Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie

(Book Review)

Started: I actually started this book around August 2017.  Before I had started keeping track of my Starting and Finishing books.  (Although, to be honest, by "started", in this case I mean "I got a few pages into it, and then just let it sit on my shelves for months).
I talked briefly about this book in an April 2018 vlog post--The Books I'm Currently Reading.  But I didn't make a serious attempt to tackle it until a few weeks ago.
Finished: February 6, 2019

Why I Read This Book / My History With Woody Guthrie
So... the past few weeks, while I've been carrying this book around with me, I've discovered that a whole lot of people out there have no idea who Woody Guthrie is.  (Many times someone would ask to see what I was reading, and then respond with some version of "Who's that?")
On the other hand, there's a whole lot of people out there who are obsessed with Woody Guthrie.  A couple of my friends from my college days were big Woody Guthrie nuts.  And while I was reading this book at a coffee shop, some random guy sitting next to me started up a conversation in which he started telling me all sorts of random facts about Woody Guthrie.*

Me? I'm somewhat in the middle.  I was vaguely familiar with Woody Guthrie, but not obsessed with him.
In my college days I was a Bob Dylan fan, and one of the first things every Bob Dylan fans learns is that Dylan was influenced by some guy named Woody Guthrie.
As a young radical (or at least, a radical wannabe) I was interested in the history of the American Left, and was intrigued by Woody Guthrie's iconic status.
It surprised me when I learned that "This Land is Your Land", a song we had actually been trained to sing for school concerts in elementary school, had been written by a radical leftist communist.  (But then... that's everyone's history with that song, isn't it?  We all learned to sing that song at school, and then we were all surprised later in life when we learned the history of that song.)
At one point in college, I tried to track down a CD of Woody Guthrie's music, but it was hard to track down at the time, and the one CD I did find was just a lot of scratchy recordings that didn't sound all that great. **
I was actually a lot more into Woody Guthrie's friend and collaborator, Pete Seeger.  (I've written about my history with Pete Seeger HERE - ***).  Although Woody Guthrie and Peter Seeger started out as contemporaries, Woody Guthrie was hospitalized in 1954 and that was the end of his career, whereas Pete Seeger was able to keep recording into the modern studio age.  Which (I think) is why there are a lot more quality recordings of Pete Seeger than Woody Guthrie.  (If I'm missing something here, let me know in the comments.)
I also used to have the Alice's Restaurant album by Arlo Guthrie--Woody Guthrie's son.  And I saw the movie Alice's Restaurant--which includes a dramatization of Woody Guthrie sick in the hospital bed.  (And I saw Arlo Guthrie perform once as part of one of the Grateful Dead's Further Festivals in the late 90s ****).

...yeah, so, point being, I definitely knew who Woody Guthrie was.  Even if I didn't know a lot about him.

During my year in Australia, I also learned that Woody Guthrie also had iconic status overseas.  In April 2010, I attended a Socialist conference in Melbourne in which a radical sing-along session was entitled: "This Machine Kills Fascists"--a reference to the slogan Woody Guthrie used to put on his guitars.
That very same month, friend and fellow blogger Whisky Prajer wrote a blog post called, Guitars I Dig: "This Machine KILLS Fascists"  in which he talked about the legacy of Woody Guthrie's guitars, and also included a long quotation from Bound for Glory.
I wrote in the comments:

You know, I was just at a radical sing-along this weekend entitled "This Machine Kills Fascists". It's amazing how that phrase has stuck in the imagination across generations and, in the case of Australia, continents as well.
...Whether Woody Guthrie's machine actually did kill fascists is something I've always been a bit more skeptical on. I'm sure he irritated some of them, but I suppose that's not quite as catchy.
By the way, I had no idea he was an author before reading this post, and that short section is so captivating I'd be quite keen to read the whole book someday. If only my reading list wasn't always so backed up.
I'm assuming you read the whole thing?

Whisky Prajer replied:

I've read Bound For Glory many, many times. It is a terrifically evocative read, and I had a difficult time limiting the quoted passage to what I wound up with. For a guy like you I don't hesitate to make BFG a mandatory purchase (ditto: Joe Klein's bio). 

I should have read the book years ago when Whisky first recommended it to me *****.  But, as I said, my reading list is always backed up.  And besides, it's difficult to track down English books out here in Southeast Asia (where I spend most of my time.)
But then, Whisky actually shipped the book out to me.  It came in the same package in which he sent me The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey.  It took me another year to get around to it, but here I am now with my review.

The Review
The book starts out with a vivid description of Woody riding the rails, packed in a boxcar with a lot of other desperate and poor men.  Tempers soon flare up with too many men confined in a small space, leading to a tremendous fight in the boxcar.
The reproduced conversations, and the blow-by-blow descriptions of some of the fighting, couldn't possibly have come from memory.  (Whisky Prajer has quoted an excerpt from this chapter on his blog post, if you want a taste of it.)  And this is the moment when the reader realizes that this is not a traditional autobiography, but some sort of imaginative fictionalized version of Woody's past.

Throughout the book, then, there is always a looming question as to what is true and what is exaggerated or invented.  I suppose the ideal reader of this book doesn't let such mundanities interfere with their enjoyment of a good story, and just enjoys the narrative prose for its own sake.
Me? I've got a certain personality, so it was impossible for me to turn off the questioning part of my brain completely.  But I largely enjoyed the book for what it was.
I probably should have read this book alongside of Joe Klien's biography of Woody Guthrie, as Whisky had recommended me all along.  As it was, I just read it alongside of the Wikipedia bio, and Wikipedia did a decent job of filling in most of the gaps.

Actually, speaking of what I learned from Woody Guthrie's Wikipedia bio...
The other noteworthy thing about this book is that it completely skips over all of the major events of Woody's adult life.  There's no mention of him meeting his wife, getting married, or having kids.  There's no talk of him getting discovered, or getting his first recording contract, or becoming famous, or becoming friends with John Steinbeck.  There's nothing about Guthrie's involvement with the Communist Party, or his writing songs about Thomas Mooney (a cause célèbre of the time) or writing his most famous songs, et cetera.
None of the big biographical events are in here.  If you're coming to this book because of Woody Guthrie's importance as a political symbol (and I admit, I was), then you're going to be disappointed.

The bulk of this book is just about Woody's childhood.
Apparently the idea for this book came because Guthrie's friend, Alan Lomax, was reading some of Guthrie's essays, and thought Guthrie had written some of the best accounts of American childhood (once again, via Wikipedia).  So a focus on childhood is what you get in this novel: a lot of descriptions of the games Woody Guthrie used to play with the other kids in the neighborhood, or long descriptions of the neighborhood fights, or just Woody recounting the conversations he used to have with his father, mother, and grandmother.
Again, this can be a bit frustrating if you come to this book expecting tales of organizing, protesting, and revolution.  But it's well told for what it is.  Apparently Guthrie had a lot of help in the editing of this book (again, Wikipedia), but regardless the stories still flow, and Woody has a talent for creating vivid scenes.
The childhood chapters of the book are the only ones that have a feel of a connected story.  (It recounts all the major episodes in Woody's childhood in chronological order.)  Then, once we get to adulthood, the memoir becomes a lot more episodic.  Some specific episodes of Woody's adult life are told, but no large grand story.

All of the stories in Woody's adult life feature him being down-and-out in some way--hitchhiking, riding the rails, sleeping under bridges, travelling with migrant orchard workers, et cetera.******
The chronology gets a bit muddled, but at least some of these stories appear to take place after Woody Guthrie had already become a celebrity, and probably wasn't as desperate as he portrays himself.  Apparently long after he had become successful, Woody Guthrie still liked to portray himself as an real working class person (again, Wikipedia).

I think that's all I have to say in general.  Onto my notes about specifics.

Notes about Specific Things
* So, every now and again, you read an opinion piece talking about how coddled and over-protected kids these days are, and how back in the author's day, kids used to run around the neighborhood unsupervised all day, climb trees, go swimming in the river, ride bikes without helmets, et cetera, and no one thought twice about it.
Bound for Glory has this flavor in spades.  Any modern parent would be horrified at all the dangerous things Woody Guthrie and his playmates got up to.  Apparently it was normal at the time?  Or is Woody Guthrie exaggerating again?
Chapter VII, Cain't No Gang Whip Us Now, is a long recounting of a play fight between two rival gangs of children.
It was similar to some of the playfights I remember from my own schoolyard days--similar insofar as we also had elaborate battles between groups of boys, and, like Guthrie's gang fight, we were also confused as to what extent we were playing and to what extent we were really fighting.
But we always had parents and teachers who were not too far away, and kept things from getting completely out of control. Whereas Guthrie's version sounds completely out of control, with stones and slingshots and sticks flying back and forth.  (Stones were even heated up on a stove to get them red hot, and then fired at one of the groups of boys).  I had trouble enjoying it.  I kept thinking, "Somebody's definitely going to lose an eye."
But I suppose this is what boys would get up to if they were left completely unsupervised all summer, isn't it?  And it sounds like back in the day, kids were left completely unsupervised most of the time.  So it's not hard to believe these kind of things happened.

* One of the themes throughout the book is how Woody Guthrie always stood up for the underdog.  In the gang fight described above, Woody takes the side of the new kids in town, who aren't allowed a vote in the clubhouse.
Later on, Woody talks about how he stands up for black friends while riding the rails.  Or how he and Cisco Houston (W) protect a family of Japanese Americans from a blood-thirsty mob on the night of Pearl Harbor.
You get the sense that Woody is tooting his own horn a little bit.
On the other hand, given how many racist writers there were during the 1930s, it's good to remember that there were people fighting against racism at the same time.

Comparison With Chronicles by Bob Dylan
Anyone remember Bob Dylan's memoirs?  It was a big deal when it came out back in 2004 (although I think since then it's been largely forgotten. Or am I wrong?)
Anyway, I read it back in the day, and posted some thoughts on this blog.  To quote myself from 2005:

One thing that really struck me about Bob Dylan's book is how clearly he seems to remember certain events from his past. What the room looked like, the way a conversation went, etc.
I'm tempted to compare this with my own memory. Something I've been noticing lately, especially back in the States and meeting up with old friends, is how much I've forgotten about my college days. I did save all my e-mails, as well as kept a fairly detailed day to day journal, and I'm glad I've done that now because my memory is such crap. I wonder sometimes if because I've been in Japan for so long I'm away from daily cues, people and places and other things, that might otherwise jog my memory and help to keep the past fresh in my mind. I'd be curious how other people feel like their memories are working. And how many people believe Bob Dylan actually remembers the events with the vividness he described them, or how much he is embellishing. 

Now that I've had a few years to think about it, it occurs to me that I was being incredibly dense back in 2005.  Of course Bob Dylan was embellishing his memories.  And probably any reasonably intelligent reader figured that out a long time ago.
It's interesting for me to see now how Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan's role model, did the same thing 60 years before.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more Bound for Glory has in common with Dylan's Chronicles.  Both are episodic--featuring certain events in vivid detail, and completely ignoring other events.

Also, the New York Times reviewer wrote of Dylan's Chronicles:

He's also taunting us, since he knows perfectly well that we'd rather be reading about the creation of "Blonde on Blonde" or some other LP from his 60's peak. 

Is Woody Guthrie doing the same thing in Bound for Glory--deliberately leaving out his biggest career achievements as a kind of tease to the reader?

I'm wondering more and more now if Bob Dylan wasn't using Bound for Glory as his model when he wrote his own memoirs.

As luck would have it, my reading of Bound for Glory coincided with my Scripted Youtube Book Review Series, in which I went through my old blog posts and made Youtube videos out of the old book reviews.  So when I got to making the video for Chronicles, I incorporated some of my thoughts on Bound for Glory in the video.  See HERE.
Since then, I stumbled across another Youtuber review of Chronicles HERE, who pointed out something I long ago forgot (if I ever remembered it to begin with)--Bob Dylan actually talks about his love for Bound for Glory within the actual text of Chronicles.

Footnotes (docs, pub)
* Specifically, from this gentleman I learned that Woody Guthrie actually stayed at one point in a building owned by Fred Trump--Donald Trump's father.  And that Woody Guthrie wrote (but didn't record) a song called "Old Man Trump" about the racist housing policies of Fred Trump.  See New Yorker article HERE.

** Of course that was back in the dark ages of the 1990s.  Nowadays with the Internet, it's never been easier to track down old recordings.  There's a lot of Woody Guthrie stuff on Youtube, but most of the recording quality sounds scratchy and old and not all that great generally.  I'm assuming that the modern recording technology just wasn't around in Woody's heyday?

*** Pete Seeger actually wrote the foreword to Bound for Glory, in which Seeger said, "Woody never argued theory much, but you can be quite sure that today he would have poured his fiercest scorn on the criminal fools who sucked America into the Vietnam mess."

**** Fun fact--Arlo Guthrie refuses to perform Alice's Restaurant in concert.  I had actually known this ahead of time. A high school friend, who had seen Arlo Guthrie in concert previously, had told me he had refused to play that song when she saw him.  People kept yelling out "Alice's Restaurant!" and Arlo Guthrie just said, "Sorry guys, I don't do that anymore."
When I saw him, Arlo Guthrie teased the audience by playing a bit of the chorus on the guitar, but then refusing to continue.  He said, "You know, I wish I could have gotten famous for writing something a lot shorter.  Did you ever see that film Groundhog's Day?  That was my life for many years.  Just the same 30 minutes over and over again every night for years."
Of course, that was 20 years ago now.  Maybe he's changed his policy since then?

***** Wow, strange to think that exchange was almost 10 years ago already.  It seems like just the other day Whisky was first recommending this book to me, and just the other day I was thinking to myself I would get around to it sooner or later.  And then all of a sudden 10 years go by before you know it.  Yet another reminder of how fast life can get away from you.

******Speaking of down-and-out, I guess an obvious point of comparison is Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.  And there are a number of similarities.  Both books are autobiographical, and both seek to convey to the reader how the poor parts of society live.

Video Review
Video review HERE and embedded below:



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