“They have their music and we have ours”: The Political Woody Guthrie

Abstract

In the last decade, scholars of American history and culture have begun to examine the political project of Woody Guthrie, who has now taken up his long-predicted place in a national cultural canon. This essay seeks to build on that literature by offering a reading of Guthrie’s texts that is informed by radical theories as to the possibility and practice of cultural politics. It explores a political effort of considerable sophistication, which, when probed with Gramscian and other theoretical tools, brings out a radical strategy embedded in a vision of American culture and manifested in Guthrie’s trademark themes: from the hobo to the war effort, from contemporary working life to the history of labor. His voluminous output provides a basis for discussion among scholars interested in the cross-over between radical theory and cultural politics, even as its subsequent history raises questions as to the possibilities of radical culture itself.