Rating: 
Summary: No Home in This World Anymore
Review: Ed Cray's biography of Woody Guthrie gives us as complete a picture of the folk-song legend as we are ever likely to get; he had the cooperation of all surviving members of the Guthrie family and full access to Guthrie's personal papers. Cray also does a marvelous job giving us a sense of Guthrie's work, liberally sprinkling his text with lyrics from familiar and unfamiliar songs. The result is not only complete and comprehensive but very sympathetic, despite details (wandering, neglecting his children, womanizing, drinking, fighting, etc.) that bring Guthrie down a peg from the sainthood that some might want to give him.Guthrie himself seems a knotty reflection of the troubled times in which his music first arose: the struggles of the working poor during the Great Depression, followed by the paranoia of McCarthyism in the late 40s and beyond. Both Guthrie and his music showed a kind of restless, kinetic energy until this second period set in, but then dissolve in a kind of undisciplined confusion.
We know now of course that this change in Guthrie was caused by his disease, Huntington's chorea, which hospitalized him for the last decade or more of his life. Cray does an exceptionally good job of showing the gradual increase of the disease from the point where its earlier symptoms just seemed like a quirky part of Guthrie's personality to the point where his internal fight against it made him violent, and finally to the point where he was rendered speechless and immobile. Guthrie's second wife Marjorie (Arlo's mother) comes off fairly saintly, visiting Guthrie with their kids weekly in the hospital for years even after their divorce. In sum, the book is inspirational, informative, and poignant as well. The only thing that keeps me from giving it five stars is its length, which fans of Guthrie will not find daunting but which may be more than you are looking for it you are only a casual reader.
Rating: 
Summary: The guy behind the folk hero
Review: Ed Cray's new biography goes a long way toward clearing up some of the hagiographic fog that's collected around Guthrie since his long illness and death. The romantic picture of Guthrie is that he was an artistically restless drifter who threw in his lot with the farmers and laborers of the Depression era. There's some truth to that picture. Guthrie undoubtedly was a good poet and wrote some good songs and prose (although his skills as a performer were uneven), was extremely restless, and seems to have had a genuine concern for the poor. But these bare facts only scratch the surface of his complexity. He was also a self-indulgent tomcat who took little responsibility for his many children; a prima dona performer who frequently insisted doing things his way or no way; a person whose idiosyncracies and freeloading perpetually tried the patience of his friends and acquaintances (see, for example, Cray's account of Woody's refusal to carry his weight when he lived in the Almanac Singers cooperative); and a chronic mythmaker, in both his memoir and his tales, when it came to his relations with the working class. In the eyes of many (although certainly not all), there apparently was a charm to him that overrode his blemishes. But the blemishes are still there.
In a curious way, the people who come across as the real heroes of this biography are the less celebrated types such as Pete Seeger and Will Geer, both victims of the McCarthy witchhunt, and Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, Arlo's mom and Guthrie's second wife, who nursed Woody during the final years, long after they were divorced. Compared to them, Woody both lived a pretty comfortable life and was less committed to the farmers and laborers he sang about. Touchingly, it was these same people whose loyalty to Guthrie helped make him into one of America's folk heroes after his death.
Rating:
Summary: Hard Traveling
Review: Ed Cray's Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie is a revealing and generally excellent overview of the wayward, troubled, and paradoxical life of 20th century America's greatest folk songwriter. Stripped of mythology, folksy color, and chest - puffing bravado, Guthrie appears here in all his essential vulnerability and human frailty. Naïve potential readers expecting an idealized hero in the mold of Johnny Appleseed may be surprised to discover that Guthrie had his own share of unpleasant personal secrets and dark passages. On the basis of some sexually graphic "love letters" to a young girl whom he appeared to be stalking, Guthrie was briefly considered as a suspect in the notorious Black Dahlia murder of the late Forties. Oklahoma - born Guthrie was something of a trickster as well as a songwriter, singer, musician, and social activist; sociopathic tendencies swirled just beneath the surface of his psyche throughout his lifetime. Guthrie was both a genuine "man of the people" who nevertheless affected an exaggerated homespun Okie persona and a fairly well - educated if self - taught individual who liked to pretend he was barely literate. In a textbook case of psychological projection and displacement, Guthrie zealously devoted most of his life to broad socialist causes, passionately believing, for example, that the United States government was parentally responsible to provide for its poor, even while he abandoned his first wife and their three young children for months and years at a time whenever the mood to wander struck him. To their hunger, destitution, and emotional pain, Guthrie, "bound for glory" in his own mind, was largely indifferent; "when that old, long, and lonesome 4 - time highball whistles on the breeze, they ain't no tellin' what an old Reckless Rambler like me will do" is sadly typical of Guthrie's breezy, self - indulgent commentary about his protracted familial negligence. Regardless of his chronic irresponsibility and ethical failures, Guthrie continually and hypocritically took issue with and targeted those he perceived to be the wealthy, the powerful, and the elite ("Just because I ain't got as much money as you got is a pretty good sign that you're crookeder than me"). Politically, Guthrie's vehement leftist ideology was just as capricious; war was a never - ending wrong to be actively protested against, unless the conditions of the war were those Guthrie found personally agreeable. Thus, in the period before and during World War II, Guthrie rapidly went from loudly protesting the "war in Europe" to writing songs in support of United States involvement and later proudly served as a merchant marine. From the evidence Cray abundantly provides, it appears that Guthrie was incapable of reasoned, sustained, and complex political thought. Guthrie's "do as I say and not as I do" behavior, coupled with his "look at me, Ma, I'm a radical" - style grandstanding are telling indeed. Guthrie inherited the degenerative Huntington's disease from his mother, which, in addition to his alcoholism, makes assessment of his grim later years fairly difficult. By all accounts but his own, however, Guthrie's early life was one of violence and tragedy. While his mother slowly sank into what was then thought to be insanity, his older sister was burned to death during an unfortunate show of temperament, and his once - successful and optimistic father failed in business before being crippled by arthritis and then set ablaze himself by his increasingly deranged and eventually institutionalized wife. Fires of all kinds haunted the extended Guthrie clan, destroying residences and individuals seemingly at random; as late as the Forties, Guthrie's beloved daughter, Cathy, a product of his second marriage, was burned to death after an electrical cord short circuited while the four - year old was left home alone. Later, in the throes of his disease, Guthrie would accidentally set himself on fire, severely burning his right arm. Regardless of his family's history, Guthrie's third wife reported that she would arrive home from work to find the "baby naked and pissed, Woody filthy, all gas jets flaming for heat." Though Guthrie died relatively young, he would live long enough to additionally set fire to the back of a car with a dropped cigarette. Cray's depiction of dustbowl Oklahoma, Depression - era California, Guthrie's wanderings and rise into the national consciousness via radio, and his portraits of Guthrie friends and associates John Steinbeck, Will Geer, Cisco Houston, Leadbelly, Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Rambling Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan (who some witnesses feel callously imitated the lisps and spasms caused by Guthrie's disease for his own early performances) are detailed, well - rounded, and illuminating.
Rating: 
Summary: A dissent ...(This Land is Your Land?)
Review: I have to admit that I am in the minority in concluding that this biography was just OK, and for my purposes, not deserving of the 5-star reviews which have been bestowed upon it. Perhaps, if I was an avid Guthrie fan and knew quite a bit about him and his life before starting this book, I might have had a different reaction, because then the book might have been useful in filling in gaps in my knowledge. However, my knowledge of Guthrie before reading the book (and I suspect that of others as well) was only that he was a man who was hugely influential over the development and growth and 20th-century American folk music, and, not insignificantly, the man who wrote "This Land is Your Land." Indeed, as more or less conceded in the Introduction, that song is his most enduring accomplishment, and virtually the first sentence about him in most of his obituaries mentions that he composed it. I have always loved that song and was very curious about its creation and how it came to be virtually one of our alternate national anthems.
With that hope in mind when I bought the book, I was shocked at the unbelievably terse and cursory treatment given that song, and that is one of the primary reasons for my disappointment in the book. Whie the Introduction does talk about the song and its importance a bit, that proved to be just a tease. The entire rest of the book consists of less than 1 page in total in discussing the song. On page 165, he is writing out some lyrics to the song. Then, with virtually nothing in between, we are advised in the footnotes that "it is the song most likely to be remembered and sung by later generations" (p. 442) and that it is "one of the most influential songs in rock history." (p. 455). Well I for one was curious as to how the song traveled the long journey from point A (its creation) to point B (one of the most influential songs in rock history), but Cray is of no help whatsoever on this point. In fact, he hardly discusses it at all after the Introduction.
A few of the many questions I had about that song before reading the book (all of which were unanswered by Cray) were: 1. Was Guthrie ever interviewed about any aspect of the song (e.g. its creation, influence, etc.) and if so, what did he say? 2. Did Guthrie ever write anything about the song? 3. We are always told (as we were here) that the song was an "angry response" to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America". If so, why is it that there is no hint of that in the verses of the song which are most commonly sung and why did he delete one of the verses that clearly was a response to Berlin (which is quoted in the Introduction)? Also, do we know that it was an "angry response" solely from the one obscure verse of the song that is never sung, or did Guthrie ever comment about his motivations? 4. How did the song seep into the national consciousness. Was there some DJ somewhere who started playing it over and over? Was there some "tipping point"? These questions are entirely unaddressed by Cray, who, after telling us that the song was written, essentially says nothing more about it, other than to advise us at the end that it is one of the most influential songs ever. This is just a huge void of information. 5. Even Cray's brief discussion of the song was confusing. We are told that "he borrowed the tune from the Carter Family's 'Little Darling, Pal of Mine'". By "borrowed" does that mean that the music is not his and that he is responsible for the lyrics only--i.e. that he "sampled" the Carter family's song (to use current rap terminology)? I had always thought that both the words and music were by Woody alone. So what does Cray mean that he "borrowed the tune"? 6. What were the financial implications of the song for Guthrie. It seemed that he lived on the verge of poverty virtually his entire life and yet he must have received some substantial royalties from this song. Given that Cray was fairly diligent at many points when discussing Guthrie's financial situation and income and royalties, I was surprised that there was no discussion of what this huge song meant to Guthrie financially (of course, given the almost complete absence of mention of every other aspect of this song, perhaps I shouldnt have been surprised).
Two other criticisms. First, much of the book is of a "just the facts ma'am" variety with Cray painstakingly advising us of Guthrie's peripatetic movements at all times (like a travelogue) with not a whole lot of analysis in between. Second, I got the distinct impression that Cray does not have much of a musical background, and thus, while there is alot of discussion of Guthrie's song lyrics, there is hardly any about the musicianship itself.
Rating:
Summary: Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie
Review: In his song "Christmas in Washington," Steve Earle issues a call for Woody Guthrie's return because our times require his unflinchingly honest and prophetic voice. Cray (Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren) answers with this vivid portrait of the peripatetic Okie bard's life, music, and hard times. Drawing on materials from the Woody Guthrie Archives and interviews with Guthrie's friends, the author chronicles the songwriter's birth and youth in Oklahoma and Texas, marked by his sister's death, his mother's committal to an insane asylum, and his father's tumble from wealth to poverty during the Depression. His days in New York City's Greenwich Village and his death in 1967 from Huntington's chorea are also covered. To boot, Cray tells the stories behind some of Guthrie's best-known songs (e.g., "This Land Is Your Land") and provides detailed information about his Communist ties. Guthrie has deeply influenced the likes of Earle, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Ani DeFranco; Cray eloquently bears witness to his tremendous significance in this definitive biography. All libraries will want to own a copy.
Rating:
Summary: Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie
Review: In his song "Christmas in Washington," Steve Earle issues a call for Woody Guthrie's return because our times require his unflinchingly honest and prophetic voice. Cray (Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren) answers with this vivid portrait of the peripatetic Okie bard's life, music, and hard times. Drawing on materials from the Woody Guthrie Archives and interviews with Guthrie's friends, the author chronicles the songwriter's birth and youth in Oklahoma and Texas, marked by his sister's death, his mother's committal to an insane asylum, and his father's tumble from wealth to poverty during the Depression. His days in New York City's Greenwich Village and his death in 1967 from Huntington's chorea are also covered. To boot, Cray tells the stories behind some of Guthrie's best-known songs (e.g., "This Land Is Your Land") and provides detailed information about his Communist ties. Guthrie has deeply influenced the likes of Earle, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Ani DeFranco; Cray eloquently bears witness to his tremendous significance in this definitive biography. All libraries will want to own a copy.
Rating:
Summary: A USEFUL, WELL WRITTEN BIOGRAPHY - Good Read
Review: Mr. Cray does a nice job on this one indeed! Not only do we get a very well researched biography of a very interesting life, but we get a very good picture of the times he lived. We are now being flooded with works addressing this era of American History, rightfully so, and this work gives us another "slant," one we may find missing in other works. I must admit to being one of those who knew only one side of the Guthrie story, the musical, and was certainly ignorant of what made, what caused that wonderful music to exist. It is good to be able to put the music and the man into proper prespective. I do think we have to take care and not be overly judgemental of Gutheries and his chosen life style and politics. Most sucessful men and women in our history have certainly had their dark side. We have to be able to take the good with the bad and I feel this biography has done a woderful job in pointing this out. I found the text to be easy on the eye, facts well presented and foot notes to be wonderful (almost as helpful and interesting as the bulk of the book itself). I highy recommend this one.
Rating:
Summary: Well Written - Very Useful - A Good Read
Review: Mr. Cray does a very nice job on this one indeed! Not only do we get a very well researched biography of a very interesting life, but we get a very good picture of the times he lived. We are now being flooded with works addressing the era of American History, rightfully so, and this work gives us another "slant," one we may find missing in other works. I must admit to being one of those who knew only one side of the Guthrie story, the musical, and was certainly ignorant of what made, what caused that wonderful music to exsist. It is good to be able to put the music and the man in proper prespective. I do think we have to take care and not be overly judgemental of Gutherie and his chosen life style. Most sucessful men and women in our history have certainly had their dark side. We have to be able to take the good with the bad and I feel this biography has done a wonderful job in pointing this out. I found the text to be easy on the eye, facts well presented and foot notes to be wonderful (almost as helpful and interesting as the book itself). I highly recommend.
Rating:
Summary: Well Written - Very Useful - A Good Read
Review: Mr. Cray does a very nice job on this one indeed! Not only do we get a very well researched biography of a very interesting life, but we get a very good picture of the times he lived. We are now being flooded with works addressing the era of American History, rightfully so, and this work gives us another "slant," one we may find missing in other works. I must admit to being one of those who knew only one side of the Guthrie story, the musical, and was certainly ignorant of what made, what caused that wonderful music to exsist. It is good to be able to put the music and the man in proper prespective. I do think we have to take care and not be overly judgemental of Gutherie and his chosen life style. Most sucessful men and women in our history have certainly had their dark side. We have to be able to take the good with the bad and I feel this biography has done a wonderful job in pointing this out. I found the text to be easy on the eye, facts well presented and foot notes to be wonderful (almost as helpful and interesting as the book itself). I highly recommend.
Rating:
Summary: A 'you are there' feel to discussions of notable moments
Review: The music of folk singer Woody Guthrie's works lives on in Ed Cray's Ramblin' Man: a biography which charts his coming of age, his many associations with influential musicians of the times, and his shows and stage presentations. Unlike other biographies, Ramblin' Man takes a personal approach and presents a 'you are there' feel to discussions of notable moments in Guthrie's life, offers from booking agents, and stage appearances. Ramblin Man reads with all the passion and drama of the novel but is a solid factual review of Woody Guthrie's inherently fascinating life and times.
|
