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This article was downloaded by: [University of Birmingham]On: 18 November 2014, At: 13:46Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Dark Memory: A Look at Lynching inAmerica through the Life, Times, andSongs of Woody GuthrieMark Allan JacksonPublished online: 20 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: Mark Allan Jackson (2005) Dark Memory: A Look at Lynching in America throughthe Life, Times, and Songs of Woody Guthrie, Popular Music and Society, 28:5, 663-675, DOI:10.1080/03007760500142696
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Dark Memory: A Look at Lynching inAmerica through the Life, Times, andSongs of Woody GuthrieMark Allan Jackson
Drawing upon the memory of a lynching photograph he saw as a youth, songwriter and
political activist Woody Guthrie shaped his own views concerning this barbaric act into
the art of his songs. Just as he was turned away from a racist tinged past by a community
of politically charged artists and their work, the singer believed that his lyrics had the
potential to change public perception on the emotionally charged issue of lynching.
In his 22 April 1940 Daily Worker column, song writer and political activist Woody
Guthrie briefly describes a friend’s painting he has recently seen:
Stayed a few nights with a artist and painter by trade, and he’s got a mighty goodpicture of a lynching a hanging on…[his] wall…it shows you one man, aNegro man, already hung for excitement and entertainment, and another’n beingdrug in and beat up with clubs and chains and fists and guns. (‘‘Woody’s ArtistFriend’’ 7)
Perhaps it seems strange that Guthrie stumbled across such an unsettling painting in
a New York City apartment. But during the Great Depression, the issue of lynching
had become part of the general public dialogue due to the efforts of a number of
groups and to various pieces of anti-lynching legislation put before Congress. This
political discussion soon spilled over into art.
In fact, by the mid-1930s, two major exhibits of art depicting lynchings had already
appeared in New York, one sponsored by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the other by the Communist
Party. In paintings, drawings, and prints, such well-known artists as Thomas Hart
Benton and Jose Clemente Orozco used their creative powers to capture the horror of
lynching in work meant to shock and educate.1 The piece Guthrie saw had this effect,
for he writes, ‘‘This painting is so real I feel like I was at a lynching, and it…takes all
of the fun and good humor and good sport out of you to set here and realize that
Popular Music and SocietyVol. 28, No. 5, December 2005, pp. 663–675
ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online) # 2005 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/03007760500142696
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people could go so haywire as to hang a human body up by a gallus pole and shoot it
full of Winchester rifle holes just for pastime’’ (‘‘Woody’s Artist Friend’’ 7).
More than just dimming Guthrie’s spirit, the painting also brought up a dark
memory from his youth:
It reminds me of the postcard picture they sold in my home town for several years,a showing you a negro mother, and her two young sons, a hanging by the neckfrom a river bridge, and the wild wind a whistling down the river bottom, and theropes stretched tight by the weight of their bodies…stretched tight like a big fiddlestring (‘‘Woody’s Artist Friend’’ 7).
His encounter with lynching through a postcard was not unique. As noted in
shocking detail in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, images of
lynchings often found their way onto popular postcards, sometimes after having
appeared in local newspapers sanctioning the deed—graphic reminders that these
brutal acts often occurred as public displays and with community approval. In fact,
the postcard that Guthrie refers to here appears in this book (Figure 1).2
As it happens, the picture on the postcard Guthrie saw first appeared in the Ledger,
a newspaper in his hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma. Along with the origin of this
photograph, the story behind its grisly subject can be traced. In mid-May 1911, a
white officer named George Loney attempted to arrest a black man named Nelson for
theft. After going to the man’s home, Loney found only Nelson’s wife Laura and son
Lawrence. Believing Loney had pulled a pistol, young Lawrence shot the officer, who
bled to death in the Nelson’s front yard—reportedly begging for water. A week after
the entire family was arrested as a result of this incident, and a mob broke in to the
Figure 1 The Lynching of Laura Nelson and her Son, May 25, 1911, Okemah,
Oklahoma. Courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection.
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local jail and abducted Lawrence and Laura—by this time the father had already been
sent to prison for livestock theft. The angry mob may have then raped the mother,
but it is certain that they took her and her son to a bridge outside town and hung
both of them over the Canadian River. Although his exact role is uncertain, Guthrie’s
own father Charley attended this lynching, as observer or even as participant.3
Although it is doubtful that he knew the particulars of this incident, Guthrie also
became a witness to this lynching through the postcard mentioned above.
Decades after the Nelsons’ murder and around the time he encountered his
friend’s painting, Guthrie began creating songs that condemned lynching, using
images as graphic and moving as in any work by Benton or in any photograph by
drawing heavily upon the image of the Nelsons’ murder. But for too long, Guthrie’s
songs about lynching—along with most of his other work focusing on race—and his
own racial attitudes have been ignored in discussion of his work. Only recently have
any of these topics been explored to a great degree, such as in essays by Dave Marsh
and Craig Werner.4 Even this important work does not center on Guthrie’s many
songs documenting the injustice of lynching. An exploration of these songs and the
relevant aspects of Guthrie’s own past yields important benefits. First, we learn how
he came to the point where he could write this work, for he not only grew up in a
region and a nation gripped by deep-seated prejudices that controlled and
constrained everyday life for racial minorities but also had a father who advocated
racism. Guthrie even indulged in racist language himself. Understanding how his
prejudices were constructed and then dismantled reveals cultural and political forces
at play concerning race in America during the first half of the twentieth century.
Second, by examining the images found in Guthrie’s anti-lynching songs, we discover
how most of them are haunted by his youthful memory of the Nelsons’ sad end. In
effect, through an understanding of Guthrie’s and his nation’s past, we break open
these songs so that they give us both general and particular insight into the important
history behind one of America’s most savage spectacles.
That Guthrie wrestled with his own racial prejudices does not surprise. As already
noted, race-based violence against African-Americans occurred in Guthrie’s home-
town and was committed or at least condoned by his own father. Prejudice against
this group manifested itself not only in and around Okemah; it could be found
through the whole state. Only three years after Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907,
the legislature restricted the black vote through a literacy test, although this measure
eventually failed before the Supreme Court. Some segregation existed in the territory
in the 1890s, but widespread Jim Crowism raised its hydra head soon after Oklahoma
became a state, resulting in segregated schools, streetcars, bathrooms, and even
telephone booths. Oklahoma historian Jimmie Lewis Franklin notes, ‘‘For most of the
state’s history Jim Crowism occupied a central place in the life of Oklahoma’s black
community’’ (vi). In addition, restrictions on black behavior went well beyond these
legal restrictions. In speaking of how white people in Oklahoma expected African
Americans to act and speak, Guthrie admits, ‘‘It was a common custom down in that
country…that the Negro people more or less come to the back door when they went
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to see you, and take off their hat when they meet you on the street, and say, ‘Yesum,
Mister…. Yes, Ma’am’’’ (Interview with Alan Lomax).
Members of the black community who did not follow or were perceived to move
beyond these legally or socially prescribed forms of behavior would often suffer severe
penalties. According to official records, 41 lynchings took place in Oklahoma after it
became a state, with the largest number occurring between 1910 and 1918 (Franklin
29–30). During this time, Laura Nelson was not the only black woman lynched. In
1914, a white mob dragged Marie Scott out of her cell in a Wagner County jail and
‘‘hanged [her] to a telephone pole’’ (‘‘‘Chivalrous’ Southerners’’). Later, during the
early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan expanded their numbers nationwide but especially in
Oklahoma. C. Vann Woodward even goes as far as writing, ‘‘Oklahoma…[was] for a
time almost completely under the domination of the Klan’’ (102). Just as many other
Oklahomans did, Charley Guthrie joined the local chapter of the KKK and became
what one Guthrie biographer characterizes as ‘‘an enthusiastic member’’ (Klein 23).
In light of the state’s racist past and the Klan’s growing power throughout the early
years of the ’20s, it does not surprise that the single most egregious attack on African-
Americans in Oklahoma’s history occurred in 1921 when one of the nation’s largest
race riots ripped across Tulsa on 30 May, leaving 36 officially dead and with as many
as 300 fatalities probable.5
The same kind of racial violence that haunted Oklahoma could also be found
nationwide in the lynched, mutilated, and burnt bodies of thousands of black victims.
Lynch law had existed in America since Revolutionary times and had been
perpetrated against many ethnic and racial groups, including whites; however,
African-Americans found themselves disproportionately in danger of meeting this
end compared with any other group, especially black men who committed violence
against whites, who challenged white supremacy, or who were even perceived to be
stepping outside white-sanctioned behavior. According to conservative figures, from
1882 to 1940, 4,694 people were lynched in America. Of these, 3,403 were black, and
most of these lynchings occurred in the South as acts of racial violence and repression
(Zangrando 6–7). Even these figures list only those lynchings that were reported and
do not include deaths occurring during race riots, so the actual number would
certainly be higher than these statistics indicate. In addition, ‘‘many victims were
taken from town or city jails and were killed with the complicity or help of law
enforcement officers,’’ which may explain why the perpetrators of these crimes ‘‘were
rarely brought to trial or convicted of their crimes’’ (Park 311–12). In effect, lynchers
could go about their horrific deeds with the protection of the law and little fear of
retribution.
Considering the mass of wide-ranging prejudice toward Africa-Americans in his
family, town, state, and country, it would be exceptional if Guthrie grew up unbiased.
Although no racial slurs against African-Americans appear in his extant writing from
the mid-’30s, his racist tendencies came out in some of the language he used in
California in the latter part of the decade. On a radio station in Los Angeles, he
performed songs containing the words ‘‘darkie’’ and ‘‘nigger’’ (Guthrie, Endnote to
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‘‘Little Liza Jane’’; Guthrie, ‘‘Kitty Wells’’; Klein 96–97). But the most striking
example of his racist language occurred after a confrontational episode with some
black bathers on the beach of Santa Monica. He documents this incident in the Santa
Monica Social Register Examine ’Er, a homemade newspaper he whipped up. Along
with racially offensive cartoons, jokes, and articles, this little paper contains a 17-verse
parody of Longfellow’s ‘‘Hiawatha’’ entitled ‘‘Clippings from the personal diary of a
Full-Fledged son of the beach.’’ He writes that his pleasures at the beach were
interrupted by a shout: ‘‘What is that Ethiopian smell/Upon the zephyrs, what a
fright!’’ In answer comes the line ‘‘African was overflowing.’’ Later, he describes these
blacks as ‘‘chocolate drops’’ and ‘‘monkeys.’’ But one verse outstrips the others in its
racist description:
We could dimly hear their chants
And we thought the blacks by chance,
Were doing a cannibal dance
This we could dimly see.
Guess the sea’s eternal pounding
Like a giant drum a-sounding
Set their jungle blood to bounding;
Set their native instincts free. (Santa Monica)6
This language does not place Guthrie on the side of the racially enlightened—but he
soon changed due to a variety of reasons.
Beginning when he first hit the West Coast in 1936, Guthrie witnessed the
‘‘Okies’’—white migrant agricultural laborers from the Southwest and the South—
suffering in the fields and streets of California. Much of this abuse stemmed from a
prejudice similar to that faced by African-Americans throughout the nation. Even as
these migrants desired equal status, many white Californians—some of whom had
come to the state as migrant laborers themselves and had lived there less than a
generation—lumped the underclass (white or not) together. One historian explains
some of the reasoning behind Californians’ negative identification of the Okies thus:
The malnourished physique of the migrants, the deplorable settlements along theditch banks, even the slightly nasal drawl which had come with them from thesouthern Plains were the touchstones for a stereotype of the Okie as a naturallyslovenly, degraded, primitive subspecies of white American. (Stein 60)
These white migrants—who, like Guthrie, often held their own prejudice against
blacks—found themselves being discriminated against and, at least in part, losing
their white-status privileges. An example of how this loss manifested itself comes
from social activist Carey McWilliams, who notes that ‘‘in the summer of 1939 a sign
appeared in the foyer of a motion picture theatre in a San Joaquin Valley town,
reading: ‘Negroes and Okies Upstairs’’’ (116). Living in California while all these ill
feelings about Okies existed, Guthrie had an explicit example of how those in power
can unfairly discriminate against minorities, even white ones.
This understanding came in addition to other lessons. In response to one of his
radio shows, Guthrie received a letter in October 1937 from an irate listener who
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writes, in part, ‘‘You were getting along quite well in your program this evening until
you announced your ‘Nigger Blues.’ I am a Negro, a young Negro in college, and I
certainly resented your remark.’’ The writer goes on to note, ‘‘No person or persons
of any intelligence uses that word over radio today’’ (Terrence). This letter upset
Guthrie so much that he apologized on air for his thoughtlessness and tore the
offending song out of his notebook, along with any other that used the word ‘‘nigger’’
(Klein 95). Years later, the event remained solidly in his mind. Sometime in the early
’40s, he writes, ‘‘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 any more on the air.
So I apologized’’ (Introduction to ‘‘Po’ Nigger’’). In another autobiographical piece,
he again notes his on-air apologies: ‘‘I took time out several times to apologize to the
Negro people [for] frothings that I let slip out of the corners of my mouth’’ (‘‘Woody
Guthrie’’ 9). These comments show that he realized the hurt his words could inflict
and that he felt moved to make acts of contrition for what he said over the radio.
Also while in California, Guthrie first encountered and sometimes befriended
members of the left, who helped educate him on the subject of racial equality. One
man who guided him towards a better understanding of the race issue was Will Geer,
an actor and earnest left-winger. Guthrie’s daughter Nora believes her father did not
even have the language to describe racial issues before meeting Geer: ‘‘I don’t think he
[Guthrie] ever heard the word ‘That’s racism,’ until he heard it from Will Geer’’
(Interview). Guthrie made his connection to Geer though his association with leftist
writer Ed Robbins, who also helped arrange for Guthrie’s column in People’s World,
the West Coast version of the Daily Worker. The singer eventually met other
progressive writers there, such as Mike Quin. All of these figures had affiliations with
the Communist Party and either wrote or spoke out on the evils of racism. Guthrie
kept up this type of politically charged association even after he moved to New York
City. There he met other Communists, such as Mike Gold, and wrote for the Daily
Worker for awhile. During this time period, especially in New York City, the
Communist Party reached out, in both rhetoric and action, to African-Americans—
even though this effort often failed in a number of ways and for a many reasons.7
Nevertheless, these friendships with various people associated with and writing for
the Communist Party gave Guthrie some education on the complexities of race
relations beyond that he had been able to formulate on his own.
But the most influential reason for Guthrie’s shift away from racist rhetoric once
he hit New York City is due to his friendships with a number of black bluesmen. After
first moving there in the winter of 1940, Guthrie met and lived with the legendary
bluesman Leadbelly and his wife Martha in their cramped walk-up apartment on the
lower East Side. This apartment became a multicultural mixing place, for one close
friend says Leadbelly ‘‘had Italian friends, Jewish friends, white friends—he had all
types of people at his house’’ (quoted in Wolfe and Lornell 217). Here, Guthrie
learned at the foot of a master bluesman but not only about music. Through his
admiration for Leadbelly’s ability and with an understanding of the older man’s life,
Guthrie gained access to the dragging weight of racism. ‘‘It was Leadbelly…who really
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educated him mentally and emotionally and psychologically about the black
movement and about oppression,’’ says Guthrie’s daughter Nora. As a result, she
adds, he ‘‘could really begin to embrace a whole other contingency of people in the
United States’’ (Interview).
Black bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee also became close to Guthrie in
New York. In the autumn of 1941, Terry and McGhee briefly moved into the house
occupied by Guthrie and other members of the progressive music group the Almanac
Singers (Klein 214). Soon thereafter, Guthrie began performing with these two
bluesmen in an on-again, off-again teaming that would last into the early ’50s. They
also recorded together several times in the mid and late 40s for Moses Asch. Through
his relationships with these men, Guthrie continued to learn about the struggles of
black people in America. When Guthrie, Terry, and McGhee toured in late 1942, an
organization in Baltimore they played for did not want the three to eat together after
their performance. Guthrie then countered by pointing out, ‘‘I just sang with them,’’
but their hosts would not relent. In response, he had the other two leave quietly
before he calmly flipped a banquet table over and disappeared himself (Klein 258–
59). By 1946, Guthrie would even try to articulate the vision of America’s future that
Terry had shared with him: ‘‘he knows that his people can see a world where we all
vote, eat, work, talk, plan and think together and with all of our smokes and wheels
rolling and all of our selves well dressed and well housed and well fed’’ (American
Folksong 7). Due to his experiences on the West Coast, his relationship with
America’s left, and his friendship with black bluesmen, Guthrie’s views towards
African-Americans changed dramatically.
In the early 1940s, Guthrie would have several sources from which to learn not
only about racism in general but also about lynching in particular. He would have
heard Josh White, or even Billie Holiday, singing the anti-lynching anthem ‘‘Strange
Fruit,’’ which Abel Meeropol wrote in 1936 (under the pseudonym Lewis Allan) after
seeing a photograph of the brutal hanging of two black men. The song made and still
makes some people uncomfortable. The impulse to squirm is understandable, for it
immediately confronts listeners with the lines,
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
The song’s other lyrics provide no escape, no sanctuary from the grim truth of
lynching. In verse two, we find ‘‘bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,’’ along with
‘‘the sudden smell of burning flesh’’ in contrast to the ‘‘[p]astoral scene of the gallant
South.’’ The last line of the third and final verse concludes, ‘‘Here is a strange and
bitter crop.’’8
Along with the story this song told, Guthrie may also have learned about lynching
in a more direct fashion through Leadbelly or Josh White. After assaulting a white
man with a knife in Louisiana, Leadbelly almost found himself in the custody of a
lynch mob. According to the Shreveport Times of 16 January 1930, ‘‘Huddie
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Ledbetter…is in the parish jail charged with assault with intent to murder and only
the prompt response of the sheriff’s office for help saved the negro from mob
violence at the hands of a band of men who stormed the Mooringsport jail
Wednesday night.’’ Local officers held this group back until two deputy sheriffs
arrived and managed to disperse the angry whites.9 As a child in rural Georgia, Josh
White witnessed a lynching one night. Remembering the event years later, he
describes what he saw from his hiding place:
there were two figures. They were stripped other than their shirts. Like on tiptoe. Idon’t think I could see them dangling, but what I cold see and what I can’t get outof my eyes: I saw kids, ten, twelve years old, girls and boys my age, mothers, fathers,aunts, adults…the kids had pokers and they’d get them red hot and…and…it was ahell of a thing to see. (quoted in Shelton 17)
Indeed, White references this experience as his the reason ‘‘why I sing ‘Strange Fruit,’
’cause I know what I’m singing about’’ (quoted in Shelton 17). Both White’s and
Leadbelly’s stories would give Guthrie first-hand knowledge about the very real threat
of lynching that African Americans faced.
During this same time period that Guthrie befriended both Leadbelly and Josh
White, many groups were emphasizing horrific stories of lynching and fighting to
put an end to this savage spectacle once and for all. Although activists such as Ida
B. Wells-Barnett and groups such as the NAACP had long denounced this
repressive practice with well-documented pieces in newspapers and pamphlets, the
crusade against this travesty crescendoed in the 1930s. Through the efforts of the
NAACP, 130 anti-lynching bills were introduced to Congress during this decade,
more than double the number in the previous 40 years (Zangrando 165). Also
during the Great Depression, as incidents of lynchings increased after a drop in the
previous decade, several predominantly white organizations joined in this fight. As
already noted, the Communist Party had begun overtly to fight against racial
prejudice, with anti-lynching efforts as part of this strategy. Other predominantly
white liberal groups in the North—such as the ACLU, the American Jewish
Committee, the Society of Friends’ Race Relations Committee, and the Women’s
International League for Peace—also mustered against lynching during this time
(Sitkoff 277). Even southern reformers joined in to abolish lynching, with the
Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching and the Association of Southern
Women for the Prevention of Lynching taking leading roles in the perceived
heartland of lynchdom. Along with these many and varied groups during the 1930s
calling for an end to lynching, Guthrie voiced in song his own desire to end this
brutal practice.
Since his understanding of this particular form of racial violence began through his
exposure to a single photograph, it does not surprise that Guthrie personalizes his
distaste for lynching through indirect and direct references to this image. Often, the
Nelsons’ end only has the most oblique impact on Guthrie’s songs in that the victims
in his scenes meet their ends hanging from bridges rather than the more pervasive
image of a figure hanging from a tree. We see this implied impact in the song ‘‘A Tale
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a Feller Told Me’’ where a ‘‘lynch bunch’’ takes a young black man from jail who
stood up against an abusive boss. The mob then
Swung him down over the river
where that rusty bridge bends yonder
On that long iron
Hanging down, there. (My Newfound Land 78)
The song ‘‘Bloody Poll Tax Chain’’ also contains a moment that briefly echoes the
Nelson lynching. After pointing out the wrongs of the poll tax, Guthrie’s narrator
moves beyond simply addressing listeners in the third verse and asks us to get
involved. Believing Americans would help put an end to this racist barrier to the vote
when confronted with the truth, he says, ‘‘I know you know the right thing/When
you see it with your eye.’’ Then he suggests sights to prick us to action: ‘‘the crazy
killing lynch mob/And the ones that hang and die.’’ But if we witness these horrors
and do nothing to end the poll tax, the narrator warns us that others will continue to
die:
The skeleton tree and river bridge
Will see a blood red rain
If you do not swing your hammer
To break that poll tax chain. (‘‘Bloody’’)
This device also draws in listeners in that it asks us to be more than voyeurs; it asks us
to be activists who save others from lynching. Guthrie even suggested the Nelson
photograph when he created a pen-and-ink drawing of lynch victims. Here, he offers
us a view of numerous dead hanging from a bridge with a wasted city located on the
other side, indicating that the allowance of lynching only leads to desolation
(Figure 2). But we easily can surmise from these examples that Guthrie had the image
of the Nelsons in his mind when he referenced lynching, considering his explicit
connection in many other moments in his writing.
The connection between the Nelsons’ end and his lyrics becomes much more
certain in the song ‘‘Slipknot.’’ Here, the narrator twice asks, ‘‘Did you ever lose a
brother in that slipknot?’’ Then comes the answer, ‘‘Yes. My brother was a slave…he
tried to escape,/And they drug him to his grave with a slipknot.’’ This question-and-
answer pattern is repeated in the second verse:
Did you ever lose your father on that slipknot?
Did you ever lose your father on that slipknot?
Yes, they hung him from a pole an’ they shot him full of holes
And they left him hang to rot in that slipknot. (Pastures of Plenty 36–37)
As noted by Oklahoma folklorist Guy Logsdon, ‘‘The power of this song indicates
how far [Guthrie] had come in his idea about race relations and how deeply he felt
about the evil of lynching’’ (18). But by looking only at the lyrics, you would find no
specific trace of the Nelsons’ murder. However, an endnote to this song does directly
reference this incident when Guthrie writes, ‘‘Dedicated to the many negro mothers,
fathers, and sons alike, that was lynched and hanged under the bridge of the
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Canadian River, seven miles south of Okemah, Okla., and to the day when such will
be no more’’ (Pastures of Plenty 37). Obviously, he sees his anti-lynching work as a
way to rectify the wrong that occurred in his hometown.
Of all Guthrie’s anti-lynching songs, ‘‘Don’t Kill My Baby and My Son’’ (also titled
‘‘Old Dark Town’’ and ‘‘Old Rock Jail’’) most fully recreates the Nelsons’ end. Here
the narrator returns to ‘‘the old dark town…where I was born’’ and almost
immediately hears ‘‘the lonesomest sounding cry/That I ever had heard.’’
Investigating, he discovers ‘‘a black girl pulling her hair’’ in jail and hears her
lament, which becomes the song’s chorus:
Figure 2 Artwork by Woody Guthrie # Copyright 2004 by WOODY GUTHRIE
PUBLICATIONS, INC. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Courtesy of Smithsonian
Folkways.
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Don’t let them kill my baby,
And don’t let them kill my son!
You can hang me by my neck
On that Canadian River’s bridge!
Don’t let them kill my baby and my son!
In another verse, we find that she sits in jail and faces death because ‘‘A bad man had
pulled his gun/To make her hide him away.’’ Soon after these revelations, the
narrator walks into a store and finds a disturbing scene on a postcard: ‘‘I saw my
Canadian River’s bridge,/Three bodies swung in the wind.’’ As he stares at the card,
he hears her mercy plea once again (My Newfound Land 4).
With his dark memory of the murder of Laura and Lawrence Nelson, Guthrie
works to connect a past wrong with a present position on race relations in general
and lynching in particular. Although Guthrie does not ever exactly recreate the facts
of the Nelson case in any of his songs, he does generally use these deaths as a prompt
for change by making them empathetic moments. The horror of lynching comes
across through emotional connections. In his anti-lynching songs, he asks us if
anyone we know has been killed in this manner, or he creates a tale in which an abject
mother pleads not for her own life but that of her child. So while these songs
draw upon the particular Nelson case for material, none of them slavishly follows
the details, but they actually create new ones that make the victims even more
sympathetic. Thus, Guthrie uses a historical reality, the murder of Laura
and Lawrence Nelson, to urge others to stop lynchings that might happen in the
future. So in Guthrie’s anti-lynching songs that draw on the Nelson case, ‘‘The
difference and distance between representation and event are collapsed when
the representation attempts to affect the event’’ (Baker 236). The historical event,
meant to convey the message that a black person may not murder a white person,
gets reconfigured in Guthrie’s songs. Instead, Guthrie reshapes the event, intending
his songs to cause a change in his listeners, words meant to convey the
wrong of lynching. The brute power of the event, power held by the lynchers,
becomes emotional power wielded by Guthrie as songwriter, as storyteller, for the
lynched.
Even while artistically capturing the dark truth of lynching, Guthrie optimistically
believed that documenting evil in song could bring about change, for he argues, ‘‘A
folk song is whats [sic] wrong and how to fix it’’ (Letter to Alan Lomax). His way of
fixing the situation was showing the ugly reality of lynching by mobs. Guthrie used
his art in an attempt to educate others, just as he was educated, just as the visual
artists mentioned above tried to educate, just as the NAACP and other groups tried
to educate the American public about the evil of lynching. Guthrie’s efforts stand out
from many of these others in that he becomes his own best example of how being
confronted with injustice through personal experience, friendship, and art can undo
people’s racist beliefs. Just as he believed that songs have the power to educate minds
and move hearts, his anti-lynching work was his own personal offering to America to
make such change possible for others.
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Notes
[1] For a detailed discussion of these exhibits, see Park (311–65).[2] See Without Sanctuary (Photographs 37–38). As can be seen in the photograph, Guthrie’s
memory is a bit faulty in that he recalls three bodies hanging from the Canadian Riverbridge. This divergence from the actual history of the event may be due to there being twophotographs of this lynching. The first is shown in within this article; the other is a close upof Laura Nelson. Guthrie may have seen both and in remembering combines them.
[3] The information for this section is drawn from the following variety of sources to create afull account: Litwack (16); ‘‘Crime’’ (99–100); Notes to the Photographs (178–80); Klein (6).
[4] Both Werner’s ‘‘Democratic Visions, Democratic Voices: Woody as Writer’’ and Marsh’s‘‘Deportees: Woody Guthrie’s Unfinished Business’’ discuss race issues in Woody’s life andhis songs.
[5] Concerning the death toll of the Tulsa Riot, various writers and scholars still do not agree onexact figures. See Ellsworth (66), Hirsch (6, 249, 308), Madigan (222–24), and Brophy (59–60).
[6] Guthrie quotes and song lyrics throughout the article appear courtesy of Woody GuthriePublications, Inc. # by WOODY GUTHRIE PUBLICATIONS, INC. All rights reserved.Used by permission.
[7] For details concerning these efforts and the conflicts it created, see Naison and Record.[8] For the full text of this song along with an in-depth discussion of its history, see Margolick.[9] For a more in-depth discussion of this incident and the events that lead up to it, see Wolfe
and Lornell (97–98).
Works Cited
Baker, Bruce E. ‘‘North Carolina Lynching Ballads.’’ Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South.Ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1997. 219–45.
Brophy, Alfred L. Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.‘‘‘Chivalrous’ Southerners Lynch Woman.’’ The Voice of the People, 16 Apr. 1914.‘‘Crime.’’ Crisis. 2.3 (July 1911): 99–100.
Ellsworth, Scott. Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Baton Rouge, LA:Louisiana State UP, 1982.
Franklin, Jimmie Lewis. The Blacks in Oklahoma. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1980.Guthrie, Nora. Personal interview. 12 December 2000.Guthrie, Woody. American Folksong. New York: Oak Publications, 1961.——. ‘‘Bloody Poll Tax Chain.’’ ts., Box 1, folder 6. Woody Guthrie Collection. Ralph Rinzler
Archives, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Washington, DC.——. Interview with Alan Lomax. American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.——. ‘‘Kitty Wells.’’ Songbook ms, Performing Arts Reading Room, Library of Congress,
Washington, DC.——. Introduction to ‘‘Po’ Nigger Ain’t Got No Show.’’ ts., Songs 1, Box 3, Introductions folder,
Woody Guthrie Archives, New York.——. Letter to Alan Lomax. 19 September 1940. Box 1, Correspondence folder. Woody Guthrie
Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.——. Endnote to ‘‘Little Liza Jane.’’ c. 1937. Songbook microfilm: 175, Woody Guthrie Archives,
New York.——. My Newfound Land. c. 1944 Songbook microfilm, Performing Arts Reading Room, Library of
Congress, Washington, DC.——. Pasture of Plenty: A Self-Portrait. Ed. Dave Marsh, and Harold Leventhal. New York:
HarperCollins, 1990.——. Santa Monica Social Register Examine ’Er. (c. 1937) Newspaper microfilm, Woody Guthrie
Archives, New York.——. ‘‘Woody Guthrie.’’ Essay ts., Box 3, Folder 6. Woody Guthrie Collection, Ralph Rinzler
Archives, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Washington, DC.
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——. ‘‘Woody’s Artist Friend Paints Lynch Scene.’’ Daily Worker 22 April 1940: 7.Hirsch, James S. Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy. Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin, 2002.Klein, Joe. Woody Guthrie: A Life. New York: Delta, 1999.Litwack, Leon F. ‘‘Hellhounds.’’ Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe,
NM: Twin Palm, 2000. 8–37.Logsdon, Guy. ‘‘Notes on the Songs.’’ Buffalo Skinners Asch 4. Washington, DC: Smithsonian/
Folkways, 1999. 12–26.McWilliams, Cary. ‘‘California Pastoral.’’ Antioch Review 2.1 (1942): 103–21.Madigan, Tim. The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2001.Margolick, David. Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights.
Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 2000.Marsh, Dave. ‘‘Deportees: Woody Guthrie’s Unfinished Business.’’ Hard Travelin’: The Life and
Legacy of Woody Guthrie. Ed. Robert Santelli and Emily Davidson. Hanover, NH: UP of NewEngland, 1999. 170–80.
Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem during the Depression. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1983.Notes to the Photographs. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Sante Fe, NM:
Twin Palm, 2000.Park, Marlene. ‘‘Lynching and Antilynching: Art and Politics in the 1930s.’’ Prospects 18 (1993):
311–65.Record, Wilson. Race and Radicalism: The NAACP and the Communist Party in Conflict. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 1964.Shelton, Robert. ‘‘The Josh White Story.’’ The Josh White Song Book. Chicago, IL: Quadrangle
Books, 1963. 9–45.Sitkoff, Harvard. A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1978.Stein, Walter J. California and the Dust Bowl Migration. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973.Terrence, Howell. Letter to Woody Guthrie. 20 October 1937. Microfilm copy, Woody Guthrie
Archives, New York.Werner, Craig. ‘‘Democratic Visions, Democratic Voices: Woody as Writer.’’ Hard Travelin’: The
Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie. Ed. Robert Santelli and Emily Davidson. Hanover, NH: UPof New England, 1999. 69–82.
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palm, 2000.Wolfe, Charles, and Kip Lornell. The Life and Legend of Lead Belly. New York: DeCapo Press, 1999.Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford UP, 1957.Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
UP, 1980. 6–7.
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