BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World The first words displayed at the trailhead of "This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie," the Smithsonian Institution's traveling exhibit on the Oklahoman songwriter's life and work, are, "I don't know how far I'm going to have to go to see my own self or to hear my own voice." In Guthrie's life, which ended in 1967 from complication's of Huntington's disease, that route was a long one. Guthrie was a virtual vagabond, criss-crossing the country in search of that voice — an echo of his own, a metaphor of the American commoner — and transcribing that voice into thousands of songs, some of which made him famous. In the exhibit, fortunately, the curious have a shorter road to travel, simply the length of one small showroom in which is neatly encapsulated the life of one of America's greatest artists. I will call him an artist, too, instead of the more specific word by which he is usually referred — songwriter. "This Land Is Your Land" is the physical history of an artist, a novelist, a painter, a tunesmith and a philosopher (which has a substantial footing in art, surely). If this exhibit does nothing else, it broadens our understanding of Guthrie, not only of his biographical details and overall social significance but of his creative mind and the multitudes of outlets he found for his ideas -- beyond words. In addition to the requisite manuscripts, the exhibit hall is a riot of scrawls, photos, sketches, artifacts, drawings and paintings. What's astonishing — and empowering -- is the unity of expression throughout every medium. It's all the same voice, speaking different languages. The unifying text in the display is Guthrie's landmark poem, "Voice," from which those initial lines come from. It's a poem in which Guthrie explores America's cultural diversity and lays claim to the unspoken threads tying together our expression. At the end of the poem, it boils down to a more nebulous sensory assurance — the "voice" has become a "feeling." The Smithsonian show, designed by Jim Simms, re-creates that sense of commonality in all the blurts of Guthrie's artistic voice. Even on opening day, visitors voiced their surprise at the volume of imagery in the show. They had come to see the works of an old-timey wordsmith — and there are many examples of his writing — and were confronted with the less frequently discussed and surprisingly colorful visual aspect of Guthrie's expression. Watching his visual art develop as one winds through the snaking canyons of the display is interesting, too. We start with the simple, comic cartoon "Boom Town," a pen-and-ink depiction of rollicking Okemah, the central Oklahoma oil boom town where Guthrie grew up. Next, we move with Guthrie to Pampa, Texas, where his first solitary wages were earned as a sign painter. On display in the exhibit is Guthrie's 1937 oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln, a simple copy of a picture but one that already illustrates a distinct style — bold curves and an overtly geometric understanding of form. Jump to 1942 — another line drawing, cartoonish, of an Okie grabbing the rails of a passing truck, entitled "Move." That same year, though, Guthrie drew "Rounded Up in Tracy, California," a depiction of Okies fleeing bullish cops in the misadvertised "garden of Eden." The clear, simple lines of the police car in the background give way to a more fluid foreground — a nebulous crowd dominated by one man silhouetted in the police headlights, the only details being the buttons and collar of his work shirt and his white, angelic hands. From this point on, the crisp lines of Guthrie's drawings bleed into wider, bolder strokes of ink and paint, and the forms of his subjects relax into more nebulous, ghostly figures. "Starvation Disease," undated, features a face — barely — in muted watercolors and only three lines of facial features to communicate an oceanic depth of melancholy. Along one wall is a series of half a dozen prints from April 1946, each panel a depiction of a woman from behind in different modes of physical labor. She is faceless each time, allowing the viewer to more easily enter the scene and feel her weary but unyielding determination. "Hootenanny," from the same month, is a virtual stick figure, a curly-headed guitar player assembled completely from lines and circles. It looks like the kind of image that accompanied ancient Oriental calligraphy — few strokes, but big, sweeping ones — or the work of a more carefree (or harried) Leroy Neiman. "Figures in Embrace" is a swirl of only 17 strokes, but they're in there, that couple -- hugging, maybe even dancing. It's no coincidence that Guthrie's visual art became more pliable — and more prolific — as he grew older. The immovable convictions of his younger days and older songs softened in a broader understanding of the world. More significantly, the onset of Huntington's disease began making detail work more difficult. With shaky hands, he could more easily sweep a fat brush across a large sketch pad than trace the intricate lines of a wooden Okemah sidewalk with a fine-pointed pen. It's also no coincidence that the panel in this exhibition depicting Guthrie's deteriorated state prior to entering the hospital in the early '50s returns again to the words of "Voice." Over an enlarged photo of a bedraggled, bearded, hollow-eyed Guthrie playing guitar in New York's Washington Square Park, we read, "And I thought as I saw a drunken streetwalking man mutter and spit and curse into the wind out of the cafe's plate glass, that maybe, if I looked close enough, I might hear some more of my voice." At this stage, Guthrie was that drunken streetwalking man, finishing his interminable expedition for that common sound, that absolute feeling, that universal voice. It's too bad that a couple of things inhibit our reception of Guthrie's voice throughout the exhibit. A show that's designed to be displayed in 3,400 square feet has been crammed into about 1,300. In several places, the lighting has all the candlepower of a dashboard, which makes reading Guthrie's all-important words especially trying. Noisy humidifiers rage throughout the tour, too, drowning out many of the speakers broadcasting various snippets of Guthrie's singing and speaking voice. It's annoying, but Guthrie's signal still gets through. The show also features numerous interesting tidbits beyond the visual aspect focused here: these include his copy of Omar Khayyam's "Rubaiyat," several of Guthrie's notebooks and datebooks open to interesting pages, his shipboard fiddle (which also had carved upon it the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists"), a few watermark original song lyrics, one of his business cards from KFVD in Los Angeles, his address book (open to Pete Seeger's address and phone number in Greenwich Village) and the "yes" and "no" cards with which he communicated in the hospital once his voice was gone. At the end of the show, we are left with the ultimate Guthrie send-off. From his bed in the Brooklyn State Hospital, Guthrie scrawled with a brush the chorus of his signature tune, "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You." Each panel advances the line a few words, with a little doodle in that broad-brush style to accompany it. It's the convergence of his languages, visual and written expressions coming together in a more refined voice, a voice still echoing from the redwood forests to the Gulfstream waters. The exhibit continues at the Oklahoma Museum of History, 2100 N. Lincoln Boulevard in Oklahoma City, near the state Capitol. For information, call (405) 522-5248. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World There's been a lot of ink poured around the Tulsa World, trying to define and describe Red Dirt music, the elusive mix of country, rock, blues and folk native to Oklahoma and centered around Stillwater. It's like nailing smoke to a wall. You can see it, you can smell it, but how do you grab hold of it? In all the interviews with musicians classified as Red Dirt players, a lot of names come up as influences. A lot of folks hearken back to the Tulsa Sound days of Leon Russell and J.J. Cale. Some trace their sound back to Merle Haggard, others tell stories about Garth Brooks' days in the Stillwater bars. Songwriter Bob Childers is pretty universally hailed as the genre's godfather. But one name comes up more than all the others. In a recent search of the Tulsa World's electronic archives (stories back to 1989), 176 stories mentioned Red Dirt music, and 143 of those mentioned Woody Guthrie. If Red Dirt is the great consolidation of American music, especially south of the Mason-Dixon, then surely its crucible can be found in the tangled woods around Guthrie's old Okemah home site. Guthrie was famous for a certain slice of his music — frank, topical folk songs — but he wrote and performed every conceivable genre of music in the decades he wandered this land with his guitar slung over his shoulder on a rope. The comprehensive four-CD, boxed set from Smithsonian Folkways Records, "The Asch Recordings," covers most of this -- his cowboy music, his Tex-Mex, his kids songs, his blues. Guthrie respected differences in people and in music. "The unifying theme in Woody's music is that he wrote about the land he loved," says Tulsa scholar Guy Logsdon. "He played the melodies and music that came from the land he loved, from Oklahoma, one of the most culturally diverse places in America. Let's also say he modified it. He used the music he heard as a foundation and built upon it. "That's what these Red Dirt guys are doing. The Garth Brookses and Jimmy LaFaves and Tom Skinners and there's a guy in Bristow named Brett Graham — they use their heritage as a foundation and build their own sound on top of it. It just happens to be a very broad foundation," Logsdon said. LaFave, who grew up in Stillwater but relocated to Austin to make his career, is considered one of the principal standard-bearers of the Red Dirt ideal. He cites Guthrie's influence consistently and has become a pillar of the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah. Another expatriate Stillwater son, Bruce Henderson now in New York City, cites Guthrie among the lathes that shaped his easy-going, country-rock songwriting. Regional singer-songwriter Brandon Jenkins said in a '98 interview, "I've been real involved with Woody Guthrie music lately, and it got me back to writing music for my own reasons, not to have a hit." "It's about finding your identity," Logsdon said. "Often we search for ourselves and discover we're part of something greater." "Where is Woody Guthrie in Red Dirt music? In the truth," said John Cooper of the Red Dirt Rangers this week. The Rangers are probably the ultimate example of Red Dirt's nebulous but potent mixture of styles. "It's in the lyrics, in trying to tell the absolute truth as you see it. Woody said you can only write what you know about, and it's true," Cooper said. The Rangers themselves have struggled throughout their 11-year existence to explain to folks what they do, what their music is. Someone once called them "Woody Guthrie gone South." In '95, Cooper told the Tulsa World, "A lot of people think we're a country band, which is true, but we do a lot more than that. It shows in the kinds of gigs we do. We've done kids shows, bluegrass festivals, rock 'n' roll events, city festivals, prison shows and private parties." The broad base of their sound and influences allows them to be that versatile. But it's that element of truth that separates them from most style classifications based purely on musical form. It's almost like Christian music, a musical category containing every possible style of music but segregated purely because of its message. Red Dirt places a higher importance on truth in the lyrics than most other genres, certainly pure country. "Like a song on our upcoming record, ‘Leave This World a Better Place.' I'm serious about that," Cooper said this week. "I didn't write that just to be catchy. I want people to hear that and believe as much as I do that that's what we should do." That does not imply that Red Dirt music is protest music. "It's not necessarily political like Woody got sometimes and like he's so well-known for being. You can't take the politics away from Woody, and really from us either, but we're more about the politics of love, if that's not too corny. "Our connection to Woody is through that desire to tell the truth and to lift people up no matter what kind of stories you're telling them," Cooper said. "Woody was the voice of all people who struggle," added Ranger singer Brad Piccolo, "but people struggle in many different ways, not just political stuff. There has to be honesty in every area of playing music, because people come to music for a lot of different reasons." Even Guthrie himself didn't know what to call his music. In 1940, a reviewer included a discussion of Guthrie's "Dust Bowl Ballads" under the heading "Americana." In his scrapbook, Guthrie scribbled his response: "Americana is a new one on me, but when these fellers hire out to write a column every day they ain't no telling what kinds of words they'll fall back on to make a living." Guilty as charged. By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World The Woody Guthrie Archives isn't anything fancy, which is in keeping with the lifestyle of the archives' namesake. The collection is not under heavy guard, under glass or even — thanks to Nora Guthrie's efforts — under wraps. The archives is really just a bunch of filing cabinets in a cramped, stuffy two-room office in midtown Manhattan, open for public perusal as long as you make an appointment. Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, runs the place, and she's not too fancy, either. She's about as open and honest and casual a professional as you can find. Of course, there again the terminology doesn't do the situation justice. Nora doesn't run anything at all — she inspires, enthralls, educates, grounds and delights all visitors and staff members. A remarkably engaging, uplifting woman, she oversees the use of Guthrie's backlog of songs, poetry and prose. Those cabinets are stuffed to overflowing with pages of Woody's work — some of it intended for public consumption, a lot of it scribbled down just to get it out of his ever-bubbling brain. Nora already has guided British folk-rocker Billy Bragg and American roots band Wilco through the stacks; the results were the two "Mermaid Avenue" albums, featuring tuneless, old Woody lyrics with new music. Many more such projects are in the pipeline. The exhibition that soon will be showing at the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City, "This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie," was culled from this resource. The show has been touring museums across the country for more than two years; its Oklahoma stop — in Guthrie's home state — is likely its last. Bringing the show here was a challenge, though. I talked with Nora last week about the exhibit, its challenges, and why Oklahoma has been so resistant for so long to welcoming home its most talented native son: Let me start with my basic question right now: was Woody an Oklahoman? With an accent like that — are you kidding? What's always fascinated me about Woody is that he left the state as a teenager, yet everything he wrote, said and sang for the rest of his life was clearly influenced by his Oklahoma roots. That's always interested me, too. To be honest, I've always felt like we were his step-family, in a way — that we were kind of holding onto him until Oklahoma finally takes him back. Everything he did and fought for had to do with the basic values he learned in Oklahoma. When I lecture in Oklahoma, I tell people, "You think he's talking about other people's rights and other people's problems, but he was talking about your grandfather" — and I point at them — "and your aunt and your cousin." These were his people. "Everything he wrote, especially the early songs, was about your family." He wasn't that expanded back then. What did he know from America? All he knew was that someone's grandmother lost the farm or someone's cousin was done wrong. Everything he cared about came from his love for Oklahoma and then became explained and justified by the rest of his life. When he finally traveled to other places, he found that they were having the same problems, so he could become this spokesperson for America — the people, not the land or the landscape. Why did he return home so rarely? Well, there were family and political problems that were a big part of that, but the biggest part was the Huntington's disease. There was this cosmic understanding that took place between him and my mother (Marjorie Guthrie) that she was his caretaker because he couldn't go home. He was in exile. I don't think he ever used that word, but there was definitely an emotional exile that he felt — and was bewildered by, to be quite honest. He was always from Oklahoma and always wrote about it and put it in context. When he wrote about New York, it was in the context of "look at me, I'm a big hick, and I'm getting on this crazy underground train." He always contextualized himself. But he couldn't go home. Until now. The annual folk festival in Okemah has welcomed his spirit home, and perhaps the exhibition will, too. It almost didn't happen, though. It was my wish that this touring show open in Oklahoma two years ago. When I first put it together, that was the only thought I ever had. I was innocent and naive, I'm confessing, but I thought, "Great, we'll have this show, and it'll open in Oklahoma." I mean, where else would you open it? This is the place. If Walt Whitman or any other major American figure had a major exhibit, wouldn't you think it would be welcomed in their hometown? Isn't that why Salinas (Calif.) has that huge thing for Steinbeck? Everyone wants to cheer their homeboy. But not in Oklahoma, not for a long time, anyway. So what went wrong? We had it booked in the Cowboy Hall of Fame (in Oklahoma City). We were planning things — a big concert, some other events. It was going to have this kind of reborn feeling, like he's back and let's finally give birth to Woody in Oklahoma and say, "Yes, he's from here." A couple of months before it was supposed to open, we got a call from the museum backing out. They gave some vague reasons about scheduling conflicts and then about funding, but I didn't even listen to it because I knew it was politics. I just thought, gosh, I'm fiftysomething now, hasn't anything changed out there in all this time? Isn't there a new generation there who can stand up and recognize that this guy was from Oklahoma and he doesn't have to be the star of the state, but you could at least say, "I might not like his politics, but what a great writer"? Where did the exhibition open? In California, at the Steinbeck museum. And it turned out to be really special there, after all. Lefty Lou (Crisman, Woody's former radio show partner) came, and she said to me, "How did you know to open it in L.A.?" I didn't understand her, and she told me this story. She said, "When we had the radio show at KFVD, every afternoon for lunch Woody and I would come out to that rock over there" — we were standing outside the Steinbeck center — "and eat. We would hike up there every single day for lunch, walk around the hills, then go back and do the afternoon show." So the exhibition opened on that site where they spent so many afternoons, and she thought I'd done that on purpose. It wound up having its own significance. Still, I always hoped it would make it to Oklahoma. Like most of Woody's stuff, this exhibition has been a sleeper. We had trouble getting it started, and we had to put up the money ourselves to get it into New York. It turned out to be such a huge success there that the director of the museum came up to me one evening and said, "Nora, I was so skeptical. I didn't think this show was going to be that good. That's why we didn't push to raise the funds for it. But the public response has been so amazing, we've had more attendance for this than anything else this year. If I could do it again, I'd double-book it. I just didn't get it." You know, these people study charts and financial reports, and they don't get the people. They're not connected, and this was maybe a good lesson in that regard. What turned the tide to allow the show to come here? Once it caught on elsewhere, we found some friends in the Oklahoma Historical Society and the state arts council there. It just took a couple of years. It was about that amount of time that the festival in Okemah really took off, too, so I guess it just takes time. It' so typical of Woody's personality, you know. He was always a sleeper. He'd slip into a room and say something, and two people would pay attention, then a few more, then a few more, until he had the whole place in the palm of his hand. Woody Guthrie exhibit to open Friday The Smithsonian Institution's acclaimed exhibition, "This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie," opens Friday at the Oklahoma Museum of History in Oklahoma City. The exhibit explores the life of the native Oklahoman songwriter, author of such well-known tunes as "Union Maid," "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You" and "This Land Is Your Land." The show offers material from the Woody Guthrie Archives and the Smithsonian Institution, including original manuscripts, drawings, sound recordings and some film. The show — organized by Nora Guthrie, his daughter and executive director of the archives, and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) — has been ramblin' round the country for two years. This stop in Guthrie's home state will be its last. Guthrie was born in the town of Okemah in 1912. He traveled the country writing songs much of his life, many of those journeys with dispossessed Okies in the 1930s. He lived in New York City in the last years of his life, many of which were in hospitals before he died in 1967 of complications from Huntington's disease. He wrote thousands of songs before he died, most of which remain collected in the Woody Guthrie Archives. The exhibit will remain on view through May 4. The museum is located in the Wiley Post Building, just SE of the state capitol at 2100 N. Lincoln Boulevard in Oklahoma City. For more information, contact the museum at (405) 522-5248 or email [email protected]. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World "This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie" What: The Smithsonian Institution's traveling exhibit. When: Opens Friday, runs through May 4 Where: The Oklahoma Museum of History, Wiley Post Building, southeast of the state Capitol at 2100 N. Lincoln Blvd., Oklahoma City. Admission: Free Woody Guthrie wrote a lot of songs about rambling around. He literally could not sit still. He had a natural restlessness and a fierce wanderlust, and he died of a nervous disease that made him shake. He was on the move all the time — hopping freights across the Midwest, riding sagging jalopies with Okies through the Southwest, touring with his singing group in the Northeast, writing songs about the Grand Coulee Dam in the Northwest, hiding out in a swamp in the Southeast. He touched every point of the compass — N, E, W, S — and then he wrote songs that reported the news of the places and people he'd seen. His songs were, for the most part, journalism — with a large literary license. He happened to be conducting his field reporting during this country's hardest times, starting in the 1930s, so he met a lot of homeless people, drifters, the dispossessed. The Okies. Guthrie's own home back in Oklahoma had disintegrated, partly because of the hard times and partly because of family turmoil. Guthrie, a teenager, was left behind in the decaying boom town of Okemah. His ties broken, he finished his junior year of high school and stuck his thumb in the wind. He left Oklahoma at age 17 and, except for a few brief visits, he never came back. Strange then that this rascally, clever songwriter -- famed for spirited songs as widely sung as "This Land Is Your Land" — should be considered a native son of our state. Strange then the fuss over Okemah's long-overdue embracing of its late hometown boy and the fanfare of its annual summer folk festival in his name. Strange the effort of officials at the Smithsonian Institution and the Woody Guthrie Archives to make sure the museum's current traveling exhibition of Guthrie's life and work actually opens in Oklahoma this week. Or maybe not so strange. When you hear Guthrie's songs, when you read his prose, when you study his life, it's clear that Woody left Oklahoma but Oklahoma never left Woody. The value of land Oklahoma is restless land. Its history is a pile of pulled-up stakes. Countless Indians of every stripe were dumped here — because the land wasn't valued. Only after the rest of the continent had begun filling up did the government open these lands to white settlers — because the land wasn't valued. Oil companies jumped in, sucked the marrow out of the earth and left as fast as they'd come — because the land was no longer valuable. Thousands upon thousands of those same white settlers were evicted from those same land claims years later when severe drought turned them to dust -- and the land wasn't valuable. Migration, resettlement, migration again. On and on. But the land had value to those who planted it, hunted on it, were born on it and buried their parents in it. Those hard-working Okies probably had more sentimental value for land than any category of Americans, and one wiry little fellow watched all those land lovers come and go, seizing and releasing the fields around his hometown. As a boy growing up in Okemah, Guthrie met Indians, farmers, ranchers and oil men. As he began traveling the plains roads, he met countless farmers and ranchers who'd been thrown off their land. As he roamed to California and back with the dispossessed, Guthrie learned about the value of home. Thomas Wolfe had just informed the world that none of us can truly go home again, but Guthrie discovered that, no matter where someone hangs his or her head, home can be rebuilt in an instant simply by strumming a few chords and singing the old songs. Joe Klein, in his 1980 biography, Woody Guthrie: A Life, wrote of Guthrie's discovery on the road with the Okies: "They always wanted to hear the old tunes — there weren't many requests for fox trots in the boxcars — and Woody was amazed by the impact the songs had. . . . The whiny old ballads his mother had taught him were a bond that all country people shared; and now, for the migrants, the songs were all that was left of the land . . . It wasn't just entertainment; he was performing their past. They listened closely, almost reverently, to the words. In turn, he listened to their life stories, and felt their pain and anger. An odd thing began to percolate. He was one of them." So Guthrie learned those songs — "The Boll Weevil," "The Farmer Is the Man," "The Buffalo Skinners," "A Picture From Life's Other Side." The ones that made him famous, though, were the ones he wrote about the land and people's tenuous relation to it in the 1930s. In the songbook of folk favorites Guthrie and Pete Seeger compiled in 1940 (which wasn't published until 1967), Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, there's a chapter called "The Okie Section." Each of the baker's dozen of songs is by Guthrie — "I'm Goin' Down That Road Feeling Bad," "Dust Can't Kill Me," "Dust Bowl Refugee," "You Okies and Arkies," "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You," "If You Ain't Got the Do Re Mi," "Tom Joad," and more. They're all songs about Okies — about people who'd been cut loose from their homes and homesteads. It wasn't just Okies out there on the road, heading to California. In his introduction to "The Okie Section," Guthrie explains that by 1940 he'd come to a realization -- that the plight of the Okies is mirrored in the workingman's struggle in every state. "It looks like this Okie section ought to be my pet section — but it ain't," he wrote. "When I first commenced a working on this book, I thought myself it would be. And then I took a looking tour through about 20 of the other states — and everything was just about as hungry, and in some spots hungrier. Virginia, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, New York and back to Oklahoma and Texas again. One is about as naked as the other." He was learning that the common man's struggle he witnessed in Oklahoma was hardly different from the same struggle in any other state or any other country. He was becoming a citizen of the world. Taking Oklahoma's message tothe world: But he was still a gosh-dern Okie. Not long after arriving in New York City in '40 — after years on the radio in L.A. as "Oklahoma Woody" -- Guthrie wrote a song called "Down in Oklayhoma," in which he was still reflecting on the gulf between the state's abundant natural riches and the workingman's poverty: Just dig a little hole, you'll find soft coal Some lead or zinc, just dig a little hole; Everybody I know goes in the hole Down in Oklayhoma Other songs followed — "Hooversville," about a squalid homeless camp in Oklahoma City; "The Dalton Boys" about the famous gangsters and their Green Country hideout; "Verdigris Headrise" about a young Will Rogers; "Okleye Homeye Home," in which he begs the listener to "take me back to my Oklahomey." He dressed like an Okie. He often smelled like one, too. More importantly, he spoke like an Okie, which means he wrote and sang in the same way. "I'm Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad" is built around a chorus that declares, "I ain't gonna be treated this-a way," and his songs were heavily spiced with this down-home dialect. Guthrie's autobiographical novel, "Bound for Glory," was described by the New York World-Telegram as being written "largely in Oklahomanese." Even as Oklahomans forgot Guthrie, Guthrie never forgot his home state. Even when his politics got mixed up and out of context over time — he supported unions and even communists, because, as he wrote, "Nobody cared — except the Union Boys. They was the onliest ones that was on our side through thick and thin" — Oklahomans eventually shunned him, but he never brushed the red dirt off his soles in protest. He took the message of Oklahoma to the world, and it's just now beginning to echo back. Oklahoma Folklife Center plans to protect folkways for the future BY THOMAS CONNER © Tulsa World In 1941, Woody Guthrie was involved in a theatrical production in New York, a revue of sorts led by Earl Robinson. The show involved a skit in which a group of stalwart, American singers, featuring Guthrie, were set upon by an unscrupulous music publisher hoping to buy them off and water down their music. The script called for Guthrie to stomp and cry out in outrage, but when he performed the lines his laid-back, Okie drawl sounded barely flustered. Robinson, according to Guthrie biographer Joe Klein, said, "Woody, for Chrissake, don't you ever get angry at people in Oklahoma?" Guthrie leaned back and, slower than ever, replied, "Yup. We get angry. But when we get angry, we just give 'em a long, hard stare." That trait, believe it or not — that laid-back approach or the refusal to show immediate, hot anger — is a folkway, a characteristic element of a particular group of people that is learned or handed down from generation to generation. It's ephemeral, it seems, but it's these little distinctions that separate an Oklahoman from a New Yorker or a Tennessean or a Californian. And it's these folkways — from music to crafts to these elusive social traits — that the Oklahoma Folklife Center plans to preserve and to provide opportunities to examine and discuss. The Tulsa-based Oklahoma Folklife Center is a new creation, a satellite of the Smithsonian Institution's American Folklife Center, and organized under the umbrella of the Oklahoma Historical Society and funded thus far through a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. So far, the center has one employee, director Guy Logsdon. It doesn't even have a home yet. The center eventually will be housed in Tulsa's historic Travis Mansion, 2435 S. Peoria Ave., undergoing renovation and additions by its new owner, the Tulsa Historical Society. Until those improvements are complete, the Oklahoma Folklife Center will operate out of Logsdon's midtown Tulsa home. That's fitting, of course, because Logsdon's home is its own folklife center. For decades, the former University of Tulsa librarian has compiled his own massive and impressive collection of Americana and folk music-related research, and his back room is its own museum — a storehouse of documents, research and artifacts relating to cowboy poetry, American folk music and other subjects far and wide — including recipes, folk art, even the peculiar way some Okies "tawlk." Bob Blackburn, executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society, has even bigger dreams for the folklife center. "I foresee this growing to the point where we need a physical location for the center itself," Blackburn said last week, "especially because of the performing arts aspect of folk arts. It would encourage the performance of music and the exhibition of more folklife materials, the demonstration of folkways and apprenticeships." Blackburn expects the folklife center to catch on quickly in Oklahoma, largely because of its Tulsa base. "The Tulsa community has always supported the arts so well," he said. "I remember attending the Chautauqua event up there five or six years ago, when Danny Goble portrayed Huey Long, and it was standing room only. I thought, ‘Boy, these Tulsans really get into this sort of expression of our cultural heritage.' BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World We could clear the dictionary of superlatives discussing the colossal talent of B.B. King and his indelible mark on blues, rock 'n' roll, even jazz. A singer, a songwriter and a guitarist beyond compare, King has been a forceful presence in music for more than half a century, and at 76 years young the old master is still recording, still touring — despite occasional injuries, like the fractured leg he suffered two weeks ago falling from his tour bus steps — even hawking Whoppers in TV commercials, somehow without sacrificing an ounce of his legendary dignity and respect. We might also assume that King achieved such legendary status by learning from the right people. Growing up in Mississippi, King heard certain blues guitarists who fired him up, and the excitement encouraged him to step out of his street-corner gospel quartets and pick up an old guitar. But even though he has been described by Rolling Stone magazine as "a great consolidator of styles," King, with his trademark humility in an interview this week, said he couldn't then and still can't play as good as his heroes. "I could never play like my idols. I wanted to. But I couldn't do what they did, so I couldn't really take that and do something else with it. People say I borrowed this and I borrowed that and then made it all into my own thing. All I ever had was my own thing to begin with," King said. Indeed, in interviewing an artist the most cliched question to ask is, "Who influenced you?" But when approaching a legend as large as King, in a career that has become its own undeniable influence, we couldn't help but come back to that discussion. Where, indeed, did this franchise begin, and are these the same roots sprouting bluesmen today? "Well, it wasn't Robert Johnson, let me say," King said. "A lot of kids think Robert Johnson was the greatest blues guitarist ever. I don't agree. Lonnie Johnson was much better. And there was a guy born in Texas, born blind, called Lemon Jefferson. People called him Blind Lemon Jefferson. He was another idol. I liked jazz, too. Charlie Christian — born right there in Oklahoma — he was great, another favorite. Barney Kessel (another Oklahoman) said he was the greatest jazz guitarist ever, and I trust him because he's the greatest ever. I heard a French gypsy named Django Reinhardt, and then T-Bone Walker playing electric guitar. We called what he did single-string. This is the stuff that made me fall in love with the guitar." He paused. "Lookie here, I've got a lot of these records right here in my room today." Another pause. "I still can't play like any of 'em. "I wish I could explain it. I wish I could say what they did that got me. Each one of them had something that seemed to go through me like a sword. I don't know how to explain it. It's something that happens and you just know, you know on some spiritual level, that this was meant for you to hear. It's like a person telling a story — each one of 'em had a punch line. You get it or you don't. And I got it. I still do." A lot of blues players have come along during the 54 years King has been recording and touring, but few of them, he said, have pierced him the way those original players did. King's ever-expanding influence has brought many of them to his throne. He's recorded with countless blues stars, frequently with his old buddy and current opening act Bobby "Blue" Bland, and with such figures as John Lee Hooker, Etta James, Mick Jagger, Robert Cray, Willie Nelson, Van Morrison, Albert Collins, even rapper Heavy D. "The young guys don't get me the same way," he said. "They're always playing something I wish I could play, and they play things I can't play. I learn from them, but I don't get that something I got from the other guys." He speaks wistfully of his collaborations with Eric Clapton, most recently the "Riding With the King" album. In fact, that's the only record of King's in the last few years that gets much airplay. "Blues isn't on the radio much," King said. "Every city has some station that plays the blues late at night. I met one fellow once who said, 'B.B., every Saturday night after 12 we play a whole hour of blues.' And I said, 'Well, what do you do with the other 23 hours?' ... Most of the time I hear blues on the radio it's on a college station." Ironically, maybe the most singular event in King's development as a guitarist was his landing a job as a disc jockey in the late '40s at WDIA in Memphis. He'd already begun to work as a musician — playing at a cafe in West Memphis, Ark., with the likes of Bobby Bland and pianist Johnny Ace — so as a DJ he gained a reputation for playing the hippest records around. As a bonus for listeners, King sometimes would play along with the records on the air, publicizing his own personal guitar lessons. Years later, at the dawn of the '90s, King attached his name and status to a nightclub on Beale Street in Memphis, largely as a way to buttress the legacy of Memphis blues that had set him so firmly on the path to stardom and consequence. "Beale Street was down to nothing, and some people wanted to help bring it back. I travel around the world, and people think Chicago is the home of the blues. Now Chicago did a lot to help blues players — they opened their doors and hearts to Muddy Waters and many like him — but personally I think Memphis is the home of the blues and always was," King said. "Most of the original blues players were born in Mississippi and moved to Memphis and then went many different ways. I was one of them. And people had started to forget." You wanna talk influence? King's regular gigs in the late '40s on Beale Street convinced Sam Phillips, then an engineer at another Memphis radio station and at the opulent Peabody Hotel, to open his first recording studio. King was one of his first clients in 1950, recording his first records. Phillips went on to be the most important producer in the history of rock and soul, starting Sun Records and launching Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. The B.B. King Blues Club is now the cornerstone of the gentrified Beale Street, and the success of the club has led to three more openings — in New York City; Universal City, Calif.; and in the Foxwood Indian casino in Connecticut — with plans to open a total of 10 across the country. "If I live long enough, maybe I'll see all 10. I'm really proud of them," King said. Then he sighed. "I've been pretty good through the years. I've lived a pretty good life. Someday they'll be blues without B.B. King around, and I doubt you'll miss me that much. But I've done OK." B.B. KING When: 8 p.m. Thursday Where: Brady Theater, 105 W. Brady St. Admission: Sold Out |
Thomas Conner
These online "clips" reproduce a self-selection of my journalism (music etc) during the last 20+ years. It's a lotta stuff, but it only scratches the surface. I do not currently possess the time or resources to digitize the whole body of work. These posts are simply a bunch of pretty great days at the office. Archives
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