Saying Whatever Needs to Be Said: Rhetoric and Rhythm in the Writing of Woody Guthrie

 

IS 289 - Interpreting Documents	Appendix 1 and Appendix 2
Prof. Phil Agre	Works Cited
December 8, 2005	Audio materials related to this document: Sound recordings
A .pdf of this text is available here.

 

Scholarship about Woody Guthrie has largely been about the content or intention of his discourse, concerned with questions of his political viewpoints and cultural authenticity. However, what immediately stands out in reading Guthrie's writing is his lyrical use of language, his rhetoric. Little to no scholarship has been done on this aspect of Guthrie except in the context of its potential use to further communist or populist ideals¹.

Woody Guthrie is best known for his music; songs like “This Land is Your Land”, “Union Maid”, and “Pretty Boy Floyd.” However, he also was a prolific writer. Guthrie lived to see his autobiography, Bound for Glory, a book of poetry entitled Born to Win, and his weekly column “Woody Sez” for People's World published. Much of his writing was published posthumously and can be found in the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives or in the Woody Guthrie Manuscript Collection at the American Folklife Center². Guthrie is a sophisticated and highly skilled orator and his careful use of rhythmic rhetorical devices translates well to the written page. A careful examination of Guthrie's correspondence and other writings reveals sophisticated use of polysyndeton, enumeratio, metaphor, and alliteration to evoke the rhythm of music in his writing. Polysyndeton and music as metaphor would remain Guthrie's most prevalent rhetorical tools throughout his lifetime. This paper will closely study Guthrie's use of rhetoric in three letters written in 1942³.

By 1942, Guthrie had an established relationship with Alan Lomax of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Lomax is known for his field recordings of folk singers from around the world. It was Lomax who made the introduction between Guthrie and Victor Records that resulted in the Dust Bowl Ballads, Guthrie's most successful album during his lifetime. December 8, 1941 the United States entered World War II and Guthrie began to focus on the “work to win the war.”

The equation of work to the war effort appears several times in Guthrie's writings. At the beginning of Guthrie's autobiography, Bound for Glory, the refrain is expressed as “Gonna take somthin' more'n a dam bunch of silly wisecracks ta ever win this war! Gonna take work!” (Guthrie 1971,20) In his letter to Victor Records the refrain appears as “This is a war of work.” In his letter to Columbia the statement “war songs are work songs” is one of clear equation. In his letter to Lomax he simply discusses the notion of “work to win the war.” Guthrie obviously felt strongly about this point. Because Guthrie was concerned with workers and the common man, his intent was probably to focus on the labors at home of those who are supporting the war effort through work in munitions factories or agricultural fields or hospitals. Guthrie's point was that an entire infrastructure is needed to support a nation at war and that the laborers in this infrastructure are critical to the success of any military engagements.

In line with this ideal, Guthrie developed a concept for a new album about the connection between war and work. He wrote to Victor Records and Columbia proposing a new album of war songs to be entitled “War Songs are Work Songs.” Guthrie included copies of his correspondence with Victor and Columbia in the letter he sent to Alan Lomax dated approximately June 17, 1942. It is these letters that we will later examine for Guthrie's use of rhetoric.

The three letters are essentially business letters written in hope of getting a recording contract. Guthrie follows some of the standard business etiquette of the time⁴. For instance, he addresses the letter to a specific person or to “Dear Sirs,” although he should technically use an “Attention” line addressed to the appropriate department if a specific contact is not known. Guthrie should include his own complete address at the upper right-hand corner of the letter, but instead puts his proposed album title. On the Victor letter he does provide his address below the signature line. However, Guthrie's address is completely missing on the letter to Columbia. On the letter to Lomax, Guthrie's address is incomplete. The address to whom he is sending the letter should appear in the form it takes in the company's letterhead in either the upper left-hand corner or the lower left-hand corner. Guthrie's address for Victor consists of “The Victor Recording Co., Mr. R. P. Weatherald.” His addresses for Columbia and Lomax appear to be more complete, but Lomax's is missing the city and state, and both Lomax and Columbia are missing the street address. However, Guthrie carefully follows rules for indentation. He starts each letter with a large indent in the first paragraph and then follows with shorter indentations for consequent paragraphs. He also is sure to keep a one inch margin on the left.

The content of Guthrie's letters matches fairly well with his sporadic implementation of standard business correspondence rules. He is polite, but is also forceful and expresses strong opinions. In a a potentially illogical move, he begins both letters to the record companies by complaining about the kinds of music that the music industry in general has been putting out. He refers to the music as “empty slogans, and zipply rhymes” (Guthrie, Letter to Victor Recordings, 1942) and “empty, sissy, and scared” (Guthrie, Letter to Columbia Recording Co., 1942). Songs appearing in the top fifteen on the Billboard charts for the month prior to Guthrie's letter included songs such as “Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree” by Glenn Miller, “Sleepy Lagoon” by Harry James, and “Jonny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland” by Kay Kyser (Whitburn 2002,163).

In addition to the fact that many of the top artists were on the Victor or Columbia labels, Guthrie's complaints may have been an intentional dig at Columbia. Two years prior, in 1940, Columbia released Burl Ives' “God Bless America.” Guthrie had a strong reaction to what he perceived as the “unqualified jingoism” of the song and penned what would become “This Land is Your Land” in response (Carman 2000,105).

In both the letters to the recording companies, Guthrie explains that he would like to present his songs and album idea and mentions that the book he is writing (Bound for Glory was published the next year) is likely to boost sales. He spends about half the time in each letter extolling the virtues of work, community and tradition. It is these passages in which Guthrie wavers in any attempt at formal writing and lets his natural literary style appear with it's rhythm, imagery, and echoes of oral speech patterns.

Even in letters never intended for publication, there is evidence of Guthrie's persuasive use of speech. In them, Guthrie reinforces his populist/utopian ideals and writes with a cadence and rhythm that invokes the oral tradition of storytelling and ballad-singing. Guthrie seems to have an instinctive sense of rhetoric and persuasive writing that was further developed by his desire to learn and consequent attempts to self-educate. It is unclear if Woody Guthrie ever graduated from High School⁵, but there is evidence that he may have learned about Western Thought and rhetorical traditions chiefly through use of public libraries or books lent by friends. Bryan Carman reports in A Race of Singers that Guthrie was “remarkably well read...gaining a familiarity with such authors as Charles Darwin, François Rabelais, Carl Sandburg, Irish poet Robert Burns, Russian poet Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, Karl Marx, and a variety of Asian philosophers” (2000,85-86). Joe Klein, author of Woody Guthrie: A Life, writes of even stronger evidence of Guthrie's affinity for knowledge and language (1980,49):

While still not very receptive to the idea of formal education, Woody had become addicted to reading. His tastes ran to psychology, religion, and Eastern philosophy...One day he shocked [the librarian] by coming in with a psychology text that he had written, by hand, in a thick, bound notebook. It was an assimilation of all that he'd read about the search for self-knowledge through the ages, and owed more to Eastern spiritualism than to Viennese technicalities.

To understand the persuasive power of Guthrie's rhetoric, it is essential to place the writings within the context of the man himself. Whatever mode he wrote in, whether for publication, personal pleasure, or business correspondence, his language is permeated with currents of his spirit and ideals. To best understand what Guthrie intended to express about himself, we should examine what he himself has said in his autobiography about his experiences of the world.

Guthrie was a class-conscious idealist who was highly concerned with compassion, community, resilience, and “singing out”. In 1943, his autobiography, Bound for Glory, was published. It is difficult to tell how many of the events portrayed in the book actually occurred in the way Guthrie portrayed them. The book is fable-like to a large degree and it seems sensible to infer that Guthrie's descriptions reflect what he perceives as the true nature of things, rather than their one-hundred percent physical reality. A contemporary review in the New York Times said it quite succinctly: “Woody is on fire inside, a natural born poet trying to make prose do the big job of verse” (Reynolds 1943). Since we are concerned with what Guthrie valued rather than the literal truth of his experiences, Bound for Glory serves as an excellent document as it is precisely what Guthrie himself wished to convey about his reality.

It is difficult to describe just one of Guthrie's ideals without describing the others. His world view is an intersecting web of lived experiences, imagined realities, and amorphous categories of being human that shift and change with each new encounter. His sense of community and brotherhood is strong; so, too, is his compassion. Part of being compassionate to Guthrie is every person's inherent duty to sing out against injustice. Many of his writings reiterate some variant of seeing what's wrong and drawing attention to it. Part of his idea of community is his idea that we all want and desire roles and places in the broader community. Part of his strong sense of compassion for migrant workers and day laborers is his perception of their pain at not being able to fulfill their role of workers in a consistent and dignified way. Guthrie's role for himself is that of herald who serves as the voice of the people. In response to seeing a piece of paper blown about by the wind one day in New York, he writes (Guthrie 1971,295):

I'm blowing, and just as wild and whirling as you are, and lots of times I've been picked up, throwed down, and picked up; but my eyes has been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the windows and through the dark halls.

Guthrie is very concerned with community and it is through singing out, writing, and speaking that Guthrie feels he serves his community best. In line with his notion of work to win the war, Guthrie feels that community can be displayed by doing big works together in a way in which everyone has a role. In Bound for Glory, Guthrie has an anonymous character who speaks with a voice that has “the sound of books in it” say that Jesus will tell you “we all just mortally got to work together, build things together, fix up old things together, clean old filth together, put up new buildings, schools and churches, banks and factories together, and own everything together....Jesus don't care if you call it socialism or communism, or just me and you” (Guthrie 1971,251).

Woody Guthrie is also interested in encouraging people to not be afraid, to have hope, and to be resilient. For Guthrie, resilience and hope are essential elements of being human. The January/February 2002 Nora's News, presumably named after Guthrie's daughter and director of the Woody Guthrie Archives , Nora Guthrie, quotes Guthrie as writing “The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us...About all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine” (Guthrie, n.d.). Guthrie reiterates this himself in Bound for Glory: “There is a stage of hard luck that turns into fun, and a stage of poverty that turn into pride, and a place in laughing that turns into a fight” (1971,235) and “the songs say we'll come through all of these in pretty good shape, and we'll be all right, we'll work, make ourself useful” (1971, 253).

Over and over, Guthrie reiterates the ideas of strength of community, resilience, singing out, compassion, and hope:

If you think of something new to say, if a cyclone comes, or a flood wrecks the country, or a bus load of school children freeze to death along the road, if a big ship goes down, and an airplane falls in your neighborhood, an outlaw shoots it out with the deputies, or the working people go out to win a war, yes, you'll find a train load of things you can set down and make up a song about. You'll hear people singing your words around over the country, and you'll sing their songs everywhere you travel or everywhere you live; and these are the only kind of songs my head or my memory or my guitar has got any room for (1971,254).

If we examine closely his correspondence from 1942, we can see these same ideals coming to the forefront. Not by what Guthrie says alone, but in the way that he uses language to persuade his reader. Guthrie is a master at rhythmic rhetoric. He chooses rhetorical devices that rely on sounds, shapes, and spacing to level hierarchies and group concepts in subtle ways. In short, he writes as if he is singing a folk song.

Most readers of Guthrie's writing can tell that there is something unusual about his style, but usually his style is dismissed as “rambling,⁶” “benzedrine,⁷” “incoherent,⁸” or “grotesquely verbose.⁹” What these critics are picking up on is Guthrie's propensity for rhythmic figures and his use of dialect. We will examine Guthrie's use of dialect first as his purposeful misspellings and incorrect verb tenses may lead to suspicions of Guthrie's inauthenticity or the fallacious idea that use of dialect cannot coincide with literary skill. As one New York Times reviewer put it (Prescott 1943):

All the “I seens,” the “clumb ups,” the “not nevers,” the “it had blowed ups” and the “we wases”...make an impressive collection indeed. In fact, there are so many of them, dark suspicions begin to raise their ugly heads...Is this an act? Is this sincere? Can anyone really think and write such rapturous spasms and mean them and never forget his bad grammar?

Guthrie's use of dialect is probably the greatest hindrance to recognition of his literary skill. Many readers are likely to share the suspicions of Mr. Prescott. However, on closer analysis Guthrie's way of speaking actually reflects what could logically be assumed to be his natural dialect. It is not that Guthrie is unfamiliar with standard verb forms or proper spellings; it is simply that he purposefully chose to write as if he were speaking aloud. Based on his values and conceptions of the world as explored earlier, this seems appropriate as it lends itself well to the rhetorical devices he uses and reinforces the ideals he wants to bring forward: speaking out in one's own tongue brings forward ideas of community resilience and hope for the future.

In all three letters, Guthrie displays hints of the dialect Mr. Prescott denounces, although Guthrie's dialect is significantly more pronounced in his letter to his friend Alan Lomax to the point that he includes non-standard orthography, or “eye dialect.” Dialect may be described as a variety of language differentiated from other varieties by presence of specific features (Carver 1987,1). Woody Guthrie spent the first part of his life in Oklahoma and northern Texas, therefore it is reasonable to assume that these two regions would influence or comprise Guthrie's natural dialect. As many “Okies” came from these regions and Guthrie is heavily associated with the “Okies,” I will compare Guthrie's dialect in his correspondence to contemporary migrant workers (Okies) of the time.

In the Victor letter, Guthrie uses the following terms that appear to be dialectical:

Table 1: Instances of Dialect in the Victor Records Letter

A field recording done in 1941 at the Visalia Farm Security Administration Camp by S. C. Loop records the narratives of Roy Turner, Bill Robinson, and Wayne “Gene” Dinwiddie (Loop 1941). All three men are migrant workers who came to California from Oklahoma during the 1930s. These men, then, are the “genuine article” and can serve as a litmus test for Guthrie's authentic use of dialect. Turner echoes Guthrie's use of non-standard verb tense with the come/came switch. He says “from there we come to” instead of “from there we came to.” Robinson uses phrases such as “there weren't any” instead of “wasn't”, and “you was lucky” instead of “you were.” Dinwiddie says “we done pretty good,” “people was lined up,” and “we come on over.” Guthrie's non-standard verb usage then, is in keeping with the natural use of language for the region he came from.

Although none of the three men mention nickel machines or that they “feel of” something, both phrases are established as part of American speech. The appendix to American Regional Dialects (Carver 1987,263) notes the use of “feel of” as an alternate for “to feel” used in the Upper South Layer which includes portions of Oklahoma (120). “Nickel machine” is probably derived from the established term of “nickelodeon machine.” The Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles notes that a “nickelodeon machine” is an alternate for “nickelodeon,” of which one definition is “juke box¹¹”(Mathews 1951,1130).

Guthrie's letter to the Columbia Recording Co. also makes use of some dialect.

 

Location	Guthrie's Form	Standard Form
Paragraph 1, words 22-23	broke down	broken down
Paragraph 1, word 24	rattletraps	automobiles
Paragraph 1, words 84-85	had ought	ought
Paragraph 3, word 32	folks	people

Table 2: Instances of Dialect in the Columbia Recording Letter

Guthrie's dropping of the final consonant in “broken” is equivalent to Tom Higgenbotham's use of “like” to stand in for “likely.” He says that in the hot weather the “fat hogs like to die,” meaning that the hogs were likely to die (Higgenbotham, AFS 4150b1, 1940). Higgenbotham is a migrant worker recorded in 1940 in the Yuba City Farm Security Administration Camp. He, like Guthrie, is from Oklahoma and, like Guthrie, the word “folks” is one of the ways in which he refers to people¹². Both Guthrie and Turner ( Loop 1941) use “rattletraps” to describe automobiles that are in poor condition and unreliable. Guthrie's extraneous use of “had” in “had ought” is not replicated by the oral history narrators, but it seems in keeping with another pattern of speech in which sentences are qualified with phrases such as “you know,” “I suppose,” “I imagine,” and “you see.¹³”

Guthrie's dialect is most present and seems most purposeful in his letter to Alan Lomax. Guthrie considered Lomax a friend and at this point in his life was singing in the Almanac Singers along with Lomax's sister, Bess Lomax. He was probably in touch with Lomax at least somewhat frequently. There is evidence to suggest that their relationship was one more of friendship than just one of folklorist and informant¹⁴. In Lomax's July 9, 1942 reply to Guthrie's letter, he says:

for the last two weeks I have been wheeling and dealing with a group of college professors so hard and fast that I wake up in the morning and start to stroke my long grey beard, and I find it warn't there. On picnics and beer parties the songs that they've liked the best have been Pretty Boy Floyd and then Pretty Boy Floyd all over again. (Lomax, correspondence to Guthrie, July 9, 1942)

Lomax continues the frank and humorous tone of the letter by warning Guthrie about a producer at Decca Records and says of him “Watch him like a hawk. He likes countryfied music and likes to get his hands on it and put it in his pockets”(Lomax, correspondence to Guthrie, July 9, 1942).

It makes sense, given the friendship between the two men, that Guthrie would have felt much more casual when writing to Lomax than he did to Victor and Columbia. His comfort level shows in the greater amount of dialect that appears in his writing.

Location	Guthrie's Form	Standard Form
Paragraph 1, word 15	sitation	situation
Paragraph 1, word 23	blueses	blues
Paragraph 1, word 28	shore	sure
Paragraph 1, word 35	done	did
Paragraph 1, word 38	hootenany	hootenanny - describes a folk concert
Paragraph 1, word 42	was	were
Paragraph 1, word 53	trotting	bringing
Paragraph 2, word 48	ain't	am not
Closing paragraph, words 31–32	hunt up15	“look up” or “find” are more standard

Table 3: Instances of dialect in Guthrie's letter to Alan Lomax

The first line in the letter is particularly evocative of oral speech and Talking Blues¹⁶: “You guys still making up Washington Bad Houses Talking In View of the New Sitation Crowded on Account of the War Effort Blueses (Guthrie, correspondence to Lomax, June 17, 1942)?” He has written the line as if it were the title of a song and he has included non-standard orthography in his spelling of “situation.” Additionally, he has dropped the “are” from the standard form of the question “are you guys still...”

“Shore” and “sitation” are examples of eye dialect, or non-standard orthography. Eye dialect tells the reader how the writer intends the word to be pronounced by adjusting the available letters that have standard pronunciations. In this way, he can alert us to the way in which the standard word is pronounced in a non-standard way. Sumner Ives explains (1971,165):

The author can represent only those phonetic features for which spellings exist or can be improvised. These improvised spellings can be interpreted only by reference to the phonetic associations with the orthographic conventions, and these associations differ from region to region. Hence, the author cannot re-spell his own dialect in terms of his own dialect except by using alternate spellings that are phonetically the same, and to the author and to readers in his own region, this would simply be “eye” or visual dialect.

These two examples of eye dialect are unique in the set of the three letters and serve as the first true signal that Guthrie deliberately intended to indicate something by his dialect. Analyzing intent behind written dialect is extremely difficult, especially when the author is likely to have naturally spoken in the same dialect he is portraying. We cannot go back in time and ask Guthrie what his intent was when spelling “sure” as “shore” and there is a strong possibility that the dialect is authentic in that it represents the way Guthrie would have spoken the word. We can only acknowledge that a non-standard spelling from someone who was highly literate has to be intentional; what it signals remains unknown.

However, writing in his own dialect sets the folk mood and affects the cadence of the three letters; the rhythm he achieves through polysyndeton, enumeratio, and alliteration. The overriding rhetorical tool for all of Guthrie's writing is music as metaphor in which he both speaks of music metaphorically and applies the aural qualities of music to his writing. His writing has a rhyme and meter to it, an inherent structure and tempo. The “rambling verbosity” attributed to him is due to the flourishes of words serving to lay down the beats in each measure. He idolized music as an agent for human understanding and social change, and it was his primary mode of expression. He writes:

And there on the Texas plains right in the dead center of the dust bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen there was plenty to make up songs about.

Some people liked me, hated me, walked with me, walked over me, jeered me, cheered me, rooted me and hooted me, and before long I was invited in and booed out of every public place of entertainment in that country. But I decided that songs was a music and a language of all tongues.

I never did make up many songs about cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs of what all's wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in that country was thinking.

And this has held me ever since.

Guthrie's writing has a strong aural element to it that successfully transforms it into poetically musical verse. The first sign we see of this transition is his use of alliteration to bring certain sounds to the forefront. In the Victor letter he writes (emphasis added), “In these days of a war...when our whole nation...job of working...greatest war...whole world...war songs are work songs.” The use of the “w” sound serves as a signal to listen for additional aural elements throughout the letter.

In the Columbia letter, the repetition of sounds is more obvious. The passage regarding folk songs is particularly sonant:

I am enclosing a large number of songs, mostly old time folk songs brought up to date, as this bringing them up to date is what keeps a folk song a folk song, it says whatever needs to be said, or as much as the law allows, at the time when it needs to be said.

Note the nearly exact repetition of three phrases: “brought up to date” vs. “bringing up to date,” “a folk song” vs. “a folk song,” and “needs to be said” vs. “needs to be said.” Guthrie gives “a folk song” particular emphasis because he repeats it back-to-back, emphasizing the sound and rhythm of the words.

Guthrie plays with the sound of words in his other writings as well. In Bound for Glory he provides a particularly musical passage (1971,297):

Thank God, everybody ain't afraid. Afraid in the skyscrapers, and afraid in the red tape offices, and afraid in the tick of the little machines that never explodes, stock market tickers, that scare how many to death, ticking off deaths, marriages and divorces, friends and enemies; tickers connected and plugged in like juke boxes, playing the false and corny lies that are sung in the wild canyons of Wall Street, songs wept by the families that lose, songs jingled on the silver spurs of the men that win.

If you pull out the elements of this passage that are aurally related to each other or repetitive, you get: afraid, afraid, afraid, afraid, tick, tickers, death, ticking, death, tickers, plugged, playing, sung, wild, Wall Street, songs wept, songs, silver spurs, win. There is repetition of specific words (afraid, tick/tickers/ticking, death, songs) and several sounds that are repeated (a, t, d, pl, w, s). The elements that Guthrie has drawn attention to through alliteration and repetition of sound serve to illustrate the way in which aural or musical elements can reinforce the basic idea of the text that is being portrayed.

Guthrie also provides a very strong metrical form throughout his letters. Meter in music refers to sequences of strong and weak pulses. In analysis of Guthrie's writing, we will use meter to refer to the duration and accent of syllables. In all three letters, phrases or “measures” of rhythm can be seen. In the Columbia letter he writes “This is a war of work and work is...” in which the pattern of strong-weak-strong-weak-strong-weak accents of syllables is formed by “war of work and work is.”

The shape formed in the Lomax letter is actually complementary and relies on the duration of syllables, rather than accent. He writes, “I think the idea of trotting in the singing songs is a new, good twist.” Note that Guthrie inserts a comma indicating a pause or slowing down between new and good. This serves to get the reader to hear the three final words as roughly the same length in duration. Using a large X for a longer syllable, and a small x for a syllable said with shorter duration, this can be graphed as:

Another way in which Guthrie provides emphasis and rhythm is through his use of enumeratio and polysyndeton. Guthrie is very fond of lists (enumeratio) and lists that warrant special attention are spaced out with the extraneous use of “and” (polysyndeton). The clearest example of this in his correspondence is this passage from the Victor letter. Guthrie says “if recording is cut down, I think it ought to be the cocktail numbers and not the songs about jackhammers and diesel engines and saws and axes and sledges that build our railroads.” The jackhammers to sledges portion corresponds to the pattern of:

There are two noteworthy features to this passage. First,“and diesel engines and saws and axes” forms a pattern of weak-strong-weak-strong-weak-weak-strong-weak-strong-weak, which is a symmetrical shape. The second important thing to note is that the passage can be broken down into sixteen syllables of four beats per measure. Charles Seeger mentions the idea that sung syllables are usually syncopated in “close approximations of simple fractions of the tempo unit” (1958, 9).

Polysyndeton seems to be a favored device of Guthrie's. One extreme example occurs in an essay he wrote entitled “No Title¹⁷.” His “sentence” on page 6 continues for three-quarters of a page, jumping from thought to thought with an “and”, a comma, or a dash to add in each new element. At this point in the document, Guthrie is extremely disappointed and angry with what he has perceived has occurred in Oklahoma due to the oil boom. He indicates that boomtowns were havens for gambling, crime, drinking, and prostitution. The final portion of what he writes indicates his anger with the police response to the situation (Guthrie, no date, 6):

...the preachers couldn't preach it, not the solution, and the cops couldn't see it, and the deputies couldn't stop it, and the lawyers and their fake sheriffs and chiefs of police - just promised the church members they'd stop it all, and took money from then, and then they took money from the hustlers and whore and thugs to let them run wild - and the law just stood in the middled, and smiled at both sides, and one foot was on the church house step, and the other'n in at the whore-house door.

Guthrie appears to use polysyndeton when he is discussing something he feels strongly about. This is also evident in the three letters. Rhetoric chiefly appears in the paragraphs of the letters in which Guthrie “lapses” into speaking about the war or about labor rather than about the business purpose of contacting the recording companies. The paragraphs in which the topic is potential business arrangements lack the alliteration, metaphor of music through sound and meter, and enumeratio or polysyndeton.

Geoff Nunberg appeared on “Fresh Air” with the insight that polysyndeton “signals plentitude and immediacy, as if you're laying down your thoughts one scoop after another” (Nunberg, 2002¹⁸). Nunberg also mentions that it is “the pattern playwrights and screenwriters used when they wanted to evoke the artless wisdom of the common man” and that it is used to represent “the rhythm of the simple feelings that are obvious to everyone but the clever people who make life too complicated.” Whether or not polysyndeton accurately reflects the “artless wisdom of the common man,” it can be found as a speech pattern amongst migrant workers. When asked about migrant workers, Roy Turner replies “There's some of 'em, of course, that'll prosper and have somethin' and some of 'em that wants to, and some of 'em that don't and some of 'em that just wants to get by” (Turner 1941).

Another feature of polysyndeton is that it serves as an equalizer of the elements within the string. There is an implied equal quality between each thing with the “and” serving to flatten the differences among unlike things (Nunberg 2002). This, too, is similar to folk music. Bruno Nettl writes “The idea of unity appears to be at all levels essential in most folk and primitive music” (1956,201).

And so we return to the idea of music as unifier, beacon of tradition and community. Guthrie repeatedly speaks of music as having a rightful place in serving the needs of community, encouraging resilience, speaking out, and being hopeful. He writes:

I decided that for this minute, for this one snap of their lives, they'd see a human walking though that place, not singing because he was hired and told what to sing, but just walking through there thinking about the world and singing about it (1971, 296)

and reiterates this thought with

And I knew I was glad to be loose from that sentimental and dreamy trash, and gladder to be edging on my way along here singing with the people, singing something with fight and guts and belly laughs and power and dynamite to it. (1971,299)

It is offensive to Guthrie when music has been misappropriated for uses not in keeping with his ideals. Mark Jackson provides a particularly strong example when he quotes Guthrie as writing about his remembrance of a postcard of a lynching. Guthrie writes that they were:

a hanging by the neck from a river bridge, and the wild wind a whistling down the river bottom, and the ropes stretched tight by the weight of their bodies...stretched tight like a big fiddle string. (Guthrie, 1940 qtd. in Jackson 2005,664)

By using the fiddle image, he calls forth the values and ideas he associates with music. Guthrie's insertion of the musical imagery provides contrast between what music could be and what the reality is of the situation he just described.

Guthrie's anger at the misuse of music comes to the forefront in his correspondence with the record companies as well. In his letter to Victor he admonishes contemporary recordings with “the working folks I've met didn't build America in a sissy tone of voice such as the nickel machines are full of.” He writes to Lomax that “I ain't entertaining no high hopes at either place of getting to put out the albums, but I will feel better, anyway, to offer them the chance.” Although Guthrie suspects that the record companies will continue to put out the “empty, sissy, and scared” albums, he feels it is his duty to at least try to get them to use music appropriately.

It is unequivocal that Guthrie loved music. He wrote over one thousand songs in his lifetime (Carman 2000,85) - purportedly twenty-six of them in a month-long spree for the Bonneville Power Administration (Klein 1980,194). Commenting on the work of Simon Frith, John Street says: “Music...gives us the experience of being one kind of person rather than another. Music provides a narrative by which an identity is realized, not expressed or revealed. And what is true for individual identity is also true for collective identity” (1999,14). Sam Hinton, himself a singer, echoes this thought with “For folk music is not so much a body of art as it is a process, an attitude, and a way of life; its distinguishing features lie not within the songs themselves, but in the relations of those songs to a folk culture” (1955,170)

Guthrie's preferred identity was surely realized through his music. He sang over and over again about struggle, tradition, community, resilience, and the importance of singing out¹⁹. His use of musical rhetorical devices and the quality of his speech kept alive the identity he had ensconced within folk culture. Richard Reuss writes of Guthrie that “He clung to the older folk and hillbilly styles of vocalization and harmony and shunned emergent forms of country-western music...Even his contacts with urban folksingers made no important changes in his traditional style” (1970,285). Guthrie fulfilled his self-appointed role as herald for the people in everything he wrote, whether music or prose. Through sophisticated use of written language he brought forth rhythm and sound evocative of the best of his folk songs.

Appendix 1

Figure 1: Letter from Guthrie to Victor Records. Click here for larger image. This is available at: The Archive of American Folk Song

Figure 2: Letter from Guthrie to Columbia Records. Click here for a larger image. This is available at: The Archive of American Folk Song

Figure 3: Letter from Guthrie to Alan Lomax. Click here for a larger image. This is available at: The Archive of American Folk Song

Appendix 2

Figure 1: Page 6 from Guthrie's "No Title." Click here for a larger image. This is available at: The Archive of American Folk Song

Works Cited