Southern Spaces

Folk-lyricist Woody Guthrie's 1943 autobiography, Bound for Glory, draws heavily on Old Southwest humor and Southern Gothic, two traditions steeped in irrationality and violence that gave Guthrie narrative forms out of which to reinvent himself as an unlikely American hero.

Edward A. Shannon is an Associate Professor of Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He continues writing about the life and work of Woody Guthrie and has two essays on Guthrie awaiting publication: "Talkin' World Revolution: The Subversive Humor of Woody Guthrie's Seeds of Man" in Intersecting Paths: Continuing Legacy of Old Southwestern Humor (Louisiana State University Press) and "'Vulgar Words of Language': The Sacred and Profane Hero of Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory" in On Western Subjects: Locating Autobiographical Writing in the North American West (University of Utah Press, 2005).

In his 1943 autobiography Bound for Glory, the American folksinger Woody Guthrie mythologizes himself and documents a career that never reached its full potential. Guthrie's tenure as a creative artist was rather short; he began performing in the 1930s, rose to some prominence in the 1940s, but was sidetracked by the war. By the end of the decade, many of his great songs had been written. By 1955, Huntington's Disease, the degenerative brain disorder that had killed his mother Nora, put him in the hospital. He died in 1967, after twelve more or less bed-ridden years. Although he had intended to write more, Bound for Glory was the only substantial prose volume he published during his lifetime, and as such is Guthrie's fullest statement about his life and art.

While he is usually considered a westerner, Bound for Glory shows Guthrie's indebtedness to southern traditions. In particular, Guthrie draws on Old Southwestern Humor and the Southern Gothic, two traditions steeped in irrationality and violence. Elaine Apthorp writes that the Guthrie persona was drawn from "the example of cracker-barrel comic Will Rogers and through him [ . . . ] the southwestern humorist tradition of Samuel Clemens and company" (22). Terrel Dixon also notes that Guthrie's dialect is "reminiscent of such early Southwestern humorists as [Thomas Bangs] Thorpe and Augustus Baldwin Longstreet" (Dixon 136). While Guthrie's debt to northern and western writers (notably Walt Whitman and John Steinbeck) has been well established, the southern influence has been little more than noted in passing.

But Guthrie's interest in the South goes beyond his use of dialect; there is abundant evidence of Guthrie's southern travels and affinities. Danney Goble, in "The Southern Influence on Oklahoma," observes that Guthrie's home state owes more than a little of its character to the culture of the south. Guthrie's career exemplifies this. Among his major musical influences were Mississippi's Jimmie Rodgers and Virginia's Carter Family, and he recorded songs, like "Stackolee," which "grew out of the lore of Southern African Americans" (Logsdon, Muleskinner 23). As he wrote in his song "If You Ain't Got the Do Re Mi," Guthrie was frequently concerned with the people of "beautiful Texas / Oklahoma, [ . . .] Georgia, [and] Tennessee " (Guthrie, "Do Re Mi" 231).