StoryCorps 513: American Talkers, Part 3
[MUSIC IN “Kings and Queens” by Alialujah Choir]
MICHAEL GAROFALO (MG): If you ask people why they participated in a StoryCorps interview, most of the time, they’ll say because their interview will live on for future generations at the Library of Congress.
That’s something that was baked into StoryCorps from the start. And in this episode, the third and final in our series highlighting Dave Isay’s “American Talkers,” we’ll hear some of the original archival recordings that inspired that idea.
If you ask people why they participated in a StoryCorps interview, most of the time, they’ll say it’s because their interview will live on for future generations at the Library of Congress.
That’s something that was baked into StoryCorps from the start. And in this episode, the third and final in our series highlighting Dave Isay’s “American Talkers,” we’ll hear some of the original archival recordings that inspired that idea.
Woody Guthrie: The first day that I ever hit the highway to be what’s called a rambling man or a hobo or a tramp was in 1927.
MG: This is the StoryCorps podcast from NPR. I’m Michael Garofalo, and I’ll be joined by Dave Isay to get a little of the history behind these pieces of public radio history. That’s coming up, right after this short break.
[MUSIC OUT]
MG: A lot of what we’ve heard so far in this series is sort of these voices that bring the past alive in a lot of ways
DAVE ISAY (DI): –Yeah–
MG: And something that you guys did with Sound Portraits was you went into the Library of Congress where all the StoryCorps interviews now go, and you dug up some incredible voices from the past.
DI: Yeah, so one of the things we did with Steve Zeitlin and City Lore as we went on with the “American Talkers” series is decided to look back, which gave me an opportunity to go to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress which, as you say, is the repository for all the StoryCorps interviews– I actually didn’t know anybody there. But we would go through eh archives and look for voices–mostly they were recorded as part of the WPA, so these were the famous oral histories recorded as part of the Federal Writers Project. Studs Terkel was one of these people who did these interviews it was ethnomusicologists and anthropologists and sociologists and writers and folklorists who traveled around doing interviews. The vast majority of these were done just on paper they were written transcripts. But with some of these the folklorists would travel with an acetate recorder which was this kind of monster recorder that you put in the back of a truck that would cut these acetate disks like these huge records, this was one of the real influences on StoryCorps because they were beautifully recorded and I found with headphones on listening to these this sense of just being transported back in time. So, if it was a pool hall in Washington dc right after Pearl Harbor or a fish crier in New York on the street corner like doing his fish cries.
Fish Criers Singing: Fish man, fish man, five cent a pound. Folks are selling them all over town. Come on down…
DI: There’s just something very immediate and transformative and visceral about the recordings and that was definitely one of the influences that got me thinking many, many, many years later about starting StoryCorps.
Fish Criers singing.
Fish Crier: well, I usually go about and I look over my bots of fish and whatever amount I have and look at the different kinds and then I try to find words to rhyme with each kind of fish. And then in my hustling and hollering, I kind of rhyme up the words and make them fit together. So people are laughing, they buy the fish. That’s all.
Interviewer: Do they buy more if they laugh?
Fish crier: Oh yeah, if I can get them to laugh a little bit, they will kinda loosen up the pocketbook a little bit.
Fish Criers Singing: –Sell them all the time. Don’t see why you folks don’t come and buy…If you don’t buy you can’t fry…
MG: To me one of the most astonishing things that you found is a recording of somebody who had actually been a slave.
DI: Yeah, one of the pieces that were done as part of the Federal Writers Project were interviews with former slaves. So, this was in the 1930s, and there are some tapes of these, and I mean Zora Neale Hurston did some of the tapes, I don’t remember who did this particular tape, I think it was somebody in Maryland–
MG: –Herman Norwood was his name. But this one actually comes from 1949.
DI: –So this must have been a continuation of the Federal Writers Project tapes. And yeah, it’s this– we’ve talked about this before. To me, like, there’s a certain truth to the human voice, and I’ve been thinking today another day of endless tweets coming from Washington, D.C., talk about fake news and questions of what’s real and what’s fake, and to me, hearing just people being who they are is just kind of this bedrock and anchor into what’s true and what’s important. In this case, the truth of our history here in this country.
FOUNTAIN HUGHES (FH): My name is Fountain Hughes. I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. My grandfather belonged to Thomas Jefferson. My grandfather was 115 years old when he died. And now I am 101 years old.
HERMAN NORWOOD (HN): Who did you work for? Uncle Fountain? when…?
FH: Who did I work for? You mean when I was a slave?
HN: Yeah, when you were a slave. Who did you work for?
FH: Well, I belonged to B. [inaudible]. We were slaves. We belonged to people. They’d sell us like they sell horses and cows and hogs and all like that. Have a auction bench. And they’d put you up on the bench and bid on you just the same as you bidding on cattle you know.
HN: Were you ever sold?
FH: No, I never was sold.
HN: Always stayed with the same person.
FH: All, all. I was too young to sell.
HN: Oh, I see.
FH: We didn’t know nothing. Didn’t allow you to look at no book. And we all had our jail centers, just same as we was in jail. Now, I couldn’t go from here across the street, or I couldn’t go to nobody’s house out I have a note from my master. And if I had that pass, I could go wherever he sent me. Tell you the truth, when I think of it today, I don’t know how I’m living. None of the rest of ’em is living. But still, I’m thankful to the Lord. Colored people that’s free ought to be awful thankful. And some of them are sorry they are free now. Some of them now would rather be slaves.
HN: And what would you rather be, Uncle Fountain?
FH: Me, which I’d rather be? You know what I’d rather do? If I thought that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away. Because you’re nothing but a dog. You’re not a thing but a dog. But still I don’t like to talk about it. Because it makes — it makes people feel bad you know.
[MUSIC IN]
MG: We are going to end this series with one more recording, and this is one made by the folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax who recorded a lot of the original blues guys–
[MUSIC OUT]
DI: Yeah, one of the interviews he did was with a young Woody Guthrie, and in the last episode we talked about Weegee and various heroes, and Woody Guthrie obviously he is the –What do you say about Woody Guthrie?– I mean, he is the, the apex of the apex, and I think getting to hear these recordings of Woody’s voice as a young man—it’s powerful, and it reminds you of the strength of his character and the brilliance of his artistry.
[Sound of Woody Guthrie playing ”The Lost Train Blues.”]
ALAN LOMAX (AL): ”The Lost Train Blues,” played on a harmonica and a guitar by Woody Guthrie from Okemah, Oklahoma. Woody Guthrie is I guess about thirty years old from the looks of him, but he’s seen more in those thirty years than most men see before they’re seventy.
[Song ends.]
AL: Woody, how long was it ago that you were born in Okemah?
WOODY GUTHRIE (WG): Twenty-eight years. You pretty near guessed it. I was born there on July the fourteenth, 1912.
AL: How did you people live out there in Oklahoma? Did you live pretty well?
WG: I don’t know, Alan. To start with, I wasn’t in the class that John Steinbeck called the Okies, because my dad to start with was worth about 35 or 40 thousand dollars. He had everything hunky-dory, and then he started having a little bad luck. In fact, our whole family had a little bit of it. I don’t know whether it’s worth talking about or not. I never do talk it much…
My fourteen-year-old sister either set herself afire, or caught afire accidentally. There’s two different stories got out about it. Anyway, she was having a little difficulty with her schoolwork, and she had to stay home and do some work, and she caught afire while she was doing some ironing that afternoon on the old kerosene stove. It was highly unsafe and highly uncertain in them days, and this one blowed up. It caught her afire and she run around the house about twice before anybody could catch her. Next day she died. And my mother — that one was a little bit too much for her nerves or something. I don’t know exactly how it was, but anyway my mother died in the insane asylum at Norman, Oklahoma. Then about that same time my father mysteriously, for some reason or another, caught afire. There’s a lot of people who say that he set himself on fire. Others say he caught afire accidentally. I always will think that he done it on purpose, because he lost all his money.
All of my brothers and sisters, all these things happened and they found theirselves scattered. All us kids had to scatter out and be adopted by different families. I lived with a family of people. There was eleven of us, lived in a little two-room shack. We had two or three beds, you know, so we’d sleep some of us at the head and some of us at the foot, and had everybody’s feet in everybody’s faces. You know how that is. Then after that, I don’t know, I kind of took to the road. I hit the road one day. The first day that I ever hit the highway to be what’s called a rambling man or a hobo or a tramp was in 1927.
AL: How old were you then?
WG: At that time I was about seventeen years old.
[Sounds of guitar strumming.]
WG: So I went down to Galveston, Texas, hoed figs in all them orchards down in that country, helped drill water wells, irrigated strawberries, and helped a carpenter tear down a whole bunch of houses. And that time I was about eighteen.
AL: Well Woody, did you begin to sing about this time? How did that happen?
WG: Then I went back up into the panhandle of Texas. The big wheat belt. Up around Amarillo, Texas — north of Amarillo, Texas. When I got into that country, I got a job about the third day I was there. I got a job with a feller that owned a root beer stand, supposedly, and he said he’d give me three dollars a day to stand behind the counter and sell people root beer. So I told him I had the intelligence enough to do that. So I got around behind the counter, and he told me, ”Now, in addition to this root beer, here’s some bottles of another description. If anybody comes up and lays a dollar and a half on the counter here, why you reach down and gently and firmly let him have one of these here bottles.”
One day my curiosity got the best of me, and I just got to wondering ”What in the devil is in them bottles?” So I opened up one and tasted of it, and it was nothing in the world but just unadulterated corn whiskey. So, we was a-wheelin’ and a-dealin’ there in the whiskey business for a long time. And this guy had a guitar that laid around there, and a lot of times there wouldn’t be any customers in this place, and I’d grab up this guitar and got to pecking around on it. I thought it sounded awful pretty. And learned a little old chord, just how to barely chord along, and finally learnt a just a few little old songs, and just kind of drifted into it. I never did own a guitar, though.
AL: What were some of the first songs you began to sing out in the panhandle?
WG: Here’s an old song here, that they sing back down in that country. Almost everybody knows it. The name of this one here is ”Greenback Dollar.”
[Sings ”Greenback Dollar.”]
WG: In this part of Texas where I was working in this whiskey store, some of the worst dust storms in the history of the whole world, I guess, broke loose. Here’s a picture, here, Allan — I’d like you to look at that. That there is the little town of Pampa, Texas. That’s where my wife and three children are living right now. I hear from them about twice a week.
AL: Well, what happened the night that dust storm hit? Do you remember just exactly what you people did and what you said?
WG: Well, you see the big picture here. It shows you the big dust storm coming up and uh, you know, just to see a thing of that kind coming towards you — wouldn’t know exactly what it was because it’s a freak looking thing. You never saw anything like it before. But we all sat there, we had seen dust storms of every other different color, labor, description, style, fashion, shade, design, model.
Anyway, I remember the particular evening of April the fourteenth, 1935, that this dust storm here blowed up. I was standing, a whole bunch of us were standing just outside of this little town here that you see, and so we watched the dust storm come up like the Red Sea closing in on the Israel children. Anyway, we stood there watched the sun of a gun coming up. And I’m telling you it got so black when that thing hit, we all run into the house, and all the neighbors congregated in the different houses around over the neighborhood. We sit there in a little old room, and it got so dark that you couldn’t see your hand before your face, you couldn’t see anybody in the room. You could turn on an electric light bulb, a good, strong electric light bulb in a little room and that electric light bulb hanging in the room looked just about like a cigarette burning. And that was all the light that you could get out of it.
And so we got to talking to, you know, and a lot of the people in the crowd that was religious-minded and they was up pretty well on their scriptures, and they said ”Well, boys, girls, friends and relatives, this is the end. This is the end of the world.” And everybody just said, ”Well, so long, it’s been good to know you.” I made up a little song there — kind of one of my own making. It’s called ”So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.”
[Sings ”So Long It’s Been Good To Know You.”]
AL: Thank you very much, Mr. Guthrie.
WG: Thank you, Mr. Lomax.
AL: This record was made on March the twenty-first, 1940. Alan Lomax speaking.
MG: One thing about this interview when I heard it– because preparing for this episode I listened to it again for the first time in 12 or 13 years– it struck me how much it sounds like a StoryCorps interview.
DI: Huh, that’s interesting.
MG: Just a few questions from Alan Lomax, like a facilitator, and then Woody just talks and talks about his life. It sounds so much like StoryCorps to me.
DI: I think that there’s a CD that may still be available on Smithsonian Folksways of the entire interview. So, for people who found this excerpt interesting you might want to dig in and check out the whole thing.
MG: Great, well, Dave, thanks so much for joining me over these past three episodes and sharing some of this old work, it’s been great.
DI: Thanks, Mike. It was fun.
MG: That’s all for our three-part series of “American Talkers.” We’ll be back next week with more from StoryCorps.
Until then, visit us at StoryCorps.orG. Rate or review the show wherever you download it, and leave a message for someone you hear on the show at 301-744-TALK. That’s 301-744-TALK.
The StoryCorps podcast is produced by Elisheba Ittoop and me. I’m Michael Garofalo. Thanks for listening.
