Woody Guthrie Archives Exhibit

dateline: 4/7/00
location: Museum of the City of New York, 103rd St. & 5th Ave.

It's a Pavlovian thing. People see a guy carrying a guitar, and it's "Hey, you gonna play us a song?" Pure reflex, genetically determined. But the women at the coat check are friendly and when the one from the West Indies - Haiti, judging from her accent - asks again if I'll play them a Woody Guthrie song, I can tell they're sincere. So I promise to play one for them after checking out the exhibit.

The exhibit is smaller than I expected - just one room of glass cases loaded with mementos: pamphlets, manuscripts, lp boxed sets, postcards. Only a few instruments - a fiddle, a mandolin, a banjo. Woody seems to have drawn and written on everything - including the fiddle, and the exhibit is dominated by enlargements of his rough cartoon drawings.  The huge prints, some skewed, some printed on burlap scrims, take on a dreamlike quality, and for the first time I sense a direct connection between Guthrie and the visionary poet William Blake. The English author of "Songs of Innocence and Experience" was also a singer-songwriter, artist, and political radical who also saw himself engaged in spiritual warfare to bring about the New Jerusalem.

You also sense that Bob Dylan and John Lennon with their famous doodles owed as much to Woody in the visual department as they did musically.

I catch the tail end of the movie, playing on a small black and white video monitor in the corner, but I've heard all the recordings listed in the credits and I've heard the stories which have come to carry the weight of legend. All I've really come for is to be close to some of these relics. A note to Moses Asch about a collection of impromptu recording sessions. A late birthday card from Arlo, mailed to him at the hospital. A draft of "Pretty Boy Floyd" copied out in a surpisingly neat, square hand.

"Woody seems to have drawn and written on every- thing, even his fiddle..."
	Woody's War: "This machine killed 10 Fascists."

Like Blake, Woody kept some of his most startling writing in his notebooks and letters, and the exhibit is littered with his observations and aphorisms. They tend to be his more direct and idealistic than even his songs:

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Hugh Blumenfeld, Editor
hugh@balladtree.com