Biography finally brings Guthrie to life

LOS ANGELES -- More than a dozen writers have tried to chronicle the vagabond life of Woody Guthrie, but none brought him alive quite like Ed Cray, not even Guthrie himself.

Cray used a treasure trove of songs, stories, letters, drawings and notes that the folk balladeer compiled from his youth until the degenerative neurological disease Huntington's Chorea made it impossible for him to write or draw.

The University of Southern California professor was the first to seek out the Guthrie collection five years ago, when the family decided to open it to scholars. Impressed by his previous books, including an award-winning biography of the late Chief Justice Earl Warren, Guthrie's daughter Nora agreed to give Cray unlimited access.

Other than some embarrassment at having her father's love affair with her mother explored in detail -- "No kid should know this much about their parents" -- Nora has had no regrets.

"We developed a kind of spirit of trust early on, and it turned out to be a wonderful book," she said.

Guthrie's own acclaimed work, "Bound for Glory," was published when he was only 31 and contained enough admitted tall tales that he preferred to call it an "autobiographical novel."

As Cray reflected recently on his just-published biography, "Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie," he said he came to realize that he had something else going for him that perhaps previous biographers didn't.

"I was part of what Arlo -- Woody's son -- calls that great folk music scare of the 1950s," quips Cray, a diminutive, whispy-haired man of 72.

When he had a full head of hair, Cray did like so many other young men of his era. He picked up an acoustic guitar and, influenced by the composer of "This Land Is Your Land," "Pastures of Plenty" and "Oklahoma Hills," set out to change the world through music.

It was during those halcyon years that Cray found himself at a party in Santa Monica one night when someone pointed to a slight, wiry-haired fellow sitting on the floor and said, "That's Woody."

He would never see Guthrie again. Nor would he ever forget him.

"It was shortly before he went into the hospital for the last time," recalled the soft-spoken Cray, leaning back in a chair, one foot up on his desk at USC's Annenberg School of Communications, where he teaches journalism.

Soon, the man who had penned well more than a thousand songs and innumerable writings and drawings would begin a dark, 13-year battle with Huntington's Chorea. The illness Guthrie inherited from his mother and passed on to at least two of his children -- both daughters from his first marriage -- would not only rob him of his ability to write and sing, but even to walk and talk.

In his final days, he would resort to blinking his eyes to communicate with people, and one of his final statements before he died in 1967 at age 55 would be "Yes," when asked whether, in spite of all he'd been through, he still wanted to live.

It is details like these, literally hundreds of them, culled from interviews with surviving friends and relatives, and from Guthrie's own notes and letters, that make Cray's work the definitive Guthrie book, says the folk singer's old friend, Pete Seeger.

"It's a wonderful book, isn't it?" says Seeger, the dean of American folk singers and, at age 85, one of the greatest living authorities on Guthrie. The two met in 1940 and as young men traveled the nation from one end to another, writing songs, swapping tales and often singing for their meals.

"We were very different in many ways," Seeger says, explaining a quote in the book that he often found Guthrie hard to put up with when he was around but always missed him when he was gone.

"I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I didn't chase girls. And Woody did all of those things," Seeger recalled with a laugh.

Indeed he did, to great abundance, according to Cray's book. It is a biography that creates a portrait of a far more complicated genius than many previous accounts of Guthrie's life, which have often portrayed him simply a man who inexplicably had a remarkable facility with words.

He counted among his friends and acquaintances writers John Steinbeck, Dashiell Hammett and Studs Terkel, actors Will Geer and Eddie Albert, composer Aaron Copland, dancer Martha Graham, filmmaker John Ford and radical activist Ella "Mother" Bloor.

Politically, he was so far to the left that the FBI concluded he was a communist, while at the same time he was so contemptuous of authority that the Communist Party wouldn't have him as a member.

He also lived a life shaped by unimaginable tragedy, beginning at age 6 when his older sister, Clara, died of burns suffered in a house fire. As he sobbed over her death bed, her last words to him were to never cry, and he never would again, not even when his beloved 4-year-old daughter, Cathy, died in a similar tragedy years later. Guthrie has a second surviving son, writer Joady Guthrie.

It's that complicated portrait of her father that Guthrie's only surviving daughter, Nora, says impressed her most about Cray's book.

"Woody is very similar to Abraham Lincoln as a historical figure in that he's kind of been reduced to an icon who stands for certain things," she said. "But there are a lot of shades and different kinds of colors to him, so that no one can completely own him."