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On Woody Guthrie and Political Karaoke
First Draft, by Nathan Townes-Anderson, 1/9/08
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I was recently reminded of a photograph of Woody Guthrie. He is standing, facing the camera, staring defiantly into the photographer’s lens. It looks as if he has just walked off stage and descended into the crowd, his acoustic guitar and harmonica still around his neck, a freshly lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. His clothing is nondescript but, judging by his features and body language, he is undoubtedly American. He might even be mistaken for a cowboy, if it wasn’t for the message scrawled across the front of his guitar: “This Machine Kills Fascists.”
Now, I am no historian, and I actually know quite little about Guthrie and his music, but it seems to me that this photograph succinctly communicates Woody’s public image. “Woody is a man of the people!” it says. “He speaks to them and he speaks for them! He is against any abuse of power, political or otherwise!” it continues. “You know…kind of like Jesus,” it says finally, much quieter than before.
Some of you may flinch when I refer to Woody’s public image, but Woodrow Guthrie was no stranger to the mass media of his time. Over the course of his career he used a wide variety of the “machines” at his disposal to spread the good word: Guthrie performed live, made recordings, distributed his lyrics and sheet music, hosted a radio program, published a regular newspaper column, wrote prose and poetry, and even found time to tell his life story in his autobiography Bound For Glory. Of course, all this proselytizing also functioned as self-promotion, but I think we can agree that Guthrie seemed to have his heart in the right place.
Indeed, Don Mitchell, author of Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction, may have had Guthrie in mind when he wrote of tools for resisting social control and, generally, fighting the good fight:
“…the power urging conformity and social control can often be turned in on itself; commodities – like records and concerts, like articles of clothing and magazines – can become not necessarily ’sites’ for resistance, but certainly tools for it. It all depends on how they are used…”
(Mitchell, 161)
When considering Guthrie’s output from this perspective, it seems that he had a prescient attitude towards the mass media. Specifically, he used the media as a neutral set of tools that could effectively spread his democratic message. Thus, with Woody, it seems we have a pretty good model for humanist political resistance through musical performance and varied cultural production.
I believe this model is still relevant to our culture, although its tools and politics may need to be updated somewhat. For instance, it seems clear that folk music’s political efficacy has been minimized. For this reason, I hope POLITICAL KARAOKE can function as a forum to research, catalog, and systematize an updated model of politicized musical performance based on traditional folk music. I imagine this updated model as some kind of politicized karaoke practice, given the public nature and general availability of this medium. I mean, it’s simple addition: “This Karaoke Machine Kills Fascists.” Woody would be proud.
