The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #90978   Message #1778968
Posted By: GUEST,bob af
08-Jul-06 - 01:48 PM
Thread Name: Woody Guthrie Birthday Bash VI
Subject: RE: Woody Guthrie Birthday Bash VI
Hope the Public Broadcasting Service's NYC tv station have been pre-publicizing this Woody Guthrie commemoration event for the public in NYC (in the same way it pre-publicizes the various U.S. corporate music industry-related documentaries/promotional films it's been airing a lot in recent years). Also, hope WBAI announced this Woody Guthrie commemoration event a lot on its "community events announcements" programs. Anyway, here's another excerpt from Woody Guthrie's July 15, 1946 letter to Moe Asch that probably won't be mentioned much in the PBS documentary about Woody Guthrie that will be aired next week:

"This is the bad part of a capitalist system, this dog eat dog, this spying, tracing, tracking and trailing after one another always under the covers of night and the shades and shadow of day...This is the system which the owners would like to prolong, to keep alive, to prolong as long as they possibly can, because in the wild blindness of it all, they get all of us to fighting against one another, and rob us coming in the fields of production, and going, in the realm of distribution. This is the system I would like to see die out. It killed several members of my family, it gassed several and shell shocked several more in the last world war, and in this world war just past, it scattered lots more. It drove families of my relatives and friends by the hundreds of thousands to wander more homeless than dogs and to live less welcome than hogs, sheep, or cattle. This is the system I started out to expose by every conceivable way that I could think of with songs and with ballads, and even with poems, stories, newspaper articles, even by humor, by fun, by nonsense, ridicule and by any other way that I could lay hold on."

Make Woody Guthrie's Birthday a National Holiday in 2007!