WOODY GUTHRIE
My Life (Part V) (1947)
THE ALMANAC SINGERS, 1941: WOODY GUTHRIE, LEE HAYS, MILLARD LAMPELL, PETE SEEGER
(left to right)
Well, then what? I got a letter after a couple of months from the Almanac Singers, Lee Hayes, Pete Seeger, Mill Lampell, back in New York. Come back to us and let's make a cross country tour singing in union halls. We made Two albums of Records for the General Record Co., Sod Buster Ballads, and Deep Sea Chanteys. We rolled the gasoline hose down into our tank and left it there to suck and blow till we hit our first union hall stopoff. We made up songs. From the Alleghaney to the Ohio she's all gonna melt up CIO, Pittsburgh! Lord God! Pittsburgh!
We went into union halls and sang before, during, and after the speakers had spoke, and took up a collection to buy gas, oil, and to grease the breezes. We sang: Union Maid. Talking Union I Don't Want Your Millions Mister. Get Thee Behind Me Satan. Union Train a'Comin'. And made up dozsens and dozens as we rolled along or as we stayed over the night at a friendly house. We rolled on out to Denver, then onto Frisco and sang for five thousand longshoremen at the Harry Bridges Local. We sang for the Ladies Auxiliary. We sang for the farm and factory workers around lower California, and then back to Frisco.
Pete and me drove on down into Mexico and sung. We drove back up along the coast to Seattle and sang for the Commonwealth Federation of Washington, the Old Age Pensioners, the Unemployed Unions, the Farmers Unions, and the office and factory workers unions.
Pete and me drifted back into New York. We sang together again as the Almanacs. We made up war songs against Hitlerism and fascism homemade and imported. We sang songs about our Allies and made up songs to pay honor and tribute to the story of the trade union workers around the world. We got Jobs singing on overseas broadcasts for the Office of War Information for direct beaming to front line fighters. Pete was drafted into the Army. I had gotten a divorce from Mary, and had shipped out in the Merchant Marines. She was right from her side and I was right from my side.
I shipped out with my guitar, and two seaman buddies, both good NMU men, Cisco Houston, a guitar player and high tenor singer, and Jimmy Longhi, an Italian boy with as good an anti-fascist head on him as I have ever seen. We played our guitars, and I took along a fiddle and a mandolin. Our first boat was torpedoed off the coast of Sicily, pulled into Lake Bizerte, but we got to visit the old bombed town of four hundred thousand souls, Palermo, Sicily, where Jimmy walked us up a mountainside singing underground songs to prisoners of war, and the people laughed and cried and shook our hands.
We caught an empty Liberty ship back to the States, sailed out again to North Africa, at the time that the Fascists' police would not let the NMU president, Joe Curran, come ashore there. We walked around to several of the most pitiful Arab Villages that I have ever seen. We saw whole swarms of people race out of their rock and mud huts to fight like cats and dogs over a hunk of soap, and then to run away again when the soap was torn into a hundred pieces. We heard these people pound on their native skin drums and sing some of the saddest and prettiest music that I have ever heard anywhere.
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