Essential Dictionary of Music: Pocket Size Book Book

I've known of Woody Guthrie all of my life; used to sing This Land Is Your Land around campfires and on hayrides. But until reading this book, I never knew about the man at all. He had a rough life right from the git go, and this book tells us bit by bit about some of the tragedies that shaped the man he became.

He was a working man who bummed around the country, singing songs about the life and the people he saw around him. This book tells about his childhood, his family, his years on the road, his philosophy of life. He would have been someone amazing to sit down and visit with.

I love his poet's eye. Here he is describing his Grandma:'Grey hair commencing to make a stand that had come from hoeing and working a crop of worries for about fifty years.' And this, before a tornado: 'The walnut trees frisked their heads in the air and snorted at the wind getting harder.' Or this, during the tornado: 'Bales of hay splitting apart blew through the sky like pop-corn sacks.....Everything in the world was fighting against everything in the sky.'

My favorite chapter tells about his boyhood gang: his group of friends, 7 or 8 years old like he was at the time. The biggest business for everyone was the buying and selling of stick horses...not to mention the training of them. Imagine a crowd of young cowboys gathered around holding down a wild stick horse until the tamer was ready and called 'Fan 'em!', then everyone stood back and the show was on. The rodeos that must have resulted while half a dozen boys were taming these stick horses all at the same time would have been such fun to see! All those boys out there trying to prove that their stick horse was the 'snuffiest in the whole history of the hill'. And of course the horse brought a better price if the tamer could gentle him down from crazy bucking to paying attention to all the cues and docilely demonstrating his gaits. Those pages were the best ever examples of boys being boys and having fun at it.

He had a rough life and parts of it were not pretty. In fact some sections are disturbing for the cruelty involved and the idea that anyone lived through such scenes, especially a youngster. But he survived, and kept his spirit, and shared it with all of us. Thank you, Woody.