What I Am Reading: "Grown-Up Anger" by Daniel Wolff
I picked up this book on a whim, while I was looking to see if my library had anything about Woody Guthrie. The book is a mini-biography of Guthrie, Dylan, and the story of the “Calumet Massacre,” a mass-casualty crush that took place in a copper-mining town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in the aftermath of a contentious miner’s strike. One of Guthrie’s songs, “1913 Massacre,” retells the story, and Dylan used the same template for his own song, “Song to Woody,” commentary upon meeting his idol and early musical influence.
The book wasn’t a scholarly history of any of the three topics, and its primary thrust seemed to be partially political, about the decline of the labor movement, and partially relating to the author’s own baby boomer appreciation for rebellious ‘60s music, depoliticized as some of the folk music was at the time. My main takeaways, however, regarded the history of folk music. I found it very interesting how many of Dylan’s and Guthrie’s songs used prior songs as templates, both in content and in the tune. Not much is said, actually, about the successive songs that connect the three stories; but reference is made to songs that can be traced back to much earlier folk music, even traced across the sea to the 16th century in England. The labor movement, meanwhile, had strong connections to the folk music tradition, preceding Guthrie’s own involvement.
It also takes care to gently puncture some of the mythologizing of each man’s career, as both came from a mode middle-class background than either cared to advertise. Guthrie may have started his career catering to an Okie audience in ‘30s California, but he himself moved west for careerist, musical reasons; and his father in Oklahoma had been a prosperous farmer and local pillar of the white, racist community. Guthrie himself hopped far fewer freight trains than he claimed.
Anyway, it is weird to read about music, since realistically you should stop and listen to it as you go. I was primed a bit for this book by “White Tears” by Hari Kunzru, a horror novel I read last October. That book was about a pair of white hipsters who collected the oldest, most obscure blues recordings they could get their hands on. One day, they accidentally capture a recording of a lost song by a blues musician they thought they had made up and set off on an obsessive journey to the rural south to learn more. The book was great, a very visceral race-focused horror story. It also made me think about early recordings, and the first era of mass musical production. Though that book was mainly about African-American blues musicians, and Guthrie’s influences leans whiter, it is interesting to consider our arcane store of primitive recordings, of voices from long ago. It was also interesting to be reminded that these don’t exist in a vacuum, or behind a wall of history, but in fact their influence carries on in music we listen to today. This book captures a little of the same sense of the swirling mists of analog American history. I think it’s interesting, anyway; musicians are probably rolling their eyes at these obvious points.