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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.

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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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