Hard Times and Hard Travellin' @ Perth Museum

Mar 24 2009

PERTH hosted a fascinating fundraiser for the Perthshire International Brigade Memorial Fund built around the story of the American radical singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie.

The event, supported by Unite the Union and www.alternative-perth.co.uk was attended by about 100 people.

Ian McLaren and Jim Harcus of Wang Dang Delta played us in with a few of their own songs on guitar and mouthorgan in the spirit of the Brigadiers, and Paul Philippou introduced the evening by reminding us that out of the 800 or so Scots who went to the aid of the Republican forces against Franco in the Spanish Civil War of 1936/37, eight of them were from Perthshire.

These were ordinary men and women who wanted to make a personal contribution to fighting the forces of fascism, many of them giving their lives selflessly for the cause.

One might have wondered what the link was with Woody Guthrie, but as soon as the main performer, Professor Will Kaufman of Central Lancashire University, took up his guitar, violin and mandolin and began to speak and sing his way through Guthrie's life, that became clear.

Guthrie, who was a teenager at the beginning of the Great Depression in America, was left destitute along with millions of others by the economic plunge and had to go “on the road” for years looking for work.

He lived in the Dustbowl of the West around Oklahoma and shocking images of the hardship of those times, with whole towns being literally flattened by sun-obscuring clouds of topsoil lifted off the prairie, made me realise how catastrophic the combination of those two events was – dustbowl and depression – for millions of ordinary Americans and their families.

They became migrant workseekers who were labelled “Okies” (even though not all were from Oklahoma), “lazy” and “shiftless”and were not welcome when they tried to gain a foothold somewhere to rebuild their homes and lives.

Guthrie himself was close to the Communist Party but really he was a humanist who cared about the well-being of his people and saw the way forward in organising the workers across national and international boundaries against the banks and the big corporations who didn’t shy away from using guns on trade union militants.

He saw himself increasingly as a radical antidote to the organised music industry of the time which came to be known as Tin Pan Alley, writing such prescient lines (in Pretty Boy Floyd, the true story of a Robin Hood-style outlaw) as:

“Well, as through the world I've rambled, I’ve seen lots of funny men,

Some rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen,

As through the world you ramble, as through this world you roam,

You’ll never see an outlaw drive a family from its home.”

In these recessionary times, with the big corporations cutting jobs in their thousands and the banks repossessing ever more homes, the parallels between the terrible times Woody sung about and the present day loomed large over the evening.

But for me the star of the event was the talented Will Kaufman who captured the humorous, wry and rebellious spirit of Woody in his wonderful story-telling and reproduction of his songs.

FG