Woody Guthrie Archives Newsletter
Fall / Winter 2008

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From the Curator
Archives Projects
Exhibits and Programs
New Productions and Publications
Recent Researchers and Visitors
Internships
Applications for Conducting Research

From the Curator

Recently, on Pete Seeger 's new recording, Woody's longtime friend and advocate sings: They said it can't be done Our work has just begun Take it From Dr. King - Learn to sing- And drop the gun!   This brilliant lyric resonates not only for its brilliant odd-metered phrasing but also for its adherence to a greater goal. In the midst of great social and economic turmoil, Woody Guthrie demonstrated his strong commitment to certain ideals based on the union or unity of all people. For Guthrie, union was a potential human reality, not limited to any one group of people or set of beliefs.

Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, c. 1941.

The historical record documented in Guthrie's songs and travels provides continuing evidence of a universal worldview, one in which his land-America-is also your land. In line with Guthrie's compelling words and ideas, the Woody Guthrie Archives serves the public by demonstrating that social struggles are commonly shared and that solutions can be found .

During his own life, Guthrie confronted extraordinary racism, poverty, disaster, and great personal loss, yet he met challenges with an equally extraordinary belief in human capacity for doing good. And while the world has certainly changed and divisions are more heavily accented, the lessons of history accessible in the Woody Guthrie Archives remain a resource for new discoveries, ideas, and knowledge.

As you'll see below, the Archives, too, has been traveling: from Italy to Germany and on to Colombia, from Massachusetts to California. We have been present and participated in exhibits, programs, and fundraisers such as Farm Aid, which is all we can ask of each other, to be present and participate. With your support, the Woody Guthrie Archives will continue to be a center where people can come to explore history and develop their own discoveries, ideas, and knowledge. Answers, like great art, or music, or love songs are out there, and the Woody Guthrie Archives will continue to be here to help find them!

Peace,
Jorge Arévalo Mateus

From the Archives

Congratulations to Jorge Arévalo Mateus, Woody Guthrie Archives curator, who has been awarded this year's ASCAP Deems Taylor award for Best Pop Liner Notes for his work on The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949. Jorge recently won the 2008 Grammy as co-producer on the album.

Archives Projects

The Works - Jonatha Brooke

The most recent album of unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics from the Archives was conceived, researched, and produced all in this past year! Released on August 28th, Jonatha Brooke 's album The Works include 10 previously unrecorded Guthrie lyrics, and represents the first album of Woody Guthrie songs ever to have been co mposed, arranged, produced and performed by a woman. Collaborating with Jonatha on this album are Keb' Mo', Derek Trucks, Glen Phillips, and Eric Bazilian. The liner notes contain original material from the Archives, such as pages from Guthrie's notebooks, and a 1940 self-portrait taken in a New York City photo booth.

The Archives website is taking on a new look, and now includes more information about the Collection holdings than ever! Since its inception in 1994, the Archives has received approximately 1200 donations, each of which has been fully described and accessioned into the Collection. We are pleased to now be able to provide full listings of all the Photographs and Books that have been entered into the Collection over the past decade. Please view the What's in the Collection portion of the website often for new updates!

The Woody Guthrie Archives is pleased to have contributed to the 2008 Children's Music Network's Conference, where a private, personalized tour of the Archives, hosted by Nora Guthrie, was placed for bids in their Silent Auction to raise funds for the CMN, a nonprofit association dedicated to the quality and content of children's music.

Exhibits and Programs

The Woody Guthrie Foundation, in cooperation with the BMI Foundation, is pleased to announce that the application period for the Fourth Annual Woody Guthrie Fellowship program will open in October 2008! A limited number of short-term fellowships, with a value of up to $2,500 USD per recipient, will be awarded to scholars interested in conducting project-based research on topics relating to the life and legacy of Woody Guthrie. The Woody Guthrie Fellowship program invites applicants who are pursuing research topics or themes related to Woody Guthrie that explore his creative work and contribution to American music and culture. Please visit our Woody Guthrie Fellowship site for more information regarding application dates and procedure.

On December 6th, 2008, the Grammy Museum at L.A. Live will present the first exhibit to explore the history of music and politics in the US . This exhibit, which will be on display at L.A. Live for a year before commencing a national tour, includes one of Woody Guthrie's guitars, and a reproduction of original lyrics to This Land is Your Land on loan from the Archives.

The Rock N Pop Museum in Gronau, Germany, is currently presenting an exhibit entitled "On The Road." The exhibit, which runs through January 2009, incorporates original material from the Woody Guthrie Archives, including artwork, lyrics, writing, and photographs.

Woody Guthrie Archives material on display at the Rock N Pop Museum in Gronau, Germany.

The Archives has worked closely with the Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center in Pampa, TX, to provide reproductions of Guthrie photographs, lyrics, and writings for display at their annual Woody Guthrie Days in Pampa, TX which was held October 3rd and 4th, 2008.

After a successful run spanning almost five years, the original material on loan to the Experience Music Project's traveling exhibit, entitled " Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966, " has been retuned to the Archives and will again be available to researchers and scholars. Items include the lyrics to "Pretty Boy Floyd", "Ilsa Koch", and "Talking Subway Blues," as well as several pieces of artwork, notebooks, and a T-shirt worn by Guthrie while at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.

Woody Guthrie at Coney Island

From mid-May to mid-August, 2008, The Coney Island History Project displayed a special exhibit, curated by the Woody Guthrie Archives, at their visitor center located beneath the Cyclone Rollercoaster. This exhibit included lyrics, artwork, and photographs documenting the years (1943-1952) that Woody Guthrie and his family spent living in Coney Island.

The Colorado Shakespeare festival's presentation of Woody Guthrie's American Song made use of photographs from the Archives to help illustrate the production. This musical, which debuted in 1989 and has traveled across America, tells the life of the rambling folk singer through his words and music.

Woody Guthrie's American Song

The Panhandle-Plains Historic Museum's upcoming exhibit, "It's Been Good to Know Yuh: Woody Guthrie in Pampa, 1929-1936 , " examines how the years Guthrie spent in Pampa formed the foundation of a life that was to influence the folk music genre for generations to come. Curated by Jorge Arévalo Mateus, the exhibition will feature material from the Woody Guthrie Archives, including original lyrics, artwork, photographs, and writings. It will open on January 24th and run until July 31st, 2009.

New Productions and Publications

Amanda Petrusich 's recent book, It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music , published in August 2008 by Faber and Faber, Inc., contains a number of previously unpublished Guthrie passages, which Petrusich uncovered while researching at the Archives, and which she incorporates into the chapter entitled, "You Won't Find It So Hot If You Ain't Got The Do Re Mi".

Penguin Books, UK, is slated to release a new edition of Woody Guthrie's 1942 work Bound For Glory, which will feature an image from the Archives on the cover.

Rick Wartzman 's latest book, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath , which uses Guthrie lyrics to contextualize and illustrate the social and political state of affairs in 1930s California and includes an Archival image of Guthrie, was published by PublicAffairs in summer 2008.

Recent Researchers and Visitors

The Archives received many researchers over the summer, including four of the 2007/2008 BMI Fellowship recipients:

BMI Fellowship recipient Damian Carpenter of Texas conducted research at the Archives in support of his upcoming work on the continuing tradition of the 'outlaw' in folk music.

Joe Seamons conduct research at the Archives. October 2008.

BMI Fellowship recipient Joe Seamons , of Portland, Oregon, conducted research at the Archives in support of his forthcoming travelogue, which will chart Woody Guthrie's travels throughout Oregon while commissioned by the US Department of the Interior to compose songs to promote the Bonneville Power Association's hydro-electric efforts.

BMI Fellowship recipient Sandra Schulman conducted research at the Archives in support of her upcoming book on Peter LaFarge.

BMI Fellowship recipient Dr. Will Kaufman, Professor at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, spent the month of August, 2008, conducting research at the Archives on the topic of Woody Guthrie and the Popular Front.

Dr. Kaufman conducts research at the Archives. August 2008.

Joseph Cosco, Associate Professor at Old Dominion University, has begun research into Guthrie's account of the Sacco & Vanzetti trials. The Archives holds a variety of material, created by Guthrie, which relates directly to Sacco & Vanzetti, including artwork, correspondence, lyrics, and recordings.

Willie Henkes visited the Archives from Germany to conduct research on Guthrie's guitars for an upcoming book examining the history of the Gibson Guitar.

Robert Koppelman , author of Sing Out, Warning!, Sing Out, Love: The Writings of Lee Hays , visited the Archives from Florida in June, 2008, and spent three weeks conducting research at the Archives in support of his upcoming book about American oral performance as public intellectual activity.

Esben, a Danish folk singer, visited the Archives to view the original lyrics of Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key, a song which he recorded on his 2000 CD release Iøjnefaldende anonym.

Special Accessions

Accessions 2008-24: Strauss Letters

The Archives received digital copies of 124 pages of correspondence and printed material, including songbooks, sent by Woody Guthrie to Charlotte Strauss. These 15 letters and printed material, which date from 1945 to 1947, were written by Guthrie in a variety of locations, including Scott Field, Illinois; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and were sent to Strauss, who had initially contacted Guthrie by mail with her comments on Bound For Glory , at her home in rural Pennsylvania. The Archives received digital copies of the correspondence and booklets, including a rare 1947 edition of Woody Guthrie's "American Folksong".

A street sign from Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, NY, where Woody Guthrie lived from 1943 until 1952 with wife Marjorie and children Cathy, Arlo, Joady, and Nora, was recently donated to the Archives and accessioned into the Collection.

Archivist Tiffany Loiselle with Accessions 2008-226

The Archives recently acquired a copy of the first film footage in which Woody Guthrie appears. Director Pare Lorentz's The Fight For Life ( United States Film Service, 1940), which deals with public health services, features a brief cameo appearance by Woody Guthrie. This five-second clip shows Guthrie seated on the stone stairs of a building, strumming his guitar, while a police officer walks past. The audio was dubbed over, and does not feature Guthrie. For more information about Guthrie's appearance in this film, please see Ed Cray's biography of Woody Guthrie entitled Ramblin' Man , which discusses how Guthrie made his way into this film (pp.153-154).

Internships

The Woody Guthrie Archives Internship Program received four interns during the summer of 2008. Marc Pondruel, an exchange student from France; Nick Panken, a musician from New York City; Lisa Sparks, an Archivist from Michigan; and Caleb Bissinger, a high school student from Pennsylvania, all completed month-long internships at the Archives. These interns were instrumental in providing assistance on a variety of projects, including transcribing original Guthrie lyrics, surveying and listing contents of the unprocessed Harold Leventhal Papers, updating and adding content to the Archives website, and assisting with researchers. Thank you all!

Intern Lisa Sparks reviews Guthrie's personal recording collection of record albums.

Intern Marc Pondruel organizes the Archive's Book collection.

Applications for Conducting Research at the Archives

Encouraged by the range of scholarship, creativity, and inspiration that the Woody Guthrie Collection offers, the Archives welcomes researchers, scholars, artists, musicians, publishers, filmmakers, and those pursuing interests related to the life, works, and times of Woody Guthrie.

Interested researchers must complete an Application for Research Form. Successful applicants are invited to set up an appointment with the archivist weekdays between 11:00AM and 5:00PM. We encourage researchers to look at the "What's in the Collection" portion of our website before visiting the archives in order to get an overview of the material held in the Archives.

At this time, due to limited staff time and to protect the delicate collection, we are unable to accommodate general interest visits. We hope that our ever-improving website will satisfy general interest.

For further information or questions, please contact the Archives.

Thank you for your interest in the Woody Guthrie Archives!

- Tiffany Loiselle