Searching for Woody Guthrie
eBook - PDF

Searching for Woody Guthrie

A Personal Exploration of the Folk Singer, His Music, and His Politics

  1. 401 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Searching for Woody Guthrie

A Personal Exploration of the Folk Singer, His Music, and His Politics

About this book

Born in the summer of 1912, Woody Guthrie remains one of the most significant figures in American folk music to this day. While most Americans know his iconic anthem “This Land Is Your Land,” surprisingly few understand Guthrie’s place in the greater context of American radicalism and protest in the 1930s and beyond.

In Searching for Woody Guthrie, Ron Briley embarks on a chronological exploration of Guthrie’s music in the vein of American radicalism and civil rights. Briley begins this journey with an overview of five key periods in Guthrie’s life and, in the chapters that follow, analyzes his political ideas through primary and secondary source materials.

While numerous biographies on Woody Guthrie exist—including Guthrie’s own 1943 autobiography—this book takes a different approach. Less biographical and more thematic in nature, Searching for Woody Guthrie centers around Guthrie’s faith in the common working people of America, bringing together People’s Daily World “Woody Sez” newspaper columns, Guthrie centennial secondary source texts, research in the Woody Guthrie Archives, and Briley’s own personal reflections to present a narrative that is at once personal to the author and relatable to America’s rural working class.

Interlacing Guthrie’s music with his own geographic and economic background, Briley presents an original and eloquent chronology of Guthrie’s life and work in what amounts to a compelling new case for why that work, more than fifty years after Guthrie’s death, continues to leave its mark.
 

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Yes, you can access Searching for Woody Guthrie by Ron Briley in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Music Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Foreword, Ted Olson
  3. Introduction. My Search for Woody Guthrie
  4. Chapter One. De-radicalizing Woody: Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory (1976)
  5. Chapter Two. Woody in California: The People’s Daily World and Indigenous Radicalism
  6. Chapter Three. Woody in New York City: “Woody Sez” and the Daily Worker
  7. Chapter Four. Woody and the Bonneville Power Administration: Twenty-six Songs in Thiry Days
  8. Chapter Five. Woody and World War II: The Struggle against Fascism
  9. Chapter Six. Woody and Postwar Disillusionment: The Korean War
  10. Chapter Seven. Woody and Jesus: The Working-Class Carpenter and Christian Socialism
  11. Chapter Eight. Primitive Rebels: Woody and the Outlaw Tradition
  12. Chapter Nine. “I’m Sticking to the Union”: Woody and Labor
  13. Chapter Ten. Woody and Race: Taking on Jim Crow
  14. Chapter Eleven. Woody and the Women’s Question: Advocate for Equality and Sexual Libertine
  15. Chapter Twelve. Woody’s Songs: Dust Bowl Ballads, 1940
  16. Chapter Thirteen. Woody’s Songs: Struggle, 1946
  17. Chapter Fourteen. Woody’s Songs: Ballads of Sacco & Vanzetti, 1946 and 1947
  18. Chapter Fifteen. Woody’s Children: Arlo Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen
  19. Conclusion. Woody Guthrie and Our Times
  20. Notes
  21. Bibliography
  22. Index