Woody Guthrie, Upton Sinclair, Ayn Rand and John Steinbeck

For the past couple of weeks my wife and I have been listening to an unabridged version of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's polemic about Chicago at the turn of the 20th Century. As I have listened to the endless hardship that Jurgis Rudkus endures in the packing yards and the political system I have grown increasingly tired of Sinclair's one sided view of the world, even the world of the working man - which the original version was quick to tell us that Sinclair did some "original" research to write the book (undercover of course). The book is unrelenting in the same way the Rand's Atlas Shrugged or Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath are unrelenting. In Sinclair's version the main character has flaws but the wolrd he encounters is populated by people without heart or soul - until of course he encounters the socialists.

Rand's Atlas Shrugged has an excessively long peroration in the middle which in about forty pages unfolds her unique brand of individualism. Steinbeck is also the same kind of grinding writer in the Grapes of Wrath. Two of the three (the Jungle and the Grapes of Wrath) were written not as novels but as media events. There is plenty of evidence that the Jungle eventually resulted in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Steinbeck wrote his screed in 1939 and it was immediately put into a movie which I have always thought was designed to justify a good deal of what FDR had tried during the thirties.

So how does the dust bowl singer fit into this grouping? In my sense he does not. Woody Guthrie, whose estate just issued a great compilation set of CDs of remastered classic Woody, was no less political than Steinbeck, Rand or Sinclair. He believed very deeply in a number of causes that were certainly more in concert with the thinking of Sinclair and Steinbeck. But his work had a depth that neither Steinbeck (at least in the Grapes) nor Sinclair ever seemed to achieve. First, although there are some Woody ballads that I think have lost their punch, many are still very timely. Second, and more importantly Woody had the ability to stir on political issues and yet comment on the very human side of life. In some ways the voice that Dylan tried to emulate was not the most musical but like a lot of Dylan's early work, it was evocative of both the times in which he lived and the broader human condition.

It is in part a bit unfair to include Steinbeck in this grouping. He has a large body of other writing that is first rate. But the Grapes of Wrath fits very neatly into the model established by the other two authors.

What I like best about the new Woody set called My Dusty Road is that the songs show that broad range of commentary that Woody did so well - from political songs to life songs. I've listened to Woody for more than forty years and this is the best collection I have ever heard.

When you read Sinclair (or listen to someone reading him) you realize how dated his references and style is. When you listen to this collection of lots of previously unreleased Woody - it is current for this time.