Talk:Woody Guthrie/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Jewish?

I heard somewhere that Guthrie was Jewish...can't find any sources, but could anyone clarify this for me? Wobblies (talk) 17:42, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

No, his son Arlo Guthrie is.

In the section "Jewish music" you'll find Guthrie was partially inspired by Jewish-American music in his travels to Brooklyn in the early 1940's. He felt oppressed peoples whether they are black, white, Jewish, Christian, Okies and Yankees, the words and music of the oppressed has a powerful message & sound to what they are promoting a sense of unity and brotherhood of all mankind. + 71.102.2.206 (talk) 06:22, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

More books

This article is so neat that I am loath to edit it in any way. There are a couple of relevant books which are not mentioned.

• "Woody Guthrie Art Works" by Nora Guthrie, Steven Brower, and Woody Guthrie (Rizzoli International Publications, 2005)
• "Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie" by Robert Santelli and Emily Davidson (Wesleyan University Press, 1999)

There are both in print, so some people might be inspired to buy them - if they are mentioned in the article. Ogg (talk) 20:18, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. Let me do some research first. I think the Santelli book (I have it at home) is a compilation of lectures/speeches given during the 1996 event at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. If so, I may try to incorporate that fact into the prose of the article. Will think about adding the other. There are quite a few books about Woody, it's difficult to decide which ones to include. Kmzundel (talk) 15:48, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

I added info about the Santelli book into the prose of the Tributes section. Kmzundel (talk) 17:15, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

The discography comes from that book (that you scanned), It should be added to the printed materials section. --Dannygutters (talk · contribs) 16:23, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Tributes section

Should the Tributes section be broken out into it's own page like the festival, foundation and discography page? It's reaching the length and tangental scope where I think this should happen. --Dannygutters (talk · contribs) 18:43, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

IMHO, no. :-) The Festival and Foundation are both organizations. And the Discography is a list. I just don't see the Tributes being a separate article. Kmzundel (talk) 19:21, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

There should be something in here about Jonatha Brooke who published a tribute to Guthrie entitled "The Works" in 2008. This was, i think (according to Jonatha herself) recorded using lyrics from Guthrie's archives along with his daughter. —Preceding unsigned comment added by We4get1918 (talk • contribs) 02:03, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

I agree that the Jonatha Brooke album should be included in the article, but is the correct place for it under Tributes or should it be in the Archives section where the similar Mermaid Avenue projects are mentioned?Jimdoria (talk) 03:08, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

The Jonatha Brooke album would not be relevant to the information included in the Tributes section and it is already included in the main Foundation and archives article. Kmzundel (talk) 13:50, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Posthumous honors

IMHO, the Grammy award info should still be listed under posthumous honors for Woody. It's his biggest honor yet. There's nothing wrong with it appearing in both the Woody bio article AND the Foundation article. Kmzundel (talk) 19:35, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

I agree entirely, and would like to see it come back. There is room for it, as the article is neither overlong nor slow to load. Unless there are strenuous objections in the next few hours, calling for further discussion, would you do the honors of restoring the material? Hertz1888 (talk) 20:39, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I'll restore it if there are no strenuous objections. Kmzundel (talk) 21:37, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Since there have been no objections and it's been at least one day, I will restore now. I feel strongly that anyone reading the bio of Woody Guthrie should know about this Grammy Award. Kmzundel (talk) 14:13, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

You're right about the award, I think the grammy win should be mentioned but release specific info like book-length and taper are relevant to the release itself not Woody himself. I've taken a stab at editing it this way. Lets keep the more verbose details of the release on the discography and foundation page. I kind of see this page growing in the way the bob dylan page did, detailed information about a specific album should go on that albums page and biographical information should go here, is this a good idea? --Dannygutters (talk · contribs) 15:36, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Probably. I guess time will tell, depending on if the article grows and to what degree. So far, so good. :-) Kmzundel (talk) 01:30, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Mermaid Ave Section

Hi, So I removed the Mermaid Avenue section. I think this is an important album for Woody, Wilco and the archives, but outside of the scope of this page to have a whole paragraph on it. We previously had a similar section to this but during the Featured Article review it was decided that to keep this article about woody himself and projects related to woody on their own pages for the sake of focus. The Mermaid Avenue album has it's own page which is pretty detailed, it is also mentioned in the Woody Guthrie Foundation article and the foundation section in this article. --Dannygutters (talk · contribs) 02:33, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Live Wire

Public radio coverage this AM of "Woody Guthrie - Live Wire", Exhibition or release based on wire-recorder tracks of him singing 1949 in a Jewish community center, maybe in Florida, recently turned over to archivists and with considerable effort transcribed to media that can actually be played in the present. Apparently quite a find; probably worth research and mention.
--Jerzy•t 16:03, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Yep, the album won a grammy in 2008 for best historical album, It should be mentioned in the honors section. Check out the article on the album itself too. the Live Wire --Dannygutters (talk · contribs) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dannygutters (talk • contribs) 16:34, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Peace Abbey Award

I just called the Peace Abbey and verified the date of the Award (Sept. 26, 1992) since the date is not listed on their web site. The person I spoke to told me she would do her best to have the date added to their website so that it substantiates the statement (date) that I added to the article.Kmzundel (talk) 17:26, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Query accuracy of "Early Life"

Which states: "Eventually, Guthrie's father sent for his son to come to Texas where little would change for the now-aspiring musician. Guthrie, 18 years old..." Guthrie told Lomax that, after his family home burnt down in one of the mentioned fires he was adopted by Sam White, and then by another family, before taking to the road in 1927 at the age of 17. After reviewing this recording I find not much other specific information (dates of events etc.) is given. I beleive this recording is the same that refered to (second hand) in Ref. 9 "Guthrie's interview with Alan Lomax at the Library Of Congress Recording Sessions, as recorded in Cray, Ramblin Man, p. 28.". In any case the interview is with Woody aged 28 which should make it a ~1940 recording. Is anyone able to clarify this apparent contradiction? 60.242.91.158 (talk) 15:33, 26 May 2008 (UTC) 60.242.91.158 (talk) 15:00, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

I think these ages are refrenced in Cray's Ramblin' Man p44, I have this book at home so I'll check the refrence, but I think the chronology goes that Charley left for texas after the guthrie home burnt down, guthrie eventually came to texas after him and married mary before he began his 'traveling' in the sense that traveling refers to his time moving westward with the migrants rather than the first time he went anywhere. --Dannygutters (talk · contribs) 14:37, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Bot report : Found duplicate references !

In the last revision I edited, I found duplicate named references, i.e. references sharing the same name, but not having the same content. Please check them, as I am not able to fix them automatically :)

• "cray197" :
  • Cray, ''Ramblin Man''p. 197
  • Cray, ''Ramblin Man'', p. 197

DumZiBoT (talk) 06:46, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Ok it's fixed, DumZiBot! LeeVJ (talk) 00:49, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Quote box

At least on my browser, the text quoted in the first quote box is not currently visible. I looked at the underlying source, and there is nothing obviously wrong. The problem might be in the template. - Jmabel | Talk 02:11, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Fixed, even as I was remarking. - Jmabel | Talk 02:12, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Moe Asch

"Though the song was written in 1940, it would be four years before it was recorded by Moses Asch in April 1944." I understand what this means, but only because I know who Asch was. The wording makes it sound as if Asch sang or otherwise performed on the recording. In fact, Guthrie performed, and Asch engineered, produced, and marketed the record. - Jmabel | Talk 02:17, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

It is highly ambiguous. On the other hand, it should be easy to fix with proper rewording. Let me encourage you to be bold and proceed with that. Hertz1888 (talk) 02:28, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Y'know, I'm just not in the mood. As I mention in the next section, I think there are some much larger problems with the article, but this article is not one I'm particularly inclined to take on. - Jmabel | Talk 02:57, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Some surprising omissions

Given that this is a featured article, there are some surprising omissions. There is no mention that he was quite a decent visual artist, graphic designer, and especially cartoonist, routinely illustrating his own writings; a rather good book of his artwork was published in 2005 by Rizzoli. Certainly people have made a career in visual art on less talent. There is no mention of talking blues, which he played a major role in popularizing. And there is nothing here to indicate that there was a lot of humor in his songs, nor really much of anything about the manner in which he mixed traditional folk elements and original songwriting (little more than an allusion to the fact that he did so). On this last, I see only one reference to him appropriating a melody, and nothing about him reworking traditional lyrics (as, for example, when he turned the "Ballad of Jesse James" into a song about Jesus). - Jmabel | Talk 02:44, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

That's some omissions, but then FAC articles aren't finished, so can still be improved ;) have added 'best known' to intro to allow for his other talents, but you'r right, they should be included in the article.. LeeVJ (talk) 03:10, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

The article says that Woody Guthrie sang pacifist songs and only opposed fascism after the breaking of the Molotov Ribbentropp pact. I believe this is misleading. He may or may not have sung pacifist songs but the fact is he did not appear on the Almanac Singers' Songs for John Doe album of pacifist songs (recorded in February or March 1941) In fact I believe he was in another part of the country when the Almanacs were founded and only joined the group later on when the industrial labor movement had thrown its support to the war. (It had earlier opposed rearmament because corporations refused to hire black workers, but after President Roosevelt signed an executive order forbidding this the labor movement got behind him).

In fact the entire section of the article dealing with the World War II era is a little sketchy and I think. Also even though Irwin Silber is quotes as saying:

In the Almanac House Guthrie added an air of authenticity to their work since Guthrie was a "real" working class Oklahoman. "There was the heart of America personified in Woody....And for a New York Left that was primarily Jewish, first or second generation American, and was desperately trying to get Americanized, I think a figure like Woody was of great, great importance", a friend of the group, Irwin Silber, would say.

Weren't Almanac members Cisco Houston (from Baltimore), Lee Hays, and Sis Cunningham (both from Arkansas) real American, too? Don't get this point. (I guess Bess Lomax, Butch Hawes, and Pete Seeger don't count as "real Americans" because not sufficiently working class in this -- to my mind rather strange-- version of things). Why is Woody supposed to be more "real" and a more authentic representative of the "heart of America" than they were? Mballen (talk) 19:28, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Needs a list of audio links!

How did this article make it to this point without a list of audio links? E.g.

This Land is Your Land
Jesus Christ
House of the Rising Sun
Two Good Men
Pretty Boy Floyd

... well, I could go on - there are 1,280 hits on YouTube, but I might as well pause at this point for suggestions on the best way to structure the list. Wnt (talk) 03:13, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Good points except for "Rising Sun," which Guthrie didn't write, nor is his performance of it an especially significant one. You'd want Leadbelly for that.Sensei48 (talk) 03:21, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Far as I know (and ridiculous as it may sound), these recordings are still copyrighted and the Guthrie heirs protect their copyrights [1]. Which is a shame, since Guthrie once wrote

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

... Phiwum (talk) 12:14, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

This copyright stuff is irrelevant. Legally it doesn't matter if a link is on the "Talk Page" or the "Article Page" ... or the history page for that matter... if you really think it's so offensive to link to the songs you'll have to "oversight" this discussion right out of existence. But I say that if a song has been viewed 253,000 times, and I discuss it on the Woody Guthrie page the day that it's featured, and I still can access it, then the odds are that whoever is hosting the thing on YouTube is doing so legally within the laws of whatever country they live in or by some permission or music fee or whatever. And I also say that making that judgment isn't my responsibility or Wikipedia's responsibility, because otherwise every single inline reference in Wikipedia has to be reviewed by a lawyer and we might as well close up shop now. Wnt (talk) 19:21, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

It's relevant because we have guidelines against linking this sort of thing. Please see Wikipedia:External links#Restrictions on linking. - Jmabel | Talk 05:57, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Looking at this guideline, I think that it is misguided, and was changed in 2007 without any clear consensus as indicated in the Talk archives. But even as worded, it does not prohibit the posting of these links. It says that the links are prohibited if I know that they are a copyright violation. But how the heck can they be a violation when they stay up for months and months and appear as the first few entries returned by any YouTube search that the owner would care to perform? If those things are illegal then after the first 250,000 hits somebody owns the great-great-grandsons of the guy who taped Woody Guthrie singing a bajillion dollars in damages, don't they? What I do know is that there must be plenty of countries where "Internet radio" can pay some nominal fee and deliver this content entirely legally, or where the copyright isn't interpreted to last quite so long, or something, even if I don't have the time or detective skills to figure out what the story is. Wnt (talk) 20:43, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

YouTube has a very different policy on copyright violations than Wikipedia. YouTube's policy is to leave it up unless some rights holder complains. Our policy is to try never to cross the line at all; even for clear "fair use" of media we write an explicit justification. The fact that YouTube leaves something up doesn't mean the rights are clear at all, just that they haven't (or haven't yet) received a complaint. That's exactly why our guidelines discourage linking to YouTube.

I personally find some of our guidelines too restrictive, and I've on occasion argued to loosen them (although this particular one I don't think I've ever concerned myself with: I figure anyone can do their own search in YouTube, and pretty much everyone knows it exists). But the place to fight this issue if you are so inclined is probably at the guideline level, not to say that a particular article should be an exception. - Jmabel | Talk 18:21, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

As I said before, I don't think this runs counter to that guideline anyway, because we don't "know" any such thing is a copyright problem... Wikipedia doesn't screen other links based on whether we think they adhere to Wikipedia policies, or copyright claims, etc. When we link to a newspaper, who knows whether they still have a valid subscription to the AP wire, or whether their reporters have plagiarized from a competitor? Some people just seem to need to make a symbolic sacrifice to the copyright god, no matter whether it makes any legal difference or not. Wnt (talk) 06:30, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

"who lived across from Guthrie and his family in Brooklyn in the 1940s"

Across from him how? Across the street? Across the hall? There is an indispensable word missing in this sentence. It can say "nearby" but it can't say "across" as if across is a specific thing in and of itself.—141.155.159.210 (talk) 09:20, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Having read this article from stem to stern (as I often do with Wikipedia's featured articles), I must say this is really a step below most featured articles. The writing is haphazard; choppy in places, unbalanced. There is more problem grammar and errors than the one I flagged above. It's a long way from "brilliant prose". You should reassess this article and get it off the front page.—141.155.159.210 (talk) 10:43, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

• "Guthrie was born in Okemah, a small town in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, to Nora Belle Sherman and Charles Edward Guthrie."
  • How about a date in relation?
• "...judging from the circumstances surrounding his death by drowning, suffered from the same hereditary disease."
  • Why? What is it about huntingtons that makes it likely. What were these "circumstances". Why is the mother suspected in the preceding paragraph? It's all very insinuating and muddled and unilluminating.
• "According to one story, Guthrie made friends with an African-American blues harmonica player named "George", whom he would watch play at the man's shoe shine booth. Before long, Guthrie bought his own harmonica and began playing along. But in another interview 14 years later, Guthrie claimed that he learned how to play harmonica from a boyhood friend, John Woods, and that his earlier story was false."
  • "One story" is poor; the source of this "story" should be attributed in text; it's then referred to later by relation to "another interview", but we never knew the earlier was an "interview"
• "He seemed to have a natural affinity for music and easily learned to "play by ear". He began to use his musical skills around town, playing a song for a sandwich or coins."
  • "Seemed" is waffling; "began to use" should be rethought if you aren't going to provide a time period in close proximity; "a song for a sandwich or coins" should be "songs for a meal or small sums" or something similar
• "Eventually, Guthrie's father sent for his son to come to Texas where little would change for the now-aspiring musician."
  • "Eventually" sounds like a stand in for not having a date; "now-aspiring musician" should never be said without a date or age provided.
• Guthrie, now 18..."
  • Poor. "Now 18" has to be said in relation to something else. The "now" invokes some event just told, at which he is "now". It should say "at 18" or "by 18" or something similar.
    • This is just the first section after the lead. This article is a bit of a mess.—141.155.159.210 (talk) 11:04, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Book written by him

I cannot see a link to the autobiography written by him - forgot the name - but it has an article here. 78.151.123.71 (talk) 10:09, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Canadians sing his patrotic song?

Canucks had any idea from them having their own identity as a nation? Eliécer Guillén. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.249.87.38 (talk) 23:04, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Canadians don't sing his songs in school. That should definitely be taken out of the opening description, just because Manitoba happens to have a pdf file? Canking (talk) 04:48, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Points from FA Review

Just noticed that the article failed its FAR, there are some points in this review that could be addressed to improve the article, review can be found here. L∴V 23:43, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Tributes

There is a recent notice of the musical 'Woody Sez', but there are no independent sources supporting its notability, and it looks like a conflict of interest, if not outright spamming. Thoughts welcome. 99.155.206.57 (talk) 06:23, 13 December 2009 (UTC)