Dismantles the Woody Guthrie we have been taught--the rough and ready rambling man--to reveal an artist who discovered how intimacy is crucial for political struggle.
INTRODUCTION
When to Be Personal
CHAPTER ONE
“I Don’t Sing Any Silly or Jerky Songs”
CHAPTER TWO
Choreographing the Revolution
CHAPTER THREE
“I Hate to Describe My Mother in Terms Such as These”
CHAPTER FOUR
The War Against Loneliness
CHAPTER FIVE
Bodies of Glory
CHAPTER SIX
Stackabones
CHAPTER SEVEN
Two Good Men a Long Time Gone
CHAPTER EIGHT
“The Whole Works”
CHAPTER NINE
“Sick in His Own Healthy Way”
CHAPTER TEN
Look Away
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Exactly How My Own Mother Saw and Felt”
Acknowledgments
Credits
Notes
Index
Gustavus Stadler is a professor of English at Haverford College. A well-established scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century US culture and popular music, he is the author of Troubling Minds- The Cultural Politics of Genius in the U.S., 1840-1890. His writing has appeared in the Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, the North Carolina Independent Weekly, Social Text, Sounding Out!, avidly.com, and numerous other outlets. He lives in Haverford, Pennsylvania.
“A revealing and reorienting new portrait.”
—Booklist
“Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life adds powerfully to our
understanding of a man who never shied from blending the personal
with the political.”
—The Progressive Magazine
“What keeps the book from being merely another entry in a timeworn
biographical tradition is that it is an expansive and strikingly
unique portrait of a man, not of an immortal legend. An Intimate
Life privileges the messiness of character and circumstance, tying
together the many Guthries collected under the proper name and
placing them in the context of broader social and institutional
movements. And here we find the most rewarding and unanticipated
delights of the biography: at various stages, one could be forgiven
for forgetting that Woody Guthrie was a musician at all.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Zinn’s presentation is crisp and measured, a perfect alignment to
provide listeners a view of Guthrie’s fascinating and tragic
life.”
—AudioFile
“With revelatory scholarship and a critic’s skeptical touch . . .
Stadler retraces Guthrie’s footsteps, most strikingly when Guthrie
left few if any traces himself.”
—Greil Marcus, author of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten
Songs
“Gustavus Stadler helps Woody Guthrie down from his pedestal as
dust bowl icon and helps us to see him as the three-dimensional
character he really was.”
—Billy Bragg, musician and activist
“A landmark work . . . complicates a story most music fans thought
they knew. It will change the way you think not just about Guthrie
but about folk music and its political legacies.”
—Ann Powers, author of Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White,
Body and Soul in American Music
“Like Walt Whitman before him, Stadler’s Guthrie sees no artificial
boundary between the needs and urges of the human body and those of
the body politic: both can be so robust, and both can be so
vulnerable—ultimately, like Guthrie himself. Stadler captures it
all.”
—Will Kaufman, author of Woody Guthrie: American Radical
“Stadler’s gorgeous book is both a paean to the Guthrie we know . .
. and a revealing look at the embodied Guthrie, who is vulnerable,
playful, and lustful . . . . It opens up an important new window
into not only Guthrie the man but the history of the
twentieth-century American Left.”
—Gayle Wald, author of Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of
Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe
“A radical, sympathetic, and essential rethinking of one of the
twentieth century’s most radical, sympathetic, and essential
artists. Powerful and inspiring.”
—Jesse Jarnow, author of Wasn’t That a Time: The Weavers, the
Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America
“Under the cloak of biography, Gustavus Stadler has written a
meticulously researched and stunning kaleidoscope of events, music,
people, and populist movements that have influenced our lives
since. Stadler’s scope for contextualizing Guthrie’s provocative
work is expansive—leftist politics, Pete Seeger, Sacco and
Vanzetti, gay rights groups, racial violence, the history of
psychiatry—and evocative.”
—Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United
States
“Groundbreaking . . . provides us with fresh perspectives and
important insights into how this iconic figure pushed boundaries in
his writing, music, and politics by redefining the role of
intimacy.”
—Kip Lornell, coauthor of The Life and Legend of Leadbelly
“Stadler has produced a refreshing, unflinching, and occasionally
painful study of Woody Guthrie—exhuming a character more vulnerable
than even his most ardent disciples might have imagined.”
—Robert E. Price, author of The Bakersfield Sound: How a Generation
of Displaced Okies Revolutionized American Music
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