ABSTRACT
Unfortunately, the name Woody Guthrie has not become a household name as most of the Guthrie enthusiasts would like it to be. The mention of it still makes people shrug, even those who may be considered well versed in contemporary popular music. As a matter of fact one gets the impression that more people have come across the name of Arlo Guthrie than that of his father. A simple Google search of the name ‘Woody Guthrie’ yielded 1,120,000 hits on 3 January 2010, which may be deemed unexpectedly high as long as one disregards the fact that both Madonna and Britney Spears yield more than 60 million hits each. However, Guthrie’s internet presence drops by almost 50 per cent if one excludes entries that feature the names of Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen or both. This fact may allow for the conclusion that rather than being considered as an artist in his own right, Woody Guthrie features to a large extent as a footnote to other major musicians. One could, to be sure, extend the experiment to names like Joan Baez, Robbie Robertson and Neil Young. Guthrie has been treated as an intertext to all of them. Bobdylan.com, for example, features the whole text of Dylan’s ‘Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie’1 and the lyrics of his ‘Song to Woody’ with the line ‘Hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song’.2 This poem and this song alone are responsible for much of Guthrie’s notoriety, with the latter yielding almost a quarter of a million hits on the net. How prominent Guthrie is when one tackles Dylan may also be gleaned from the December 2009 news on Bobdylan.com which advertised that on 9 December 2009 ‘Bob Dylan performs Woody Guthrie’s “Do Re Mi” in The People Speak’.3 Most of all, however, the internet abounds with references to Bob Dylan idolizing Guthrie and noting that the two met when Dylan visited his idol
in hospital. Whole websites document the influence Guthrie had on Dylan, with the latter being the focus of attention.4 This is not very surprising considering Dylan’s notoriety. However, and this may be somewhat unexpected, the names Guthrie and Dylan are just as often paired on websites focusing on Guthrie. In the light of this, the Guthrie community is not entirely guiltless of letting their idol deteriorate to a mere footnote to other musicians, predominantly Dylan. For example, the Wikipedia entry on Woody Guthrie, which has all the properties of a fanzine, mentions the name Bob Dylan eleven times. His visiting the dying Guthrie in hospital is given much more room than the occasion warrants. Twice the article mentions verbatim that Dylan idolized Guthrie.5 Such like entries, one may surmise, stem from the fact mentioned above, namely that the Dust Bowl balladeer is not as well known among the general public as one might like him to be. Guthrie enthusiasts feel like having to prove their idol’s greatness, and prove it, first, by citing authorities that share their judgement and, second, by pointing to the influence Guthrie exercised on artists whose renown is unquestionable. Generally speaking, Guthrie-ites, when greeted with a mere shrug by the mention of their hero’s name, tend to utter statements such as ‘Guthrie is the singer without whom there would be no Bob Dylan’.
