heard of the storm, I hate to say the first thing I thought of was that you’d just opened your doors to the public and –
Nora: No, everything’s okay! We’re in Tulsa, so we missed the worst of it. Most of the new buildings they make are for high winds. New rules of construction, you know. A lot of the old wood frame houses had no way to escape or anything like that.
DH: I know. It’s amazing. There are a lot of old houses where I live in Vancouver that don’t even have proper foundations and a huge earthquake has been predicted here to hit some time in the next century. But, everybody’s lives are so busy and it’s hard enough taking care of today’s problems without worrying about things that may happen in the future. I was watching the new ‘Woody Guthrie at 100! Live at the Kennedy Center’ video last night. Can you tell me how that all came together? The first thing that struck me was how far Woody’s come in the last decades from singing to grass roots people anywhere that wanted him to such a sophisticated, well heeled venue in Washington DC honoring him at this late date. That’s a lot of miles travelled.
Nora: We brought the protest inside! Ha Ha! We called it Occupy Kennedy Center! Where you been? You know, every time someone sang a powerful song – it was a great audience! It was an all Woody audience. It was kind of exactly where he would like to be, I think! Right in the heart of Washington!
DH: I don’t know what Woody’s history is with respect to playing for presidents or politicians or in Washington –
Nora: Well, it depends on how far back you go, but people like Eleanor Roosevelt were huge fans. Not fans of his per se – they didn’t know about him but the governments were quite different in the 1930s and 40s. Woody actually did a lot of work in collaboration with the old Bonneville Dam and that was all government. He writes quite often in his journals that he’s very very happy to be part of government projects when he feels the government is working for the people.
DH: So, as a Canadian again – I’m not as up on what you are referring to in how the governments have changed since Woody’s day.
Nora: That’s a long story! (laugh)
DH: Well, could you picture someone like Woody being invited to be part of the government today?
Nora: Well, he wasn’t an ideologue. He was an individual who thought that he could and was free to use everything he had to help other people. It’s such a simple concept. Maybe that’s the difference between where we are now and where he was then. He wasn’t dependent on large amounts of money! (laughs) He kept his cost of living down and kept his freedom and autonomy because of that. That was just one of the important things all of us could learn from him. I call him ‘Citizen Woody’ First and foremost, what Woody means to me is that he shows us what it’s like to be a free citizen in a democracy. Say what you have to say whenever it needs to be said, and whatever happens, you don’t have to worry if someone fires you if you keep your costs low enough. When he did the Bonneville Dam stuff, I think they paid him $230 for the month to work up there in Portland, and not only that but if he ever felt he wasn’t in synch with what was happening – whether it was for the government or for a radio station or a record company he walked out. He just left, and not only that, he didn’t leave in a huff. He just left and said ‘I don’t think I belong here.’
DH: Today, someone would hold a press conference and tweet about it.
Nora: Exactly! I think that’s what I’ve learned from him all of these years – the importance of a certain amount of humility. The most important thing for an individual is to do what they think is the right thing to do. That’s number one.
I want to say that if you have focus, wake up every morning and remind yourself that this is what you’re alive for, it isn’t any more difficult to do today than it was back then. Who knows why we’re alive, but to do what you think is right is one of the great things you can do with your life. I don’t think there’s any need to attach yourself firmly to any one dogma or ideology. The joke with Woody and the communist party is he wouldn’t sign the papers! The minute they said you have to do that and you have to be here, he said ‘never mind.’ It takes away your freedom to express yourself. You never know when one system will get corrupted, and that’s why to me Woody’s most important lesson was to keep your sense of citizenship and community and contribute as you wish when you can with what you have.
DH: And there are so many other variables now. I’ve talked to musicians whose managers haven’t let them play benefits that they want to play because of worries about how it will look in – say – China.
Nora: Yes, everything has become so entwined. But, really, an artist can – every night before they go to bed – surround themselves with the right people who also understand that. It’s today that we have to say yes or no to something and commit ourselves. I don’t want to make a martyr of Woody because I know that he was just a basic human being.
DH: Of course.
Nora: We can use him as a great reminder. When I come to work every day I try to remind my colleagues to say ‘yes’ as much as possible. You can’t always and sometimes you’re in a grumpy mood, but to the best of your ability, relax, take a deep breath and see how many times you can say ‘yes’ today. That’s Woody! Whenever anyone asked him to sing for a cause, the answer was ‘yes.’ I’ve read many of his diary entries where he kind of gets angry at himself and kvetches that ‘they’re using me for everything and I’m so tired and I don’t want to sing tonight.” He went through all the stuff we all go through. We get tired and sometimes we have to say ‘no.’ It’s kind of nice to read in his diary that he’s a wonderful example of how to be an ordinary human being.
DH: You’ve mentioned his diaries a few times. Do you have any plans to publish them or make them available to the public?
Nora: Well, a lot of the excerpts have been published previously in different books, but as far as publishing the diaries in their entirety, I wonder who would want to read them. The things that’s interesting about the excerpts is that Dave Marsh did a great job using them when he wrote ‘Pastures of Plenty’ years ago. It had some really insightful stuff in it. As the decades change and the times move along, something that I didn’t notice twenty years ago, now sticks out. It might be about immigration rights, but every idea is about current events. As an example, there was a song he wrote in the forties called ‘Jolly Banker’ and then a few years ago when the bankers were called on the carpet and asked how they collapsed the economies of the world –
DH: While being bailed out and well paid for it –
Nora: Right! They flew in on their jets and explained that it was the other guy’s fault and not theirs. It was so nauseating. The passing of the buck by billionaires was outlined in ‘The Jolly Banker’ and I needed to pull it out immediately and Wilco was in the studio that week and I got in touch with them and said ‘Guys, I need this recorded tonight.’ I needed people to hear this lyric and the thing I always feel comfortable about with Woody is that it’s always about the lyric and it doesn’t have to be about the man. So, if he has any name, it’s because of his lyrics. It’s not because of the way he dressed, where he ate or anything like that. The texts themselves are so wonderfully poignant, so luckily they recorded it for me and put it up on their website that night. Within three days, 300,000 people had downloaded it, so that’s a nice example of Wilco using their popularity to get an idea across. Not only that, but the irony was that within three days Jeff Tweedy was doing an interview on Market Watch, and they were asking what Wilco had to say about banking. It made me wonder why aren’t we hearing artists on Market Watch, and why don’t we listen to diverse voices that have something to say about the economy. Just because you don’t own stock, doesn’t mean you don’t have anything to say about economics.
Here’s a link to PART TWo of this interview:
“Let the song be the star and just fucking sing!”
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