ABSTRACT
It is easy to picture Woody Guthrie as an independent, free spirit unattached to political parties or organized movements. He was famously shifty about his relationship to the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), declaring once that he had ‘signed up’2 with them in 1936, although there is no record of any signature. (Guthrie seems to have used the phrase ‘sign up’ to indicate solidarity with a group or an idea, as opposed to ‘join up’, which signified actual membership – hence his line from ‘Talking Hard Work’: ‘I joined up and I signed up with seven of the best trade unions that I could find.’3) In any event, the date of 1936 is highly improbable since, for all intents and purposes, his radical politicization did not commence until after his arrival in California in 1937. While one of his New York associates, Gordon Friesen, maintained that Guthrie was ‘a full-fledged member of the Village branch of the Communist Cultural Section, and proud of it’, corroborating documentary evidence has never emerged.4 Guthrie’s own teasing doesn’t help: ‘I ain’t a communist necessarily but I have been in the Red all my life.’5 The overwhelming critical consensus is that Guthrie was, at most, a fellow traveller of the Party – in Ronald D. Cohen’s neatly encapsulated phrase, ‘a Red, but of his own stripe’.6
