‘Gimme an F!’ — This unassuming man was once one of hippiedom’s prime provocateurs
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Legendary for his 1969 Woodstock gig and a leader in the 1960s Bay Area music scene, Country Joe McDonald is bringing his Tribute to Woody Guthrie to Calgary this week. While the show’s subject is well-known to folk music fans the world over, McDonald has a few surprises in store.
With his tribute, McDonald invites us to look a little closer at the folk music legend and has unearthed a few things most listeners haven’t heard before. It’s common knowledge that Guthrie was a songwriter, folk musician and a survivor of the Great Depression. Package that with his lifelong commitment to socialism and trade unionism and you have the extent of the picture that most histories paint of Guthrie. It isn’t the whole story, though. Take, for example, Guthrie’s proclivity for writing erotic poetry.
“I just pulled everything out of the book shelves that I could find on Guthrie,” says McDonald, describing the roots of the tribute concert that he first performed in 2001. “It started with the songs, but then it also started with other songs that I had because of my collections of songbooks and magazines. Then I found a collection of Woody Guthrie’s column called Woody Sez, which is out of print. So I just put it (all) together. It happened pretty quick, and I just started experimenting with it, and 80 per cent of what I did then is the show now. I refined it a little bit and added a few more things.”
Some of Guthrie’s more risqué material, like his “Cookies Talk Louder than Words” letters to Berkley folk singer Malvina Reynolds, surfaced in this research. Other material came directly through Guthrie’s wife Marjorie. “She asked me in 1970 in a Hollywood Bowl Woody Guthrie tribute concert if I would put some exotic, erotic, sexy lyrics that (Woody) had to music,” McDonald recalls. “They (the Guthrie family) wanted to expand the image of Guthrie, because he did write some really erotic stuff, and I said ‘sure.’”
And yes, it’s expanded our impression of Guthrie. Since then, Woody’s erotic poetry has been part of the Guthrie tributes and they certainly provide a different impression of the man’s life and politics. McDonald is still surprised at the resounding success of the Guthrie shows. “It had some kind of magic to it, me and the show,” McDonald says of the first performance. “For me, the show is a personal journey. I’m surprised that it’s being received the way it is. I’m really delighted and surprised.”
McDonald’s own talents and background have made the Tribute to Guthrie a many-layered thing. It’s part politics, part demythologizing the legend and it’s full-on McDonald and Guthrie in the way the shows deliver a message. Like Guthrie, McDonald has never had any desire to be a politician, but he sees himself as a social observer. “I guess politicians fix things or something,” McDonald observes. “I’m not a politician. I’m sort of a commentator on things, and I like when you put words and music together. It becomes something a little bit bigger.”
McDonald’s tribute performances are certainly bigger. They’re about mixing song and storytelling. “I don’t morph into Woody Guthrie,” say Joe, “but there’s a lot of Oklahoma in me, anyway, that I inherited from my father. I kind of turn into my father and Woody a little when I tell the stories. It’s certainly a tribute to Woody Guthrie, but it’s a lot more than a person who just did a crash course on Woody Guthrie.”
There’s another layer, too. McDonald, the son of radical socialist parents, is determined to make us question our assumptions about Guthrie and politics. Guthrie’s more than the sum of his lyrics, and as McDonald observes, “I grew up with left-wing music. I liked the music but I didn’t like the left-wing theory and dialectics. It bored me and made me nervous.”
In the end, the tribute concerts are about finding the many faces of Guthrie and humanizing him. “When a person grows up with radicals, you don’t have that worship of them,” Joe explains. “You have a respect, but you don’t have a worship of them.”
