Hi, This is for Ron Davies -

You're absolutely right about the Nelson lynching and its impact upon Woody - and you're right in surmising that it wasn't until later in life - in fact, the early 1940s - that he was able to revisit that event and comment on it in song, writing, and drawing. There is evidence from 1937 - and I've seen it in the Woody Guthrie Archives - that as late as that year, he had yet to start thinking in anti-racist terms. There's a mock poem he wrote that makes vile fun of black people swimming on the beach in Santa Monica; there is his thoughtless readiness to announce and play Uncle Dave Macon's appalling "Run, Nigger, Run" on his radio show, which prompted an angry reply from a black listener (which to his credit, Woody read out on the radio the next day). 1937 was really the year his political re-education began, in terms of race - and this journey of Woody's is the subject of my presentation.

It is also the subject of a chapter I call "Long Road to Peekskill" in my forthcoming book, "Woody Guthrie, American Radical," which will be published next year by the University of Illinois Press.