LITTLE KNOWN FACT: WOODY GUTHRIE WAS A BIG OL' RACIST
https://www.laweekly.com/little-known-fact-woody-guthrie-was-a-big-ol-racist/
Woody Guthrie is one of the most universally celebrated musical figures of the 20th century, and there's been a gale of veneration accompanying the 100th anniversary of his birth tomorrow. This includes a weekend of tributes and events in his former 'hood Echo Park, and the renaming of a public square downtown in his honor. Our feature this week, meanwhile, tells the story of his time in Los Angeles, pre-fame, through analysis of four unearthed singles that were recorded here.
Guthrie cheered Joseph Stalin long and loud, defending the Reds' invasion of Poland. (Biographer Will Kaufman found the extent and duration of Guthrie's pro-Stalin stance “shocking.”)
But the most damning buried Guthrie biographical fact? That he was, just like his old man, a racist.
Having blacked up as a teenager in Okemah to perform a half-baked minstrel show, Guthrie while living in Echo Park took time out from championing oppressed white Okies to doodle his innumerable cartoons of what he described as “jungle blacks,” a group he also referred to as “niggers,” “darkies,” “chocolate drops” and, yes, “monkeys.”*
After encountering a group of African-Americans on Santa Monica Beach one day in 1937, Guthrie immortalized the meeting in a lengthy poem that included stanzas like, “What is that Ethiopian smell / upon the Zephyrs, what a fright!” and “We could dimly hear their chants / and we thought the blacks by chance / were doing a cannibal dance.”*
Broadcasting on Pasadena's KFVD, Guthrie often indulged in on-air employ of ebonics and was stunned when a black listener characterized the singer as “unintelligent” after hearing Guthrie perform songs with titles like “Run, Nigger, Run” and “Nigger Blues.” Fortunately for Guthrie, recordings of these tunes do not survive.
Later, Guthrie said, “A young Negro in Los Angeles wrote me a nice letter one day telling me the meaning of that word [nigger] and that I shouldn't say it anymore on the air. So I apologized.” He next “tore all the nigger songs out of his songbook.”***