Where's Woody?

(I'm republishing segments of my "Okie Rebels With A Cause" series, initially pubished in 2004-2005, as the midterm elections draw near. Also, read my comments on the state's new centennial song in this week's Oklahoma Gazette.)

Okie Rebels With A Cause, Part One

(This is the first installment of a series of blogs dealing with the progressive and heroic Oklahoma mythology created by musician Woody Guthrie, actor and writer Will Rogers, and novelist John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. “Okie Rebels With A Just Cause” will appear on a regular basis. )

In Search of Woody
On a recent December afternoon a couple years ago, I was in Okemah, Oklahoma, the birthplace of the legendary musician and songwriter Woody Guthrie. Using information from friends and the Internet, I searched for a small park that I was told possessed a small stature of Guthrie. Okemah, a small town whose city officials claims has approximately 3,000 people, is located about seventy miles east of Oklahoma City on Interstate 40. It has only one street really—a Main Street stretching a few books—devoted to business.

I was surprised I could not find Woody right away when I first pulled into town.

I drove up and down Main Street, and then through the city’s small residential neighborhoods, which are marked by dilapidated homes. I noticed one of the homes was made of corrugated tin and attached to one-half of a double-wide trailer. Another home had been heavily damaged by a fire, but people still apparently lived in it. One home was next to the city’s rusty water towers; in fact, the people who lived in the home obviously parked directly beneath them. More tiny homes, some in dire need of repair, dotted the hill upon which much of the town is built.

Still, I could not find Woody, and the town, frankly, was giving me this weird, discombobulated, old-newsreel vibe both horribly magnificent and freaky at the same time. Why? You see, it is apparent that, in some respects, Okemah has never really recovered from the Great Depression, which was the most inspirational topic of Guthrie’s career. One of Guthrie’s most famous records, for example, is titled Dust Bowl Ballads, and it describes the struggles of impoverished Okies evicted from their land during this time. Consequently, to visit Okemah, is to view, upfront and personal, the leftovers of a cruel right-wing, political philosophy. To visit Okemah, especially if you are an Oklahoman, is also to become all at once character in a Guthrie ballad, a person trapped by all the state’s weird contradictions and carried along by its sometimes surreal, American-gothic beauty. There is a terrifying beauty in rural poverty if one has the patience and heart to face it.

Ignored and neglected, then and now, by the state’s powerful people, and especially the conservative right, Okemah (like much of rural Oklahoma) is a particularly noteworthy symbol of the nation’s contradictions, its cyclical miseries, and its inspirational but sometimes fraudulent mythologies. It becomes even more symbolic when one considers it is the place where one of the nation’s most moral sons first created a music that provided the inspiration for a populist movement that seized the country’s imagination and brought about decisive change through Roosevelt’s New Deal.

That moral son, of course, was Woody Guthrie. But where was Woody? I couldn’t find him anywhere. Dusk descended on the town. A mangy mutt crossed the street in front of me. Was that a coyote I heard howling in the distance? Was that an armadillo or possum that darted under a huge rock and down into a large hole? Did the young man walking down the street look at me strangely or was I just imagining things? A redigitalized Guthrie sang out from my car’s radio and into surreal Okemah, Oklahoma:

One Sunday morning
In the shadow of the steeple
By the relief office
I seen my people
As they stood hungry,
I stood there whistling this:
This land was made for you and me.

Woody Guthrie, I thought to myself, where are you?

I had been told to look for a mural on the side of a downtown building. The park was supposedly next to it. I returned to Main Street, then, and began a new search. I found the mural at last. It was on the side of the Wright Kit barbershop. I parked, looked at the mural. But where was the park? Where was Woody?.

And then from the corner of my eye, I noticed a small head of a statue poking out of a shabby, cardboard Christmas nativity scene, and I realized, then and there, I was actually standing in the park all this time.

The gaudy and oversized nativity scene completed obscured Guthrie’s statue, so only locals would have known that right behind the crass cardboard Jesus and Mary stood a tiny monument to one of the nation’s most influential songwriters of all time. As I made my way to Woody by weaving through some weathered angels and the three wise men, my immediate reaction was, “This is what it would be like to live in a true theocracy” where symbols of social protest and art—the very substance of Guthrie’s life—are replaced by the oppressive symbols of the prevailing religion. Maybe. But then I pinched myself, thought, “No, Woody Guthrie’s political ideas always had strong roots in Christianity.” Jesus and Woody both wanted to feed the poor. Both made it their life’s work. It really is that simple. Obviously, Woody was right at home next to baby Jesus.

Woody Guthrie and the nativity scene is a powerful symbolic message for progressives as the nation’s red-state, right-wing religious folk turn a peaceful, sin-forgiving, inclusive religion into a religion of hate and death. When people are starving to death, as they did in The Great Depression, as they do today, it is immoral to stand by and let it happen. Yet the religious right did just that then, and it does it again now. (Watch the powerful, religious right, for example, allow President George Bush to steal your grandparents’ Social Security check and give the money to his rich, stock market buddies. Ah, if only Woody was here to sing about this one.)

But the religious right did not always dupe people into voting and acting immorally in Oklahoma. Oklahoma and its surrounding states were once a hotbed of populism. There was Guthrie, true, but also Will Rogers. In addition, the novelist John Steinbeck mythologized Oklahomans forever in The Grapes of Wrathby creating a heroic image of the beleaguered Okies through the character of Tom Joad. Joad and his family struggled against the brutality and immorality of right-wing Christian ideology that allowed people to turn their heads away from child starvation, massive homelessness, and widespread illness.

Today, even a casual reconsideration of Guthrie, Rogers, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath moves us to larger questions in the contemporary, political world. Why, for example, have so-called “ordinary” middle-class people of Oklahoma, The Great Plains, and portions of the southwest rejected their populist history and supported politicians with extreme, hateful conservative views when doing so is not only immoral within a religious framework but also is against their personal economic interests?

Current political and economic conditions in this country, one-party conservative rule that favors the super wealthy over the middle-class and poor, stagnant wages, corporate corruption, and media manipulation make the time ripe for a reconsideration of another dark time in American history when a growing, deceitful conservative movement brought about misery and despair for millions of Americans until brave Americans like Guthrie, Rogers, and Steinbeck stood up and fought the rich and powerful.

These three men created and used an Oklahoma mythology and an Oklahoma message to make things right again in this country. Guthrie, Rogers, and Steinbeck helped bring this country back to a moral center once before.

They will do it again.

(Next: “Woody’s Home Bittersweet Home”)