Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia and the greatly exaggerated achievements of the new communist regime in the mid-late 1920s, people around the world admired Communism. Communist Parties sprang up around the world, including in the USA. They attracted people who wanted to improve their living and working conditions. In the USA a number of newspapers and radio stations developed which were sympathetic to communism. Many also expressed this by joining the International Brigades on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939).
In the late 1930s Woody Guthrie had a live radio show in Los Angeles in which he composed and sang left wing songs, He also had a regular column, called Woody Sez, in a left wing newspaper.
Ass pat of Roosevelt’s New Deal, several large building programmes were undertaken to employ the unemployed. One such project was The Grand Coulee Dam which started in 1933 and was completed in 1941. Towards the end of the construction period a film was made which showed what had been achieved. Guthrie was commissioned to compose and sing songs for the sound track. While the film was never completed, Guthrie revised and recorded several of the songs in 1944 and 1947.
In 1940 Guthrie, Pete Seeger and others performed at a benefit concert in New York for John Steinbeck. This is said to have been the spark leading to the revival of American folk song. Up to now Guthrie’s songs had been strongly anti-capitalist. Like many anti-capitalists he revised his views of communism following the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1940.
Alan Lomax promoted the work of several ringers in the 1940s. As a result, Guthrie won a commercial radio contract which paid well. But, after only a month, he left New York to return to Los Angeles.
During 1941 Guthrie was heavily involved with a group of singers called The Almanacs. They formed the hub of an American folk revival. Guthrie was concerned to stop their songs becoming too wordy and sermonising. At the same time he wrote some very strong anti-Hitler songs that were very popular. The group quickly won influential left-wing cultural followers in large measure because some of their songs supported trade unions.
Following Pearl Harbour in December 1941, Almanac found a new audience with their songs which bolstered the anti-fascist/anti-Japanese war effort. They were catapulted into the national spotlight when they became the resident musicians on the programme called This is War. They also won a recording contract with Decca and a management contract. Because of the strong political content of some of their songs, people began reporting them to the House Un-American Activities Committee. They said the songs were seditious. As a result they lost their recording and broadcasting contracts.
During 1942 Guthrie began to focus on pro-USA, anti-fascist songs and, at the same time, began a large scale rewriting of his songs. By late 1942 he had about 60 songs which went under the title of War Songs are Work Songs. He poured hate and violence into them. The opening of a second front against Germany became an obsession for Guthrie. As a result, he joined the Merchant Martine. Between June 1943 and June 1944 he completed three tours across the Atlantic. His ship was torpedoed twice, on the first and third voyages. Because of the amount of free time on board ship he was able to do a huge amount of writing and singing. Between the second and third voyages he wrote a ballad-opera called The Martins and the Coys. He was unable to find a producer in the USA, but the BBC in London broadcast it.
After his third voyage he won a prestigious slot on New York’s WNEW radio station. His first broadcast was on 3rd December 1944. Guthrie openly back Roosevelt’s campaign for a fourth Presidential term. The losers began to single out communism as a scare tactic. Guthrie was considered too left-wing and so lost his radio programme in February 1945. His seaman’s papers were withdrawn following an unsubstantiated accusation of belonging to the Communist Party. Shortly after, he was drafted into the army.
Following the dropping of the Atom Bombs on Japan in August 1945, Guthrie became an anti-war, anti-A-bomb activist.
During 1946 the trade unions became extremely militant and several held long-lasting strikes. Guthrie fought for the cause of non-unionised singers who were paid pittances. He was particularly interested in securing proper payment for radical singers like himself. Pete Seeger also fought for this cause. They and others formed People Songs. They wrote and sang songs of labour and encouraged people to send them similar songs that they had heard. As a result a library of about 20,000 songs was created. The trade unions weren’t interested in their activities but the FBI were. By the end of 1946 militant trade unions were damned for communist interference in their affairs. Guthrie was disillusioned by the crumbling of the militant labour movement. By late 1947 the House Committee of Un-American Affairs was revived.
During the late 1930s Guthrie was sensitised by racism. Between then and the end of the war he learned how much the development of white songs owed to Negro singing. He memorialised racist miscarriages of justice in song and championed anti-racism. It is in this context that his album of 12 songs about the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti on trumped up charges in 1927 was written. Guthrie thought it was one of the best albums he had ever written but it was not released until 1964 because of its attitude to authority.
In 1949 Paul Robeson was due to perform at an outdoor concert but was unable to because of police tactics. Shortly after he managed to perform at Peekskill. Guthrie was there and witnessed the police tactics personally. In the months following he wrote 21 songs. The following year he supported the integrationist presidential campaign of Stetson Kennedy. In 1951 he and his family spent time at Kennedy’s house in Florida. Kennedy was forced to go to London by the Ku Klux Klan which burned his house.
By 1952 the entire radical wing of American folk music was under siege by the anti-communist movement. But Guthrie was increasingly debilitated by advancing Huntington’s disease. In September he bought a plot of land in Topanga, California for his family to live on. He was unable to play but could still write music. In 1951-2 Jack Eliot had become a virtual member of Guthrie’s household and learned to sing Guthrie’s songs exactly like Guthrie. He went to Europe between 1955 and 1961 where he raised people’s consciousness of Guthrie’s music through live performances and influential recordings.
In March 1956 there was a tribute concert for Woody Guthrie in New York. Two months later he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in New York. People continued to write and meet him.
The folk revival of 1963-4 spread his music worldwide. His achievements were widely acknowledged and his music was played on TV and radio shows.
He was celebrated for his musical achievements but damned for his radicalism. In the course of his life he wrote about 3,000 songs of which only a limited number are vigorous protest songs.
This book is well worth reading to explore the radical background to Guthrie’s music. ( )

Woody Guthrie, American Radical by Will Kaufman is a treasure even for those who have known Woody’s life and legacy.
Kaufman has been doing performances (lectures and songs, some appearing now on YouTube) that bring Woody’s songs and thoughts to audiences who never had the opportunity to hear him. With this book he can reach a larger audience.
Woody Guthrie lived his life burdened by the shadow of Hundington’s disease which he inherited from his mother (and from which there is no escape). His songs were woven with threads of humor, bitterness, protest, sardonic hope. His association with other singers was sometimes problematic but today his legacy survives and many of his songs are as relevant as when he sang them. (They are popular in England, thanks to the performances of Jack Elliott, a skiffle group, and the book’s author.)
The book is greatly enriched by pictures. There’s a chilling postcard of an Oklahoma lynching, a sad sad picture of Woody in his last days, and many many more. Kaufman writes about Woody’s private and public lives, of his admiration for Paul Robeson, and his sometimes quarrels with fellow singers.
An introduction by Woody’s daughter, many footnotes and a bibliography complete this excellent book. A portion of the royalties will be donated to the Woody Guthrie Foundation.
Thanks are due to Will Kaufman and his publisher. ( )

I chose this as a NetGalley ARC as soon as I saw it the day after Election Day. Therefore this is a review of a free e-book.

Instead of a biography that explores his personal life, this is really a biography of Guthrie's music and how it influenced and was influenced by the political and social environment of his times. Kaufman shows that as a person and artist matures, his perspective may change on issues like war and racism and remain the same on others like socialism and rights for the working class. Kaufman details Guthrie's interaction with the radical left and progressive movements, his connection to the government both good (Alan Lomax's recordings for the Library of Congress) and bad (J. Edgar Hoover's FBI), and finally his relationship with the other folk musicians and radicals of his era (Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly, Ronnie Gilbert, Will Geer, Bob Dylan). If you want to know more about his womanizing, marriages or Huntington's Disease, read a different book. If, however, you want a detailed, honest but respectful history of a man and his music, this may well be the book for you. After a disappointing mid-term election, I found it a refreshing reminder that the quest for peace and social justice is an ongoing one filled with heroes like Guthrie. ( )