ABSTRACT
Larger than life – this is how singer and political activist Woody Guthrie has been portrayed in a variety of venues. He stands as a hobo bard, an Everyman who sympathetically and poetically documented the dire hardships and the rambling life many experienced during the Great Depression. Since his death in 1967, his image has graced a US postage stamp, his life has been immortalized in films and biographies and he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In essence, Guthrie has gained great status. We could easily call him an American legend. The singer has gained this rank largely through his writings, which themselves often draw upon well-established legendary figures or which sometimes contained new characters who have been embraced by the American nation, such as Jesse James and Pretty Boy Floyd. Throughout his career, Guthrie repeatedly included folksongs depicting this type of individual in his repertoire, especially if their stories fitted his own developing working-class ideology: if the songs presented them as men (or women in a few cases) who strove against an unjust system for the good of average citizens. That these celebrated characters appear often in his writings, recordings and performances is no surprise insofar as their presence looms large in the American public imagination, especially in the Southwest, the land where Guthrie grew up. In fact, he used various versions of them to identify or align himself with the working-class audiences he encountered. Still, Guthrie was not fully satisfied only in dealing with fanciful heroes who others had already established. He also developed his own narratives emphasizing the worth of various figures he came to know, projecting them into the stratosphere of legend, even as he made them real through his use of evocative language and telling detail. He took lesser-known figures and worked through his own songs to establish them in the canon of outlaw heroes, those from the underclass who demanded respect and created their own justice outside the law. However, many of those people whom Guthrie attempted to encode with staying power were workers. Often drawing upon the well-known figure of John Henry as creative template, Guthrie crafted his own worker archetypes. In many of his songs, he celebrated various blue-collar professions through particular characters he created, giving credit to those who laboured mightily to better America through their efforts.
