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Songs and stories of Woody Guthrie at the DeWitt County Museum

An older man with white hair is seated in a recording studio, playing an acoustic guitar. He is wearing headphones and singing into a microphone. Sheet music and recording equipment are visible on the table in front of him.
Lauren Warnecke
/
WGLT
Folk singer/songwriter and music historian Bucky Halker visits the C.H. Moore Homestead in Clinton on Aug. 4 to give a presentation on Woody Guthrie.

Musician and music historian Bucky Halker is a Wisconsinite, but he has spent most of his career traveling Illinois from top to bottom, exploring the Prairie State through its folk tunes and labor songs.

A major influence is Woody Guthrie, the prolific songwriter who spent a fair amount of time in Illinois, too. Halker will speak about Guthrie and play a selection of songs Sunday, Aug. 4, at the C.H. Moore Homestead in Clinton.

One entry point to a conversation about Guthrie in Illinois is his fascination with a southern Illinois coal mine disaster.

On March 25, 1947, the Centralia No. 5 mine exploded, killing 111 people.

“Union officials had been warning the company for a long time that a disaster was in the making,” Halker said.

A week later, Guthrie wrote The Dying Miner [the first song on Halker’s most recent album, Coal].

“I think these kinds of working-class disasters touched his soul and his brain,” Halker said.

Guthrie was drafted during World War II and stationed at Scott Air Force Base near Belleville, about 50 miles from Centralia. In idle moments, he voraciously wrote songs — now thought to be an early symptom of Huntington’s Disease.

“He would write 30-page letters to his wife,” Halker said. “Not just once, but repeatedly. He would write lyrics and poems and entries in his journal that would go on and on. The other thing is, when he had a furlough, he’d walk out the gates, stick his thumb out and go hitchhiking.”

The Centralia disaster represents a confluence of things that made Guthrie tick: working people, labor songs, workers’ rights and the politics of power. They are themes which similarly pulse through Halker’s work — and what attracted him to Guthrie’s music five decades ago.

A memorial dedicated to the No. 5 coal mine disaster of March 25, 1947. It features plaques with engraved text and a list of victims' names on a black stone, surrounded by snow-covered ground and leafless trees in the background.
Emily Bollinger
/
WGLT
A historical marker in Wamac, IL, shown here on Jan. 17, 2025, commemorates the Centralia Coal Company Mine No. 5 disaster.

“My mother’s side was from the Chicago area,” he said. “My grandfather started in the stockyards and would tell me all these stories about how bad workers were treated back then — this was early in the 20th century. That stuff affected me. And then my own life history from the time I was a teenager onward made me continue to be interested in those issues.”

An imperfect idol

Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie was born on Bastille Day, July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma. His father Charles was a businessman, politically active in the Democratic party and aligned with white supremacists. Woody Guthrie’s parents named him after the Democratic presidential candidate who became president that November. His uncle was named for Jefferson Davis.

Guthrie had a tough childhood — made tougher by his mother’s battle with undiagnosed Huntington’s Disease and young adulthood during the Great Depression. Guthrie associated with the Communist party [though he never formally registered] and grew to be tolerant of minorities.

“Woody was not an intellectual,” Halker said. “He jumped around in his views sometimes. Oklahoma had a tradition of racism pertaining to both Indians and African Americans. Woody had some of those views early on, but he seemed open to change.”

Still, Halker said it’s necessary to be critical of Guthrie — particularly in how he treated his wives and children.

“I think it’s good to admit that he had errors in his way of thinking about some things,” he said. “It’s hard, because we know now he had Huntington’s Disease, which wasn’t diagnosed until ’52 or ’53.”

This land was made for you and me

Of Guthrie’s prolific catalog [and hundreds more songs that ended up in the waste bin], This Land is Your Land is his best known song — and perhaps the one that best captures the complexity of Guthrie’s legacy. Penned as a response to what Guthrie saw as Irving Berlin’s cloying, overplayed and complacent declaration of love of country, God Bless America, This Land is Your Land confronts and challenges the nation to self-reflect — and, perhaps paradoxically, appears in elementary school song books nationwide as an anthem of patriotism.

“I mentioned this to Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, one time,” Halker said of the school song book version, which typically includes just three verses.

“Was it just to be more patriotic and leave out the more critical verses? She said it might have just been Woody’s manager, Harold Leventhall. Harold might have thought it would sell better if they left those out,” Halker said. “It’s hard to say; it might just have fit better on the page.”

Bucky Halker sings songs by Woody Guthrie at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 4, at the DeWitt County Museum at he C.H. Moore Homestead, 219 E. Woodlawn St., Clinton. This event is free and open to the public. chmoorehomestead.org.

Lauren Warnecke is a reporter at WGLT. You can reach Lauren at lewarne@ilstu.edu.