Woody Guthrie: Forever Young

His guitar was emblazoned with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists. He didn't care about making money, being famous or topping the Billboard charts. He wrote more than 1,000 songs, and when he died, at 55, he left behind at least 2,500 complete lyrics.

There is tragedy all over this story; there is fire, illness and romantic calamity; there is death and disappointment. And there is the opposite of those things -- life, with all its commotion and beauty. And so we have the myth of Woody Guthrie.

Woody's story is one of those considered to be distinctly American -- that is to say, he came from nowhere (in myths Oklahoma is often a stand-in for nowhere) and became an enormously influential artist. Thirty-four years after his death, Woody still inspirits the American imagination.

But who was the real Woody Guthrie?

Woody's youngest daughter, Nora Guthrie, wondered the same thing about her father, who was in the hospital for most of her childhood and died of Huntington's disease when she was 17.

About eight years ago, Nora found a cache of her father's papers in the office of Harold Leventhal, his last manager. She sat down on the floor surrounded by the boxes and that's how the Woody Guthrie Archives were born.

"In looking through my dad's notebooks and diaries and lyrics, I discovered a lot about my dad," said Nora, 51, at a recent talk at the National Steinbeck Center to celebrate the opening of the exhibition "This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie."

"I discovered that about half of what I knew about my dad wasn't true. Creating the archive has given me an opportunity to know him without Huntington's."

The show, a collaboration between the Guthrie Archives and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, is the first-ever museum exhibition about Guthrie's life and music. Along with portraying the Woody that most of us know -- folk legend, protest singer, rambling man and union organizer -- the exhibition paints a fuller picture of Woody Guthrie as a father, husband and lover, poet, novelist and newspaper columnist, sketcher, cartoonist and painter. At its best, the exhibit liberates Guthrie from his status as legendary cardboard folksinger and hero of the left and grants him the complexity that has long been his due.

Pastures of Plenty

I went to the Steinbeck Center to see the exhibit the week of my father's birthday. He's been dead a year now, and Woody Guthrie was one of his lifelong heroes. My father lived in Coney Island on Neptune Avenue about the same time Woody and his family were living around the corner on Mermaid Avenue.

So it seems inevitable that I looked at the exhibit and listened to the songs and watched the videos of Woody and Cisco Houston and all the others through the eyes and ears of my father, who was himself a card-carrying lefty, and I marveled and mourned and ended up getting my own personal loss mixed up with our national loss of Woody Guthrie.

But when I started to tease it apart, I realized it didn't matter, because Woody was all for stirring up feelings in people and showing how one thing was connected to another. That's what his music was about: "I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world."

Woody Guthrie was not a big man, but he had a large and irrepressible spirit. His creativity spilled out of him in a cataract of energy that filled up all the spaces of his short life in no time at all. Representing this extravagant life behind Plexiglas display cases was obviously a challenge for Nora Guthrie and the rest of the curatorial team.

The exhibit is arranged in 10 modular stations, the stations of the cross, if you will, and viewers may take a chronological stroll through the singer's life or skip around and get the stories all out of order, a sort of "Woody's Greatest Hits." There is Woody's Oklahoma period, his Dust Bowl and Great Depression period, his California period, his Union Organizing period, his Merchant Marine period, his New York period. Finally, there is the era of Huntington's disease, and then a presentation about his musical legacy.