ABSTRACT
On 20 September 1948, more than three years after the end of the Second World War, Woody Guthrie scribbled a lyric entitled ‘Old Words’ into one of his numerous notebooks. It nicely epitomizes his belief in the power of the sung word, as he (who had imagined his guitar as a ‘machine [that] kills fascists’) imagines his voice to be a weapon in a war: ‘All I’ve got left now’, he writes, ‘is just these few old words / To shoot back at you, and to try to / Stand up and talk back at you … / March march marching / To my few old words.’3 Yet, the martial metaphor Guthrie employs here to describe the power of words does not only reveal the poetological and ideological convictions of a songwriter who always believed in the social and political potential of his songs. In retrospect, it also puts emphasis on Guthrie’s particular involvement in the Second World War, not as a soldier (at least not in the first place) but, as he himself puts it, as a ‘recording machine for other peoples worries, blues, mix-ups and fights’4 in those days of general fear and crisis.
