Woody Guthrie: Better World A’Comin’

Up in the piney woods they were makin’ moonshine.. dodging the government revenuers who hunted them between the trees like wild game. Each dawn the hollers echoed with the news they had survived another night. These cries were set to music. Blue ridge and blue grass. The voice of the people.

Then they headed for the mines. The coal beneath their homes wasn’t going to walk into the daylight by itself. It had to be dynamited loose, hacked out, shoveled out Load by load, man and boy it had to be dragged to the surface.

Down South, meanwhile, it was King Cotton and the chain gang. The songs dripped with sweat this time, and heavy to match the delta heat and boggy fug. At night they plucked the banjo and slapped away the strings of another backbreaking day spent sharecropping another man’s land.

Out in Oklahoma, meanwhile, the folks simply fled. Their land stripped to bare dust, they took to the road, to the rails, to the wind. Like yesterday’s news, they blew along the byways to the four corners of the nation. Always lookin’ for a hand up, sometimes reduced to a hand-out, seeking a melody to match their flat-iron twang, a voice for their homeless lyrics.

Most headed west. One was named Guthrie. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie.

Uprooted from the heartland, Woody would take the pulse of the nation, and set it to the rhythm of the rails. Migrant and restless, hard traveling would tune his senses to the plight of his country and its people. On the anvil of the land he traveled, he would pound the ringing hammer of cold truth and give voice to the very wind that blew them from their homes. From California to New York they were the songs of freedom, and justice… and they would resound from shore to shore.

In this week’s episode, From the Vault delves into the Pacifica Radio Archives collection to find interviews with Woody’s wife Marjorie, longtime friend Will Geer, best friend Beth Lomax Hawes, along with classic music and interviews with Woody himself.

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