[Rarebooks] FS: Happy 103rd birthday! Phenomenal Woody Guthrie Letter

[Charles Agvent]

GUTHRIE, Woody . AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED (ALS) on the Current Folk Music 
Scene and Championing Pete Seeger. [Brooklyn], 1955. Interesting 
AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED, three pages on adjoining panels of an off-white 
folding paper towel (7-1/2" x 9-1/2"), dated "On top of old April," 1955 
and sent to SING OUT, the influential folk music magazine still 
publishing today. Using several colors of ink, Guthrie writes what seems 
to be an overview of the current folk music scene concentrating on and 
comparing the young and upcoming Pete Seeger and Ewan MacColl, folk 
singer and partner of Peggy Seeger. In part [Guthrie's spellings and 
grammar retained]: "Artists ... do sing up and out with the pure old 
truth in bigger bunches and at better lower & cheaper price than I hear 
it sung around any other ... old printin shop or office.... I sure do 
believe that Petey Seeger is a real champion at more jobs then floggin 
his wire stringy banjo ... singing his ever better & better & better and 
better ... songs. He sounds honester to my poor old exploited ear than 
Ewan Macall's [Ewan MacColl]. I don't rekon that Macall has ever walked 
his land from end to end like Pete has.... Macall ever try to make his 
grat country's own poverty and misery and deep ... hunger and wories and 
fears ... and hopes all rhyme ... beat to time of a ballad song on any 
musicyial instrument like Pete has and habitually does.... I guess Ewan 
is a fine ... honest hard workin' man like England and Scotland ... so 
full of by the uncounted millions and to me Ewan does the best job of 
singing exactly what his pappa and his mama and all his ancestors and 
all of his back generations of dead miners have told Ewan and had sung 
to him all his life about. He sounds too muchly slick & polished and 
rehearsed and thin to me-because he sings not about what his own life 
sees around him but what his ancestors lived thru and heard and sang out 
about. They made up their ballads to tell how hard ... every minute and 
every hour ... and every nite.... When I sit and just read those printed 
words in my ... lp album here I get this terrible feeling again that I'm 
living in the place and scenery where it all takened place and where it 
all happened at but Ewan's records fail to live quite up in their 
feelings when I play them." Guthrie closes, "Every word you folks print 
up there is printed on a high high hard hittin' hard fightin' level and 
all your printed words needs is just a ... jillion people to sing em up 
and out in your high militante spirit."  Folds and light show-through to 
text resulting from the nature of the material, otherwise clean, bright, 
and Fine.

At the time of writing, Guthrie was a patient at the Brooklyn State 
Hospital (whose name he adds below his signature), where he spent years 
in treatment for various maladies. After a number of diagnoses, 
including alcoholism and schizophrenia, it was finally determined that 
Guthrie suffered from Huntington's disease, a genetic condition that had 
earlier claimed his mother's life. One of his visitors was Bob Dylan. In 
his autobiography CHRONICLES, Dylan recounts hearing Guthrie for the 
first time: "Guthrie had such a grip on things. He was so poetic and 
tough and rhythmic. There was so much intensity, and his voice was like 
a stiletto. He was like none of the other singers I ever heard, and 
neither were his songs.... They had the infinite sweep of humanity in 
them. Not one mediocre song in the bunch. Woody Guthrie tore everything 
in his path to pieces. For me it was an epiphany, like some heavy anchor 
had just plunged into the waters of the harbor." (#016459) $15,000.00

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