Professor of History Maurice Isserman reviewed Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie for the Chicago Tribune. The book, written by Ed Cray, will go on sale in mid-February.
In the review, Isserman wrote:
Born in Oklahoma in 1912, Woody Guthrie found himself singing "hard hitting songs for hard hit people" in the migrant labor camps of California in the late 1930s. Soon afterward he was singing those songs on the CBS radio network, and recording them for the Library of Congress archives.
... Woody may not have written 10,000 songs--there were more like 1,000--and many of those proved ephemeral (not too many people still sing his ode to "Miss Pavlachenko," a Red Army sniper who single-handedly killed 257 Nazi soldiers in 1942). But as long as there are acoustic guitars there will be musicians enthusiastically belting out the lyrics to such Guthrie songs as "Roll on Columbia," "Pastures of Plenty," "Union Maid" and, above all, "This Land Is Your Land"--so Fadiman's prediction was not far off the mark. Guthrie's music helped define the era of the 1930s in popular memory; since the 1960s his songs have, for many Americans, come to embody a timeless spirit of adversarial patriotism.
... For Ed Cray, Guthrie's most recent biographer, Woody is a genuine American hero whose "achievement was to capture a part of the American experience, the lives of people who had previously been excluded from public view." Despite Cray's obvious admiration for his subject, his book unsentimentally dissects Woody's capacity for self-invention (which may have been one of his most essentially American qualities). "[P]raised for his authenticity," Cray writes, Woody "was inauthentic himself."
... Whatever his shortcomings as a human being, Woody was certainly good to his future biographers. He left behind a trove of unpublished letters, reminiscences and manifestoes, as well as his published writings and his recordings. Cray has mined these sources thoroughly and interviewed many of Woody's surviving family members, friends and acquaintances. The result is a reliable and lucid work of biography. But it suffers one major defect, and that is that journalist Joe Klein got there first. Readers will not learn much from Cray's book that they could not already have garnered from Klein's celebrated "Woody Guthrie: A Life," published in 1980.
Readers of the earlier work will find no startling revelations about, or major reinterpretations of, Guthrie's life in "Ramblin' Man." Cray essentially echoes the narrative rhythms already familiar from "Woody Guthrie: A Life": 1912-1937, Guthrie is a work in progress; 1938-1947, Guthrie finds his calling; 1947-1955, Guthrie falls apart; 1956-1967, Guthrie slowly fades to death while rapidly gaining his mythic status.
... "So long, it's been good to know you," Woody sang in one of his most enduring songs. And it would be good to get to know you in some new way, Woody. But that will have to await another biography.
For the complete article, go to the Chicago Tribune Web site (registration is required).
