Happy Birthday Woody Guthrie- *Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Woody Guthrie's "Pastures Of Plenty"

Happy Birthday Woody Guthrie- *Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Woody Guthrie's "Pastures Of Plenty"

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Woody Guthrie's "Pastures Of Plenty"

A“YouTube” film clip of Woody Guthrie's "Pastures Of Plenty".

No, today I am not going to beat you over the head with a screed about how music, in whatever form, is not the revolution. You know that already, and if not life itself should have disabused you of that notion long ago. Music, however, has always had an important place in the history of progressive movements as a way to rouse the troops and keep the faith. I think back to the days of Cromwell’s plebeian New Model Army, singing New Testament psalms, while going off to do battle against England’s King Charles I’s royalist forces that started the whole modern revolutionary movement. Or the songs of the French revolution. Or those of the modern labor movement like “The Internationale”. I could go on, but you get the point.

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

Markin comment:

Woody Guthrie had an extraordinary way to take a complex subject like the plight of the 1930s migrant workers and make great musical art out of it. Put this with Steinbeck's "Grapes Of Wrath", the movie of the same title and Dorothea Lange's photographs and you have a very good idea of what the Great Depression of the 1930s meant, and continued to mean to those generations that went through it, like my parent's generation.

Pastures Of Plenty-Woody Guthrie

It's a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed

My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road

Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled

And your deserts were hot and your mountains were cold

I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes

I slept on the ground in the light of the moon

On the edge of the city you'll see us and then

We come with the dust and we go with the wind

California, Arizona, I harvest your crops

Well its North up to Oregon to gather your hops

Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine

To set on your table your light sparkling wine

Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground

From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters run down

Every state in the Union us migrants have been

We'll work in this fight and we'll fight till we win

It's always we rambled, that river and I

All along your green valley, I will work till I die

My land I'll defend with my life if it be

Cause my pastures of plenty must always be free