Songbook from Woody & Lefty Lou's radio show.
Woody Guthrie Archives Exhibit (cont'd)
One of the blown up photos is of Woody squatting, naked, and as if it's a caption, there's this paragraph in the same case:
Again, I can't help thinking of Blake, always singing the praises of the naked human form, whose simplest observations so easily veered into the realm of the spiritual and the political. And I think of Whitman too.
As I come out of the exhibit, a dark-haired woman is leading two people out the main door. The guard motions to me, saying "That's Nora, his daughter. Go say hello!" I follow her out the door, but her guests are clearly either old friends or funders. And what do I really have to say, anyway? "I know a dozen of your father's songs. I play them all the time. Tell him thanks for me...."
Songbook from Woody & Lefty Lou's radio show. |
"Ah, you should have said hello. She tends to everyone." As if she is a physician, or a pastor. Denis, the guard, and the coat check ladies all clearly love Nora and look forward to her regular visits. But instead of an awkward brush with fame, I choose to redeem my guitar with a ticket, take it out of the case, and hop up on the counter. Here on the edge of East Harlem, I play "Deportees":
The sky plane went down over Los Gatos canyon
A fireball of lightning that shook all our hills
Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves
The radio says they are just deportees....
The women join in on the chorus. Afterwards, Denis, who is from Ghana, asks if I have any CDs and says he wants to buy one. I thank him - this is another common reflex, a way people have of complimenting musicians - but listening to him talk about folk music, I realize that Denis, too, is in earnest. So I give him my latest disc for the $9 he pulls from the tip basket at the coat check. Later in the evening, I will do a set at the Sun Music Company, a great little listening room on E. 71st Street, for a small crowd of old friends and fans. But this short, impromptu concert is the kind of encounter a musician remembers for a long, long time.
Adios, mis amigos,
Hugh Blumenfeld
The Guthrie Archives will remain in NYC until April 23. For more information on the archive and its stops on the tour, go to: http://www.woodyguthrie.org/woody.htm
Hugh Blumenfeld, Editor
hugh@balladtree.com
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
