It has these Yiddishisms in the song that are really cool. The Klezmatics’ Lorin Sklamberg, in preparation for recording the band’s renditions of Guthrie’s songs, recalls picking through “not just Hanukkah songs but songs about the cultural life in Coney Island, anti-fascism things, other stuff.” In an interview with me when “Wonder Wheel” was released, Sklamberg, himself a sound archivist at New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, said, “One song I was interested in was called ‘Headdy Down,’ a lullaby for Arlo and the other brother Joady. ![]() ![]() He’d married into a Jewish family, so songs about Jewish culture began coming, too, such as “The Many and The Few” (a whopping 20 historical verses, ending with “Eight candles we’ll burn and a Ninth one too/ Every New Year that comes and goes/ We’ll think of the many in the hands of the few/ And thank God we are seeds of the Jews”) and an adaptation of the Carter Family’s “Little Moses.” Off the road, he turned to the newspapers for topical inspiration, producing a whole album of songs about Sacco and Vanzetti. With kids appearing at his feet, he began writing songs for them (“Take me riding in the car, car…”). Settled here for a time (or as settled as a rambler like Guthrie could get) in the mid-’40s, Guthrie began doing what he could never stop himself from doing: writing songs about everything around him. Guthrie would forever ramble about the country, but the man we know as the quintessential Okie boy was based in the five boroughs of New York for the majority of his life, and much of that was in Coney Island. He took that new insight to the airwaves in his first radio gig in Los Angeles - performing those folk songs on a daily show and honing what became a carefully crafted persona as a wise but feisty hillbilly - before taking off for New York. Guthrie would channel these empathies from many cultures he encountered, but this first transformation was significant: Guthrie ceased being a mere Okie and became a citizen of the world. It wasn’t just entertainment he was performing their past.” Singing for these people was a totally different experience from playing a barn dance with the Corncob Trio. “The whiny old ballads his mother had taught him were a bond that all country people shared and now, for the migrants, the songs were all that was left of the land. His first biographer, Joe Klein, wrote of the epiphany in “Woody Guthrie: A Life”: During these travels, at first passing time by idly strumming his guitar, Guthrie learned that music was more than an escape it was a conduit of cultures. He spent the next few years hitching on highways and riding on rails. ![]() He then succumbed to the allure of the road as he watched boxcar after boxcar of desperate, destitute farm families roll through town on their way out west to a different kind of promised land. Set adrift as his family fell apart, Guthrie set out alone from Okemah, Oklahoma, as a teen, got married in Pampa, Texas, and stayed put a short while in the early ’30s. Guthrie was not just a native of Oklahoma, he’d come to symbolize the plight of all “Okies,” an initially pejorative term that tagged Dust Bowl migrants from any state. Woody Guthrie blew into New York City in February 1940 and literally knocked the dust off his shoes.
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