Beginning and ending with Kaufman as the author's analysis of Bound for Glory is head and shoulders above the other Klein and Cray:

“The most disturbing thing about this passage is not the hideous minstrel dialect, but rather the implication that Guthrie had been educated out of racsim at such a young age. He perpetuated this myth in his interviews with Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress Recordings, on which he is plainly uncomfortable in discussing the issue of race. He betrays a lingering tendency toward sterotype as he attempts to present a childhood untainted by racsim: “Ever since I was a kid growing up I've always found time to stop and talk to these colored people because I found them to be full of jokes––what I mean, wisdom.” On the recordings he juggles his own faux naiveté and the rewriting of his racist childhood with equal awkwardness: “I'd never hardly pass an Indian or a colored boy, because I'm telling you the truth, I learned to like them....

In spite of all these protestations, it is clear that when he fled the Dust Bowl in the mid-1930s and landed in California, Guthrie was quite unconcerned about his own racism. His KFVD songbooks indicate that he happily sang about "niggers" in songs like "Little Liza Jane" and "darkies" in "Kitty Wells." Minstrel dialect and caricatures grace the pages of his crude homemade newspaper the The Santa Monica Social Register Examine 'Er (1937), in which jokes about "Rastus," "coons," "monkeys," "chocolate drops," and "all de Niggahs evawha" compete with slanderous descriptions of black men at the beach giving off "the Ethiopian smell":

We could dimly hear their chants
And we thought the blacks by chance,
Were doing a cannibal dance
This we could dimly see.
Guesss the sea's enternal pounding
Like a giant drum a-sounding
Set their jungle blood to bounding:
Set their native instincts free.

Guthrie's merciful comeuppance came at the hands of a member of his KFVD audience on October 20, 1937,...”
[Kaufman, pp.147-150]