Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life

by Gustavus Stadler

Overview

Dismantles the Woody Guthrie we have been taught—the rough-and-ready rambling’ man—to reveal an artist who discovered how intimacy is crucial for political struggle

Woody Guthrie is often mythologized as the classic American “rambling’ man,” a real-life Steinbeckian folk hero who fought for working-class interests and inspired Bob Dylan. Biographers and fans frame him as a foe of fascism and focus on his politically charged folk songs. What’s left unexamined is how the bulk of Guthrie’s work—most of which is unpublished or little known—delves into the importance of intimacy in his personal and political life. Featuring an insert with personal photos of Guthrie’s family and previously unknown paintings, Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life is a fresh and contemporary analysis of the overlapping influences of sexuality, politics, and disability on the art and mind of an American folk icon.

Part biography, part cultural history of the Left, Woody Guthrie offers a stunning revelation about America’s quintessential folk legend, who serves as a guiding light for leftist movements today. In his close relationship with dancer Marjorie Mazia, Guthrie discovered a restorative way of thinking about the body, which provided a salve for the trauma of his childhood and the slowly debilitating effects of Huntington’s disease. Rejecting bodily shame and embracing the power of sexuality, he came to believe that intimacy was the linchpin for political struggle. By closely connecting to others, society could combat the customary emotional states of capitalist cultures: loneliness and isolation. Using intimacy as one’s weapon, Guthrie believed we could fight fascism’s seductive call.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807019092
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Gustavus Stadler is a professor of English at Haverford College. A well-established scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century US culture and popular music, he is the author of Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the U.S., 1840–1890. His writing has appeared in the Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, the North Carolina Independent Weekly, Social Text, Sounding Out!, avidly.com, and numerous other outlets. He lives in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
When to Be Personal

CHAPTER ONE
“I Don’t Sing Any Silly or Jerky Songs”

CHAPTER TWO
Choreographing the Revolution

CHAPTER THREE
“I Hate to Describe My Mother in Terms Such as These”

CHAPTER FOUR
The War Against Loneliness

CHAPTER FIVE
Bodies of Glory

CHAPTER SIX
Stackabones

CHAPTER SEVEN
Two Good Men a Long Time Gone

CHAPTER EIGHT
“The Whole Works”

CHAPTER NINE
“Sick in His Own Healthy Way”

CHAPTER TEN
Look Away

CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Exactly How My Own Mother Saw and Felt”

Acknowledgments
Credits
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

A revealing and reorienting new portrait.”
—Booklist

“Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life adds powerfully to our understanding of a man who never shied from blending the personal with the political.”
—The Progressive Magazine

“What keeps the book from being merely another entry in a timeworn biographical tradition is that it is an expansive and strikingly unique portrait of a man, not of an immortal legend. An Intimate Life privileges the messiness of character and circumstance, tying together the many Guthries collected under the proper name and placing them in the context of broader social and institutional movements. And here we find the most rewarding and unanticipated delights of the biography: at various stages, one could be forgiven for forgetting that Woody Guthrie was a musician at all.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Zinn’s presentation is crisp and measured, a perfect alignment to provide listeners a view of Guthrie’s fascinating and tragic life.”
—AudioFile

“With revelatory scholarship and a critic’s skeptical touch . . . Stadler retraces Guthrie’s footsteps, most strikingly when Guthrie left few if any traces himself.”
—Greil Marcus, author of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs

“Gustavus Stadler helps Woody Guthrie down from his pedestal as dust bowl icon and helps us to see him as the three-dimensional character he really was.”
—Billy Bragg, musician and activist

“A landmark work . . . complicates a story most music fans thought they knew. It will change the way you think not just about Guthrie but about folk music and its political legacies.”
—Ann Powers, author of Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music

“Like Walt Whitman before him, Stadler’s Guthrie sees no artificial boundary between the needs and urges of the human body and those of the body politic: both can be so robust, and both can be so vulnerable—ultimately, like Guthrie himself. Stadler captures it all.”
—Will Kaufman, author of Woody Guthrie: American Radical

“Stadler’s gorgeous book is both a paean to the Guthrie we know . . . and a revealing look at the embodied Guthrie, who is vulnerable, playful, and lustful . . . . It opens up an important new window into not only Guthrie the man but the history of the twentieth-century American Left.”
—Gayle Wald, author of Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe

“A radical, sympathetic, and essential rethinking of one of the twentieth century’s most radical, sympathetic, and essential artists. Powerful and inspiring.”
—Jesse Jarnow, author of Wasn’t That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America

“Under the cloak of biography, Gustavus Stadler has written a meticulously researched and stunning kaleidoscope of events, music, people, and populist movements that have influenced our lives since. Stadler’s scope for contextualizing Guthrie’s provocative work is expansive—leftist politics, Pete Seeger, Sacco and Vanzetti, gay rights groups, racial violence, the history of psychiatry—and evocative.”
—Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States

“Groundbreaking . . . provides us with fresh perspectives and important insights into how this iconic figure pushed boundaries in his writing, music, and politics by redefining the role of intimacy.”
—Kip Lornell, coauthor of The Life and Legend of Leadbelly

“Stadler has produced a refreshing, unflinching, and occasionally painful study of Woody Guthrie—exhuming a character more vulnerable than even his most ardent disciples might have imagined.”
—Robert E. Price, author of The Bakersfield Sound: How a Generation of Displaced Okies Revolutionized American Music

From the Publisher

10/23/2020

Stadler (English, Haverford Coll.; Troubling Minds) delves into the Woody Guthrie archives to uncover the motivations behind the singer-songwriter's beliefs and actions. Rather than relying on the mythic image of Guthrie (1912–67) as a freewheeling, loner hobo who courageously championed the dispossessed, he discovers a vulnerable, somewhat fragile man wracked by shame, trauma, and guilt from his mother's Huntington's disease and who considered intimate relationships as the way to combat cutthroat capitalism. The author describes Guthrie's mother's entry into a mental institution after she set fire to his father, Guthrie's first marriage, his rise as a protest singer in New York City, and his myth-making 1943 autobiography, Bound for Glory. Stadler continues with Guthrie's tumultuous marriage to dancer Marjorie Mazia, the numbing death of a daughter, his 1949 conviction of obscenity, an ongoing commitment to antiracism, and a gradual decline from Huntington's disease. Throughout, Stadler casts Guthrie as a bridge between the Communist-dominated old left and new left cultural politics. VERDICT Though sometimes unable to explain the chasm between Guthrie's words and actions, the author offers a well-researched addition to the Guthrie bibliography for general readers that complements Joe Klein's standard biography, Woody Guthrie: A Life.—David P. Szatmary, formerly with Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Library Journal

Jeff Zinn's narration, weathered yet poised, is spiritually fitting for Stadler's audiobook on Woody Guthrie, a man whose complicated life does not wholly reflect his legend as a traveling folk hero. One case in point: Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" is probably his most popular work, yet the song in full is often edited, removing lines critical of America's policies. In this vein, Stadler's audiobook deconstructs the myth of Woody Guthrie as a progressive wanderer, presenting instead a creative yet flawed man who constantly sought intellectual meaning in intimate relationships, and who continued to write while struggling with Huntington's disease. Zinn's presentation is crisp and measured, a perfect alignment to provide listeners a view of Guthrie's fascinating and tragic life. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

Jeff Zinn's narration, weathered yet poised, is spiritually fitting for Stadler's audiobook on Woody Guthrie, a man whose complicated life does not wholly reflect his legend as a traveling folk hero. One case in point: Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" is probably his most popular work, yet the song in full is often edited, removing lines critical of America's policies. In this vein, Stadler's audiobook deconstructs the myth of Woody Guthrie as a progressive wanderer, presenting instead a creative yet flawed man who constantly sought intellectual meaning in intimate relationships, and who continued to write while struggling with Huntington's disease. Zinn's presentation is crisp and measured, a perfect alignment to provide listeners a view of Guthrie's fascinating and tragic life. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile