Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Woody Guthrie and Dust Bowl adobe.


Previously we've covered Woody Guthrie's allergic reaction to Irving Berlin, and the singer's anti-fascist angle, which my company has embraced as a timeless badge of sorts.

"Talking seventh inning blues.”

Now there's even more: A novel about much more than adobe.

This Land Was His Land; Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Novel, by Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp

The legend of Woody Guthrie as folk singer is firmly etched in America’s collective consciousness. Compositions like “Deportee,” “Pastures of Plenty” and “Pretty Boy Floyd” have become national treasures akin to Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanack” and Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” But Guthrie, who would have been 100 years old on July 14, was also a brilliant and distinctive prose stylist, whose writing is distinguished by a homespun authenticity, deep-seated purpose and remarkable ear for dialect. These attributes are on vivid display in Guthrie’s long-lost “House of Earth,” his only fully realized, but yet unpublished, novel. (His other books, “Bound for Glory” and “Seeds of Man,” are quasi-fictional memoirs.)


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