Woody guthrie played what type of music

Next is Naturalness—without no pretense—no sham—no finery. Third—Truth—that will be recognized by every singer, rich and pore, educated and illiterate. Can you beat it? The fancier it is the worse it is. Use and Reuse If an existing song had the simple, natural quality that Guthrie loved, he was apt just to use it directly, and write new words to an old melody, for instance.

Many of his most famous songs were based in part on other songs. There are ten million ways of changing any tune around to make it sound like my own. I can sing a high note instead of a low note or a harmony note for a melody note and put in a slow note for several fast ones, or put in several fast ones for a slow one. Guthrie was a believer in not only reusing old songs but reusing his own. As the archives make abundantly clear, Guthrie was a sharp and curious observer and constantly trying to capture in words what he saw.

Nobody can. Write About the Fight Guthrie found content for songs not only in tragic events but in all sorts of human drama. The fight can be a fight that leads up to a love affair. Or your song can tell about how a love affair led up to a fight.

Love affairs and fights are all tangled up like dry leaves in a spider web. For Guthrie, the fight depicted in a song could be between people or against tough circumstances. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in the country was thinking.

In a letter to Alan Lomax quoted with its creative grammar and spelling by Klein, Guthrie expanded on this thought:.

Folk music including country, blues, and other vernacular styles was supposed to be anonymous—a collective art passed along orally from singer to singer, generation to generation, sometimes culture to culture. From the vantage point of today, when kids with their first guitars start writing songs before they learn to play other tunes, it is difficult to process how exceptional it was for a folk artist such as Woody Guthrie to have created a vast repertoire of deeply idiosyncratic works.

Many Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood songwriters of the thirties and earlier were as skilled and prolific as Guthrie, but they were working in a different vein, writing to order for professional singers.

Guthrie brought the authorial imperative to vernacular music in America. Guthrie, like many American musicians, was immeasurably indebted to black music. Down in Texas, my gal fainted in the rain Down in Texas, my gal fainted in the rain Had to throw a bucket of sand in her face Just to bring her back again. Guthrie seemed to think of musical complexity as corrupt, and he wrote most of his songs with just a few chords, in the key of G. He would slide a capo up the neck of his guitar to change keys, much as his nemesis Irving Berlin, who could play only in F-sharp, used a special mechanism built into his piano to transpose his songs.

His lyrics, similarly, seek to convey a guileless cleverness and intensity—a pridefully untrained intelligence. I clumb the rocky canyon where the Columbia River rolls, Seen the salmon leaping the rapids and the falls.

Guthrie, now living in New York, challenged the commercial aesthetic of the pre-rock era through a performance style that was not merely plaintive, like that of countless singing cowboys in the movies, but almost combatively anti-musical. Moneyless and hungry, Woody hitchhiked, rode freight trains, and even walked his way to California, taking whatever small jobs he could. In exchange for bed and board, Woody painted signs and played guitar and sang in saloons along the way, developing a love for traveling the open road—a lifelong habit he would often repeat.

The local radio airwaves also provided Woody a forum from which he developed his talent for controversial social commentary and criticism. Never comfortable with success, or being in one place for too long, Woody headed east for New York City, arriving in The recordings from this early period continue to be touchstones for folk music singer-songwriters everywhere. Forming a loosely knit folk group called The Almanac Singers, they took up social causes such as union organizing, anti-Fascism, strengthening the Communist Party, peace, and generally fighting for the things they believed in the best way they could: through songs of political protest and activism.

Woody became one of the prominent songwriters for the Almanac Singers. The Almanacs helped to establish folk music as a viable commercial genre within the popular music industry. A decade later, original members of the Almanacs would re-form as the Weavers, the most commercially successful and influential folk music group of the early s. With increasing popularity, prosperity and critical success from public performances, recordings, and even his own radio show, Woody could afford to bring his struggling family to New York to enjoy his new found success.

Leaving New York, with his wife and three young children in tow, Woody headed out to Portland, Oregon where a documentary film project about the building of the Grand Coulee Dam sought to use his songwriting talent.

Hoping to get back to New York City, and on the radio, he hitchhiked his way across the country. He saw the majestic Grand Coulee Dam as the creation of the common man to harness the river for the common good — work for the jobless, power to ease household tasks, power to strengthen Uncle Sam in his fight against world fascism.

Sharing humanist ideals and activist politics, Woody and Marjorie were married in and over the years had four children: Cathy, who died at age four in a tragic home fire , Arlo, Joady, and Nora. This relationship provided Woody a level of domestic stability and encouragement which he had previously not known, enabling him to turn out a staggering number of original songs, writings, drawings, paintings, poems and prose pieces.

His first novel, Bound for Glory, a semi-autobiographical account of his Dust Bowl years was published in to critical acclaim. His capacity for creative self-expression seemed inexhaustible, whether on land or sea.

The peace he had fought so hard for seemed finally within his reach.