OKEMAH, Okla.—The revolutionary spirit of Woody Guthrie permeates his birthplace of Okemah, Okla., where the 27th Annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival was held July 10-13. There attendees celebrated Woody’s 112th birthday, and modern musicians added their voices to the folk canon. A sense of camaraderie flowed throughout the festival as musicians jammed long into the night and attendees engaged in conversation over shared meals.
At the Crystal Theater on opening night, Ellis Paul, a folk singer who sports a Woody Guthrie tattoo, debuted a new song, “Spaceman Billionaire,” comparing the excesses of the ultra-rich who can go to space on a whim while those on Earth struggle to afford daily life.
Paul makes regular pilgrimages to the foundation of Guthrie’s childhood home to collect rocks and redistribute them during his own travels as a troubadour in locations as diverse as the Smithsonian and Mariposa Folk Festival.
At the Crystal Theater on Friday, he joined with Crys Matthews, leading the audience in a chorus of Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer,” thematically inspired by Matthews’ soulful performance of Odetta’s arrangement of “Take This Hammer.”
On Thursday, Chris Buhalis opened with Woody’s “Two Good Men” about labor organizers, Sacco and Vanzetti. His set continued honoring the working class with his own original labor songs, “Daddy Worked the High Steel” and “Big Car Town.”
That evening at the Pastures of Plenty on the east side of town, the Red Dirt Rangers sang “Red State Blues,” describing what it’s like to be on the left in Oklahoma. The song takes a strong anti-fascist stance, declaring “The only good Nazi is a Nazi that’s dead!”
At the Hen House on Friday, Dan Bern played his song “Oklahoma” about the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing. The song ends on a hopeful note “When we stand strong together / And let love enjoy its will / Misfortune can’t defeat us / It makes us stronger still.”
At the Crystal Theater on Saturday, Bern also played Dylan’s “Song to Woody” and his own humorous take on being initiated into folkie lineage called “Woody and Bob, Bruce and Dan.” Bern’s “God Said No” fantasizes about going back in time to kill Hitler, thus saving millions of lives from fascism. He ended his set with “Snoopy Forever,” which presents a vision for peace in the Middle East through regional solidarity. He was met with a standing ovation.
The Okfuskee County Historical Society and Museum has a room dedicated to artifacts about Woody, including a replica of his front porch, which acts as a stage for lectures and performances during WoodyFest. There Sam Flowers of the Woody Guthrie Center gave a lecture called Woody Guthrie and Race, examining Guthrie’s personal evolution and historical events that shaped him.
In Woody’s childhood, Okemah was a conservative sundown town where Laura D. Nelson was lynched. His father, Charlie Guthrie, a Dixiecrat, was publicly opposed to socialism. Speaking about his growth, Woody is quoted as saying, “Me and my background are always having a fight.”
Woody rallied with Billie Holiday and Cab Calloway to support Isaac Woodard, who was blinded by police in 1946, and in 1949 Woody supported his comrade Paul Robeson at Peekskill as he faced attacks by the Klan during a benefit for the Civil Rights Congress.
Much like Jack Hirschman’s Revolutionary Poets Brigade of San Francisco, the Woody Guthrie Poets highlight modern-day social issues. This year’s theme was anti-fascism, and over three dozen poets participated in readings at Oklahoma City’s Rodeo Cinema, Woody’s front porch, and Tulsa’s Woody Guthrie Center. Since 2005, the Woody Guthrie Poets has featured a rotating cast of wordsmiths from across America.
In Okemah, each poet was accompanied by multi-instrumentalist David Amram on keyboard and flute. Poet Quinn Carver Johnson, a 2024 LAMBDA Literary Award winner, read their poem “Dinosaurs,” envisioning a future where “crumbled capitalism buried deep / under layers of sediment and time.”
Johnson, who works at the Woody Guthrie Center, also co-facilitated a writing workshop with Anna Canoni of Woody Guthrie Publications. Johnson shared poetry by Stanisław Barańczak and Langston Hughes. Canoni shared the newspaper articles that inspired Woody to write the songs “1913 Massacre,” “Deportees,” and “Reuben James,” transforming historic facts into consciousness-raising anthems of socialist realism.
Canoni is the daughter of Woody’s daughter, Nora, and was one of several of Woody’s descendants in attendance. Anna Guthrie, Arlo’s daughter, gave a moving solo concert at the Crystal.
Paul Juhasz, organizer of the Woody Guthrie Poets for the past five years, performed “Self-Checkout,” which examines finding social connection in an unlikely place “deep within the belly of the machine” during brief encounters with a Walmart greeter, finding gratitude for “these particles of the genuine, / breaths gulped down like I’m a drowning swimmer resurfaced, / these reminders of what the machine is designed to destroy.”
Poet Bill McCloud, a former emcee for Woody Fest, performed his poem “Time” in Tulsa, speaking to the multi-generational fight against fascism: “My father was doing it / before I was born / yet somehow I knew / That’s the connection / between a father and son.”
Ky George’s poem, “Between the Flames,” captures the righteous anger of protest, declaring, “When they start calling it a riot, things start to burn./ The streets a crematorium for the ways things never should have been.” George will be Juhasz’s successor as organizer for the Woody Poets. Their poem “A New Statue of Liberty” envisions a world beyond endless bloodshed, stating, “When the fighting is done, we will take the weapons that couldn’t be made into plowshares and melt them down to begin building her from heel to head.”
The group releases an anthology every other year. Three of the anthologies, Elegant Rage (2012), Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way (2017), and Working Man’s Hand (Fine Dog Press, 2023), currently sit behind the glass at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa as part of an exhibit on protest music and literature. The neighboring Bob Dylan Center also features an exhibition called “How Many Roads,” focused on Dylan’s protest songs during the Civil Rights movement.
Working Man’s Hand contains proletarian poetry inspired by “The Last One,” a song from the Dropkick Murphys’ 2022 album This Machine Still Kills Fascists, featuring Woody Guthrie lyrics derived from his archives. Much like Guthrie himself, the anthologized poems weave together historical events, bear witness to current events, and amplify the voice of the working class.
“Business is a Ponzi scheme yoking the worker’s neck,” writes former Corpus Christi Texas Poet Laureate Tom Murphy.
“These men / would burn Greenwood to the ground again / and go to church that next Sunday / believing God was on their side.” writes Ron Wallace, an Oklahoma poet and Southeastern Oklahoma State University professor.
During his set at the Crystal, Dan Bern sang “Slowly Turn Around,” which laments, “Where have all the protest singers gone?” Such powerful voices were easily found in Okemah following in Guthrie’s footsteps by singing out the truth, shining a light on struggle, and sparking a hunger for lasting progressive change.
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