I just finished reading Woody Guthrie’s biography, Bound for Glory. Highly recommend it. It started kinda slow, with a lot of detail about young Woody’s trials and tribulations in Oklahoma. He weathered a lot of sorrow early on. It’s surprising he didn’t become bitter. And giving his street-fighting ethic as a kid, it’s also surprising what a peaceful, tolerant adult he grew into. I particularly like a scene where he’s playing in a bar on the West Coast at the outbreak of World War II. Patriotic fervor is running high among everyone, Woody included. But when a mob starts attacking a Japanese-American’s bar, Woody and a bunch of military folks rally to their defense. There are countless scenes like that. And he has a real gift for language (not to mention songwriting.: Another great scene is when he drifts from West Texas to California on the hope of a better life with relatives. He gets to the house, looks inside at the stifling, stable existence within and walks away, even though he’s famished and his clothes are hanging off him. Better to follow his muse than succumb to the routine of middle class life.
“When I stood there on top of the hill and listened to that iron gate snap locked behind me, and looked all down across the roofs and church steeples and chimneys and steep houses of Sonora, I smelled the drift of the pine rosin in the air and watched a cloud whiff past me over my head, and I was alive again.”
One reply on “Bound for Glory”
it’s probably been 20 years since i read this. i’m sure that it’s still on a shelf downstairs. i think that i need to revisit it. thanks, bob!