Woody was an original. He was an honest person although he had his problems like all of us do. I can speak because I knew him in Topanga Canyon, California and I was one of his pickin' buddies.

As a songwriter, he didn't care about copyright or who attributed what to whom. He always wanted his songs to be sung by everybody. 1913 Massacre was a hopeful song in that he felt that the more people knew about injustice, the more they would do something about it. Songs were the means. None of his songs were nihilistic or depressed like say Dylan's paranoid ramblings on Positively 4th Street, or Hank's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry".
Woody's songs depicted the way things were. Hard times but with a hopeful quality that if you could see how people really live, someone would do something.

He would be on the side of the Iraqi people today, the 500,000 children that have died because of US sanctions and the numerous cancer victims of Bush's depleted uranium bombs. Woody was always there when an issue came up and he was never afraid to take a stand.

Woody was an iconoclast. The CPUSA threw him out. Too radical for them. But he was on the side of the poor people, the victims of imperial aggression, and would walk away from situations that he could not compromise himself over. He wasn't as famous in his lifetime as he was after his death. Anyhow, you can't say the same for any of his imitators.

Frank Hamilton