Tag: Woody Guthrie

One Thing I Do Not Want

Eisler and Brecht
Hanns Eisler and Bertold Brecht

Out of all our hard work and low pay, and tired backs, and empty pocketbooks, is goin’ to come a tune. And that song and that tune aint got no end, and it aint got no notes wrote down and they aint no piece of paper big enough to put it down on.

Woody Guthrie

I grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s, a product of mid-western St. Paul suburbia. It was a time when summer included a week at camp, a time where there was less money, less legal liability, and because of it, less adult oversight. This translated into a hell of a lot more fun than I think adolescent children and teenagers are allowed today at such institutions.  Our behavior did not always match the naive goody-goody image that might come to mind based on a Kodachrome Disney-esque portrayal of that era.  And it was at these events that I experienced many firsts of the adult world under the cover of the wholesome conservative institutions that were supposedly shielding impressionable young men and women from such temptations in the first place.

There was also a sweet, simplistic side to going to camp, the hot canvas tents, sleeping in a green cotton flannel sleeping bag, cooking out doors, swimming, canoeing and the camaraderie of friends sitting around a campfire.  I look back with fondness, though I know we rolled our collective adolescent eyes when the song books came out.  Yet, singing was an innate part of the camp experience.  The idea of song books may sound old fashioned and it is.  These were crude stapled copies, that allowed everyone to sing along.  Apple and Sony had not yet usurped the idea that music was based on technology.  Portable music played outside of the reach of an electric plug-in meant you made it yourself.

The songs were simple: On Top of Old Smoky, The Ants Go Marching In, Home on the Range, B-I-N-G-O, This Land is Your Land and America the Beautiful.  The song books often contained our national anthem, yet I don’t remember singing the Star Spangled Banner once around a campfire, but I sang This Land is Your Land a hundred times at least.

Woody Guthrie’s history is well known, however the connection from Woody Guthrie to a sonnet may seem a bit obscure.  Billy Bragg and Wilco took Woody Guthrie’s lyrics and released the song Isler On The Go on Mermaid Avenue.  It is a haunting tribute by Guthrie, Bragg and Wilco to Hanns Isler, who along with his brother Gerhart, were accused by their sister of being communists.  The two had been active in the communist party prior to WWII in Germany and had left Germany when the Nazi’s came to power.  They immigrated to the United States where Hanns was able to cobble together a modest living as a composer for Hollywood films.  In addition, while in America Hanns wrote a series of songs that had lyrics based on poetry from Brecht, Goethe and others as well.

His brother Gerhart was smeared by his sister as being the head of a communist conspiracy in America and she claimed he was the lead spy in a network of spies.  It didn’t matter that none of it was true, it was perfect fodder for tabloid headlines and exactly what the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) wanted to hear.  Hanns was called to give testimony and was interrogated himself on any role he himself had played in the Communist Party in Germany and then here in the United States. Hanns said;

My subversiveness is that I love my brother.  My crime is that I am trying to defend him.

Give a listen to the simple lyrics and haunting delivery of Jeff Tweedy  as Guthrie himself in this song is wondering what he would do if he is called to HUAC to give testimony.

 

Hanns capitulated and returned to Europe, eventually settling in East Berlin.  It was then that Isler composed the German Democratic Republic’s national anthem. He continued his long friendship and artistic partnership with Bertolt Brecht during this time.  Brecht is best known as a playwright, but he also wrote the lyrics to many songs with Isler and left a legacy of more than 2,000 poems, including sonnets. Isler fell into a deep depression after Brecht’s death and his productivity as a composer declined. I have included a video of a performance of one of Isler’s and Brecht’s songs below; Songs to Sing in Prison.

A recent English translation by Constantine and Kuhn shows the brilliance of Brecht’s poetry for those of us that can’t read him in his native tongue.

Sonnet No. 19

by Bertolt Brecht

One thing I do not want: you flee from me.
Complain, I’ll want to hear you anyway.
For were you deaf I should need what you say
And were you dumb I should need what you see

And blind: I’d want to see you nonetheless.
Given to watch for me, companion
The way is long and we’re not halfway done
Consider where we are still: in darkness.

“Leave me, I’m wounded” is not good enough.
And nor is “Somewhere,” only “Here” will do.
Take longer with the task: but you can’t be let off.

You know, whoever’s needed is not free.
But come whatever may, I do need you.
I saying I could just as well say we. *

 

 

______________________________________

*Bertolt Brecht, Love Poems, translated by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2015), 86.

Passions Read, That Yet Survive

 

BIlly Bragg and Wilco
Billy Bragg, Jeff Tweedy and Wilco.
“An isolationist America is no bloody use to anyone.”
Billy Bragg 

There is magic that occurs sometimes during live concerts, an interplay between the musicians and the audience, an amplification of energy, where each feeds off the other to create something unique, a time stamp of emotion, melody and percussion, that raises the hairs on the back of your neck with pure joy.  I love the sonic improvisation by skilled musicians of favorite songs that transform them into rock and roll jazz, an experience that will never be recreated note for note.

I had that feeling again last night at a Wilco concert at the Palace Theater in St. Paul.  The final performance of a masterful band before taking a break to allow each great individual talent to pursue solo projects.  Last night it was impossible to tell who was having more fun, the audience or the band, a night where Wilco strayed from the previous night’s set list and dived head long into an expansive array of music, created over several decades.

I try to keep a trail of bread crumbs between my blog posts.  Obscure though it may be, I attempt to playfully connect dots between poets and artists to create a flow in my writing and thought process. The concert reminded me of another creative project where the torch of creativity was passed from one artist to another after one of their deaths, just like Auden in translating Hammerskold’s Markings.  Early on in the evening, I said to my sister between songs, “I hope they play something from Mermaid Avenue.”

Billy Bragg and Wilco released two CDs, Mermaid Avenue Volumes I and II, in 1998 and 2000 respectfully. They are both compelling recordings of a unique musical partnership between musicians that took on the challenge of marrying unrecorded lyrics by Woody Guthrie to their original compositions. Woody’s daughter Nora Guthrie, contacted Billy Bragg in 1992 during a tribute concert on what would have been Woody’s 80th birthday.  Nora asked Bragg if he would be interested in examining nearly 3000 songs that Nora had found in her father’s home that he had penned lyrics but for which no song composition existed. Either Woody hadn’t written the music yet or he didn’t need to write it down, as it was in his head. Many of the songs are quite different from the socialist political repertoire that Woody Guthrie is famous.  Nora Guthrie saw in Bragg a younger British version of her father, a brash and talented defender of working men and women through music. Bragg accepted the challenge but it wasn’t until he sought out Wilco after hearing their 1996 album Being There that the project built momentum. Bragg recognized in Wilco kindred musicians who had the musical chops to venture into a wide range of styles from folk, rock and blues that would be needed to bring Woody Guthrie’s legacy of alive.

It is impossible for me to listen to California Stars or Voodo Hoodo, both of which Wilco played during the concert with a complete flourish of joy and imagine that Woody could have performed them any other way.  The songs are too complete. The spirit of Guthrie lives with Bragg and Wilco and guides their hands and voices.

Poetry was as powerful an outlet to give voice to social issues in the 1800’s and early 1900’s as rock music is today.   The list of rock star poets is long, but in my mind Shelley, Yeats, T. S. Elliot and Dylan Thomas all fit that bill. They are poets who influenced at least a generation of men and women across the political and economic spectrum, just like great rock music.

Shelley’s poetry is rebellious in its themes and imagery.  Though the terms socialism and communism had yet to be coined, the sentiments of some of Shelley’s poetry fit squarely within those doctrines. Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias speaks eloquently on the corruption of power concentrated in hands too few.  It is about the insanity of Kings who build monuments to mock the very people who built them, an empty legacy, a desert where power corrupts absolutely.

Ozymandias

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”