Here’s a holiday gift idea for the Bob Dylan fan in your life: a copy of Daniel Wolff’s Grown Up Anger, tracing the connections between Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and the Italian Hall disaster, and a DVD of the…
Woody and the Nobel Prize
By now you’ve probably heard that Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, and you probably won’t be able to turn on a radio or a TV today without hearing a Bob Dylan song. Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, “advised those unfamiliar…
Fred Hellerman, 1927-2016
Fred Hellerman, the last surviving member of The Weavers, died on Thursday at 89. The New York Times obituary does not discuss Hellerman’s relationship with Woody Guthrie (except indirectly, where it notes that Fred produced Arlo’s first two albums). Hellerman nevertheless played an important part in the musical story of…
Bloodpot and Melting Pot: Woody Guthrie and “Old Man Trump”
In 1950, Woody Guthrie leased an apartment from Donald Trump’s father, Fred, in the Beach Haven complex, near Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. As Woody’s biographer Will Kaufman writes in an article published today on The Conversation, it didn’t take too long before Woody “was already lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white…
Documentary As A Layer of Memory
Geoff Gimse saw our film last Thursday evening, at Michigan Tech. Here, Ken and I agree, he nails it, and we especially dig his last comment about the film as “another layer of…memory.” Since the actual facts of the tragedy are impossible to discern, the film instead focuses on how…
“They Try to Create Despair Among the Miners”
One of the small treasures I brought back to New York from Lake Superior is Hannu Leppanen and Daniel Schneider’s 2013 letterpress edition of Tyomies, the Finnish workingman’s newspaper published during the strike of 1913. I’ve mentioned the project here before. Daniel set up his Chandler & Price Pilot Press…
“Unfinished Business”
Mike Ragogna interviews Nora Guthrie today on Huffington Post about her father and his music. MR: Were there certain topics brought up in his material, such as the plight of the Mexican worker in “Deportees,” that resonated with you more than others? NG: Woody wrote over 3000 songs for every…