Guthrie needs to find his medium

Woody Guthrie and his famous fascist-smashing guitar

The reading that most interested me this week was Guthrie’s Bound for Glory. The name, of course, hooked me – Woody Guthrie is one of my favorite musicians. We’ve read so many travel stories at this point – a near endless amount – that they tend to blur together, the better moments and more powerful scenes sticking out but not from a particular narrative, typically just out of the massive flood of people moving west, stories of people moving west. I feel as though this is indicative of the time period – events would last, the people seemed and felt irrelevant. Individual narratives were all the same, save for a few poignant things that would be saved, remembered, learned from, felt and felt again. After reading Bound for Glory, though, I sat back and thought about how it was written by Woody Guthrie. Bound for Glory was not without its moments – the generous old man and old woman, secretly giving things to Guthrie while warning him not to tell the other, his stolen paintbrushes, the song of the bubbles in his wine jug, etcetera. But overall, nothing screamed VOICE OF AN ERA at me, nothing even screamed Guthrie, nothing screamed. Was this an issue of Guthrie needing to find his medium? Was this an issue of me reading nearly infinite travel stories? No – because I hadn’t read a fraction of all of the travel stories that were written. It was almost reassuring to read his relatively lackluster nonfiction. A brilliant mind could also create something ordinary. And could also have the same experience – overall – as the other thousands of minds moving West. And on the flip side of the coin, something brilliant could indeed be made out of the same experience that all of the others had. That his narrative seems ordinary connects Guthrie to his era, to everyone else in that time, doing those things. And that legitimizes even further the songs he wrote, knowing that they came from the same experience. It validates them as a product of a truly iconic (in the commonality sense) life, and set of experiences. A refined, super-potent distilled version of a thousand narratives, including his own. Nothing spectacular made Guthrie’s songs, because his stories of himself were nothing spectacular. The truth, a universal and ordinary truth, made the songs.