On Aug. 14, you can hear a rewrite of "This Land" on "Woody at Home"

From a July 14 New York Times article by pop music critic Jon Pareles comes some of the "This Land is Your Land" lyrics from the Guthrie estate and Shamus Music. On Aug. 14, they will release songs from home recordings recently recovered from simple recording equipment Woody used at home. Look for "Woody at Home, Vol, 1 & 2." Some  of the draft lyrics for "This Land:"

Wikipedia lists "This Land is Your Land" under "Songs of Socialist Movements." It includes these notes: "Guthrie wrote the song as a critical response to Irving Berlin's God Bless America. The stanza condemning private property is often omitted."

Lynda Rutledge takes us on a magical mystery tour in West with Giraffes

I meant to post this as soon as I finished the book. Here it is.

A runaway teen – Woodrow “Woody” Wilson Nickel -- is fascinated with two shipwrecked African giraffes and signs on with a crusty Old Man to transport them from the East Coast to the San Diego Zoo. The year is 1938. The Depression is still loose upon the land and evil lurks overseas. A road trip with giraffes seems like just the thing.

The book opens with a prologue from the year 2025. A healthcare worker in a VA hospital comes across a deceased patient’s old army footlocker. In it, she finds a porcelain toy giraffe from the San Diego Zoo and a stack of writing tablets. It’s the saga of Woody’s trip. The writer intersperses scenes from the journals with a look at Woody at 105 struggling to write it all down. He writes, talks gibberish, fends off hovering healthcare workers, and imagines a giraffe outside the window. The reader roots for him to get down his story and we know he will as the tale depends on it.

During the journey in a specially-outfitted truck, Woody encounters charlatans, circus freaks, hobos in Hoovervilles, and a budding love interest. His mentor, the Old Man, works overtime to keep the trek on track. There’s a love interest, too, in a young woman Augusta (Red) who pretends to be a Life Magazine photographer and accompanies the giraffe convoy in a stolen Packard.

As I’ve written before, I dig road trips, going on them and reading about them. It was rough travel, suited to the realities of 1938. But I loved reading about it. It did drag in some spots – the always difficult middle section of the novel -- and the journey’s ending seemed a bit anticlimactic. But it’s a trip I’d go on again.

 

Nelson Algren lived the writer's life in the 1930s and J. Edgar Hoover was watching

I write a fan letter to fellow writer Colin Asher:

Dear Colin:

Just finished reading “Never a Lovely So Real.” I loved it. Your intro sections read more like an historical novel than standard biography. It helps that Nelson’s origins and his writing life were so real and unpredictable. Overall, I found out so much more about the writer who conducted my creative writing workshop at University of Florida in 1974. Nelson’s reputation preceded him and he took it with him after the 12-week session. Until I read your book, I was content to remember the grizzled old 63-year-old who wandered into the classroom on a hot September night in Gainesville. Now I know better. I’m glad you found his life worth writing about.

Nelson was my first writing teacher. He was a gruff but entrancing presence in the classroom. I only knew him by reputation. As you write it, that was part fact and part fiction, some of it fed by Nelson. I’d read one of his books and a half-dozen stories. His past was checkered but I knew little about it. He’d been friends with James T. Farrell and Richard Wright and lover to Simone de Bouvier, a feminist writer found on many women’s studies reading lists. Two of his books were made into movies and he spent some crazy time in Hollywood. His political activities earned him a file in J. Edgar’s commie blacklist (886 pages – one heck of a file).

Remembering that time almost 50 years later, Visiting Writer Nelson Algren was an unsettling presence on the sprawling University of Florida campus. His clothing was more Dust Bowl Goodwill than Central Florida Casual. He wore rumpled shirts, loose-fitting slacks, and what looked like the army boots he wore during his time with a medical unit in France during World War II. He sported a grizzled beard and a cap that looked better on Tom Joad. He was old, probably the worst sin you could commit on a campus known for frats, football and consistent listings on Playboy Magazine’s “Top Party Schools.” Schools made the grade by earning an A-plus in three criteria: Sex, nightlife, sports. Creative writing is not mentioned. Keggers under the palms were the order of the day and nobody really wanted to take a walk on the wild side or meet the man with the golden arm who prowled The Windy City’s mean streets.

Me – I wanted to take that walk. Nelson Algren was the real thing. Here he was, stuck in a classroom in one of the campus’s oldest buildings teaching writing to kids from Daytona and Apalachicola. I looked at him as a weathered sage. We were a wave of youth in the U.S.A. who knew very little about what life was like for most Americans. We wrote stories about surfing and soured relationships. The stories in Algren’s “Neon Wilderness” might have been about Martians for all we knew. Grifters and gamblers, whores and junkies. I wanted to know these people because I desperately wanted to be a writer. I just didn’t know how to go about it.

Nelson was generous of his time and expertise. He told great stories. One of our fellow students invited us to her apartment where we smoked dope. Nelson partook, noting that he used to smoke it with Chicago’s jazz musicians and the addicts he met when writing “The Man with the Golden Arm.” He even grew his own brand of weed outside his bungalow near Gary, Indiana.

Another night, my pal Big Mike, piled us into his big black station wagon and took us to the strip club where he was a bouncer. Big Mike was a teetotaling Vietnam vet whose studio apartment was piled high with cases of bottled Pepsi because he could never find enough Pepsi in Coca-Cola country. I had a feeling that Algren had been in rougher places but he was a good sport. After his second drink, he demonstrated how he would put his head between the dancer’s big breasts and make motorboat sounds. It shocked me, the idea of this old writer motorboating a stripper. What he might have been saying is this: “Don’t waste any time, boys. Do motorboats when you can. It all goes by faster than you know.” I wasn’t listening then but now know something about the brief span of a lifetime.

In class, Algren was kind to our stories but made suggestions to make them better. I wrote a story about a homeless guy getting evicted from a tent in a mall parking lot. Algren said it needed some work. He handed out his recommended reading list. I wish I still had it. Hemingway was on it along with books I didn’t know: “A House for Mr. Biswas” by V.S. Naipaul, “The End of the Game and Other Stories” by Julio Cortazar, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Good Soldier Svejk” by Jaroslav Hasek, and the collected stories of John Collier. On the last night of class, Algren handed me a slip of paper with his agent’s name and address and told me to contact her. I didn’t see him do that with any of the other students and felt pretty special. I never followed up. I had nothing to show an agent except a half-finished story and late-night journal entries.

A year later, my next writing prof was Harry Crews. I figured he probably knew some of the same people Algren did, ne’er-do-wells and junkies and killers. Algren came from the mean streets and Crews from the mean swamps of the Okefenokee. If you’re curious about how mean it was, read his memoir “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place.” This was before Crews got sober and didn’t always make it to class, regaling the locals at Lillian’s Music Store which wasn’t a music store. When he did, he told great stories. One night, he read aloud his favorite story, “How Beautiful with Shoes” by Wilbur Daniel Steele, a wonderful writer whom nobody in class had ever heard of, This from Wikipeda: “Steele has been called ‘America's recognized master of the popular short story’ between World War I and the Great Depression.” Crews wrote an Esquire column called “Grits” and had stories and essays featured in Playboy. One I remember the best was “The Button-down Terror of David Duke,” infamous KKK grand wizard from Louisiana. Crews wrote about an ill-fated backpacking trip along the Appalachian Trail that ended in a Tennessee town that once convicted and hung a circus elephant for stomping a boy to death.

I was lucky to have two great early mentors. At the time, I didn’t understand it but knew it was important to my imagined writing career. After graduation, I worked in Denver as a sportswriter and edited a weekly alternative newspaper. I was a corporate editor until I decided it was killing me. I wrote a novel and snagged myself an agent in Ray Powers of the Marje Fields Agency. He helped me revise the book and shopped it around. I told him I was quitting my job and he advised me to get a numbing day job so I could have plenty of energy left for writing. Instead, a went off to get my M.F.A. at Colorado State University. It helped my writing and helped me get published. It also sent me off with a career as an arts administrator at a state arts council and then the National Endowment for the Arts. It cut into my writing time. I’m retired now and have time to think about paths taken and not taken. I write every day and have a short list of published fiction. I have a fine family and a house. Still, Ray Powers might have been right. I’ll never know.

Thanks again. I look forward to reading your other work.

Sincerely,

Michael Shay, michaelshaywyo@hotmail.com, hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com

P.S.: Ordered a copy of “Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters” after reading about it in your book. Couldn’t resist.

History and storytelling in historical fiction

One of the great things about historical fiction is the discovery of familiar names whom I know little or nothing about. This, of course, makes me want to know more.

Dorothea Lange is known for the most famous photo of Depression America. You know the one – the portrait of the poor mother and child taken in a California work camp. The subject wears the gloom of the Depression in her eyes and her slumped shoulders. Something heroic about her, too, something almost mother-and-child Biblical. 

Lange took the photo in 1936 after gathering a lifetime of expertise and a lifetime of hurt, some of that at the hands of her husband, Maynard Dixon. I had heard Dixon’s name mentioned in arts circles and had seen some of his paintings at the Center of the West in Cody and the Denver Art Museum. I know nothing of the man.

Curiosity caused me to pick up the historical novel “The Bohemians” by Jasmin Darznik. It opens in 1918 San Francisco and I am curious about the era in American history because I am writing about it. I picked up the book from the seven-day shelf knowing I could not read it in seven days because I was guiding Florida family members around Wyoming for that week. Then I saw it was dedicated to California poet Rebecca Foust. I knew that if a fine poet such as Rebecca was attached to this book that it was a good one. So who cares about a late fee?

I’m only about two-thirds through the novel but know that Dixon plays a major role in Lange’s life and vice versa. I looked up Dixon to see some of his paintings and recognized several and his famous style. I looked up Lange to reacquaint myself with the famous photo. I didn’t want to read too much since I want to maintain the suspense that Darznik develops. Now I can continue…

How true is historical fiction? I fall back on this phrase: “This book (movie) is based on real events (real people) but is a work of fiction.” The fiction writer reserves the right to merge with their character’s protoplasm to bring them to life. It’s the writer’s view based on what may be years of research. The reader gets to decide if it’s a good and believable story.

“The Bohemians” seems believable. I’ll let you know my final thoughts when I finish.

I will tell you that “The Ridgeline” by Michael Punke is a true and believable story of the events in Wyoming during Red Cloud’s War in 1866. It focused on the characters involved in the Fetterman Fight. We see the Oglala side through Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, and some young warriors. We see the cavalry side from journal entries by a young bride who has accompanied her brash husband to Wyoming. Other “invader” voices include Lt. Crummond, the doomed Capt. Fetterman, the acerbic and aging Jim Bridger, several young soldiers, a camp follower, and an occasional snide look at policy-makers in D.C.

It’s a ripping yarn as I say in a review soon to be published on another online Wyocentric site. It’s cool that it was written by a Wyoming native but not necessary to the story. It’s a good read. Reminded me that the Fetterman Fight site (usually labeled “the Fetterman Massacre”) is preserved by the State of Wyoming as is the Wagon Box Fight and Fort Phil Kearny. Museums in Johnson and Sheridan counties have exhibits about the Indian wars. It’s often told from the conqueror’s POV. But remember: “Custer’s Last Stand” or the “Custer Massacre” used to be the terms for the famous national historic site in southern Montana. It was renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and was the first NPS entity to hire a Native American superintendent. To the Lakota or Sioux Nation, June 25 is Victory Day in the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass.

Reading “The Ridgeline” helped me see the Fetterman Fight as a military encounter and a battle between opposing cultures. It’s the most notable event in a long line of battles between U.S. horse soldiers and the native horse soldiers of the Northern Plains. As a kid in the 1950s in the Rocky Mountain West, I was steeped in the glory of Custer’s Last Stand. As an adult, I now get to see the encounter from the POV of all sides. I am a curious adult. Not sure what schoolkids are learning about the Plains Wars. Let’s hope that a bit of reality creeps into schools now being assaulted by right-wing zealots who believe in a whitewashed version of history.

Read my review of Anna North’s alternative historical novel “Outlawed” centered around the Sundance Kid and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang of Wyoming.

"Meet John Doe" -- a 79-year-old movie has something to say about 2020

I watched Frank Capra's "Meet John Doe" Friday night on Turner Classic Movies. I've seen it before but not in the Trump era. I see it now with new eyes. It's a story about decency. A hackneyed subject, boring even. But a lively tale in the hands of director Frank Capra.

If you don't know the 1941 movie, here's a synopsis. After the credits roll over scenes of Depression America, the film opens with a workman taking a jackhammer to a chiseled stone logo: "The Bulletin: A Free Press Means a Free People." It's replaced by a shiny new metal sign: "The New Bulletin: A Streamlined Paper for a Streamlined Era." 

Cut to the newsroom. An officious young clerk strolls in, points at each expendable employee, whistles, makes the universal cutthroat sign across his neck, and clucks his tongue. The somber looks on faces reveals the awful truth -- that they are now cast loose into The Great Depression with no real safety net. 

Mitchell is one of them. But she is not going to take this lying down. She marches into the editor's office and pleads for her job, saying she will take a pay cut from $30 to $20. Editor Henry Connell is a grizzled old school editor brought in to make the paper, now owned by millionaire businessman D.B. Norton, more exciting and more "streamlined." He has no patience and no job for Stanwyck and shoos her from the office, reminding her to write her final column before she leaves.

What comes next? It's a Capra-style exploration of celebrity, greed, patriotism and fascism. It was released in 1941, almost two years into the war and just a few months before Pearl Harbor. An unsettled time, maybe as angst-ridden as 2020. As the plot unfolds, I had Trump on my mind. Couldn't help it. And I kept contrasting Capra's worldview and the one that emerged after the 2016 presidential election.

In the movie, Mitchell's parting newspaper column is a fake letter from a John Doe who rails against society's ills and says he will make his point by jumping off the city hall building on Christmas Eve. An editor, who's also been fired, comes to Mitchell and says her column is two sticks short. She hands him to new column and he runs with it. When printed, the column causes an uproar. The competing newspaper calls it a fake. Mitchell is rehired at a higher salary and told to produce John Doe. She finds a washed-up pitcher named Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper) who bums around the country with The Colonel (Walter Brennan). Mitchell persuades Willoughby to be Doe and the plot thickens.

Doe takes to the role. He eats regularly and has money. The Colonel warns him of "the heelots," those heels who just want your money. The Colonel is the voice of reason to Doe's aw-shucks naivite. He urges Doe to flee before it's too late. But Doe is stuck -- he likes the attention and having money ain't a bad thing either. Meanwhile, Norton gets his hooks into Mitchell as Doe warms to his role until a radio appearance pushes him over the edge and he flees with The Colonel. Doe is recognized at a diner and the crowds swarm to see him. He sees that he, as John Doe, has made an impact. He returns to the city and forms hundreds of John Doe Clubs, financed by Norton.

Norton is the stand-in for every fascist ascendant in the 1930s and 40s. He issues orders. He has his own paramilitary force (Norton's Troopers). He feels that the country is going to hell in a handbasket and needs a strong hand to restore order. His ultimate goal is to transform all those members of John Doe Clubs into compliant voters. But Doe, Mitchell and Connell rally to stymie Norton's plans. That's a spoiler but, if you know Capra films, that's how they end. Decent people win, the grifters lose.

Which brings us to the America in 2020. Decent people are everywhere. They heal the sick, feed the hungry, help their neighbors.

The indecent are always with us. Perhaps we just notice them more in our time of greatest need. Trump, of course, is Indecent American No. 1. Just the other day he was asked was about Rep. John Lewis's contributions to society. He replied that they weren't so great, that Lewis didn't show up for Trump's 2017 inauguration. He wasn't alone of course -- many thousands had something better to do on 1/20/17. Trump didn't even bother to attend Lewis's farewell at the Capitol Building Rotunda.

Everything is about Trump all of the time. He has his own band of Norton's Troopers. They were out in force the night that Trump decided to go to a church he had never attended to hold up a bible. Donald's Troopers tear-gassed and beat down peaceful protesters.Then Trump's Troopers traveled to Portland to do their dirty work. 

In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had its own problem with fascists. The German-American Bund (America's Nazi Party) had thousands of members. Some 20,000 of them showed up for a rally at Madison Square Garden on Feb. 20, 1939. Bund members battled with protesters outside the Garden. Trump's pop probably said "there was good people on both sides." The Bund supported Hitler and his thugs, possibly history's most indecent group although there are a lot of contenders.

We need decency in film. Not the National Legion of Decency version. The Catholic org rated films and condemned some, telling Catholics that seeing one was a mortal sin and would send you straight to H-E-L-L. To teens in the 1960s, it was a handy guide for those films we just had to see. Censorship tends to backfire on the censor. We youngsters were also keen on reading banned books. I'm no youngster now but I always check the banned books lists to make sure I've read them. It's the decent thing to do.

You can watch "Meet John Doe" on YouTube. For a story about pre-war conflicts between Nazis and protesters in New York City, read Irwin Shaw's short story "Sailor off the Bremen." 

Where's Herbert Hoover when we need him?

In times like these, we need a guy like Herbert Hoover.

Hoover has long been a joke for his poor performance in reacting to the Great Depression during his presidency. Prosperity is "just around the corner," or so he said. Can you say Hooverville?

When World War I erupted overseas, while his country remained neutral, Hoover jumped into the fray and chaired the Committee for Relief in Belgium. He was responsible for feeding thousands of starving people in Belgium and northern France

When the U.S. joined World War I in April 1917, Hoover was the man they called upon to get shit done. He was named head of the Food Administration and came to be known as the "food czar." Most people know of Victory Gardens on the home front in World War II. But there were War Gardens in The Great War. While President Wilson called on Americans to make sacrifices for the war effort, Hoover fed the civilians at home and the doughboys in France.

After the war, he led the American Relief Administration which shipped four million tons of food to Central and Eastern Europe and post-revolutionary Russia. In 1920, the newly-elected President Harding made him head of the Department of Commerce. His competency earned him the title of "Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Under-secretary to all of the other departments." During the big Mississippi River flood of 1927, Hoover ran the relief efforts.

Hoover ran for president as a Republican in 1928 and decisively defeated Al Smith. The stick market crash came less than a year later and, in 1932, FDR took over the White house for 13 years.

Hoover was, as I said before, a guy who could GSD. So why did this go-getter from modest Midwestern roots lose the 1932 election to a rich guy from New York? He never took seriously the suffering of Americans during the Great Depression. FDR made a lot of promises and ended up keeping many of them, earning him the hatred and some envy from Republicans. Hoover had tried to get the economy moving again. But he was adamant that the government should not be directly involved in relief efforts.

Sound familiar?

It;s one of the ironies of history that Hoover could feed millions across the globe but let those in his backyard starve. He was all food food relief efforts as long as they didn't come from the gubment. He wasn't a cruel egomaniac like Trump. But his Republican small-government stance was almost America's undoing.

I'm no historian but Hoover's dilemma seems to be playing out inside the Beltway almost 90 years later. Unlike Trump, Hoover was an accomplished administrator in the private sector and in government. But their approach to an emergency seems the same. It's no big deal. Americans can't starve. We are immune to Third World viruses. The suffering was all around.

Last night, as I watched the third season of "Babylon Berlin," the stock market crashed in October 1929. In the Berlin streets, men ran madly to their banks and brokerage houses. One of protagonist Inspector Rath's colleagues goes crazy and takes hostages at a bank, threatening to kill them if they don't hand over his money. Outside an office, a businessman shoots himself in the head. As Rath walks down stairs, a man's legs hang limp above him, obviously a case of hanging. Rath is not oblivious to the suffering. He knows a little bit about it. He's a combat veteran of the war and treats his serious shell-shock symptoms with hits of morphine. He also knows that Nazi sympathizers plot to take over the police department and he is on a mission to do something about it.

There are those who are oblivious due to political orthodoxy. That is not Trump. Remember that he was a Democrat for much of his life, probably because he had to deal with lots of Dems in NYC. Trump is what he has always been, an unscrupulous narcissist. Yesterday, when threatened by America's governors charting their own way out of the pandemic, he said that they couldn't do that because he alone was in charge. Period. Spoken like a true autocrat. One of these days, he will read the Constitution and discover that we have three branches of government. They've all been compromised by the GOP but we know how it's supposed to work. In November, we will have the opportunity to return the country to its roots. I hope that all those nurses and doctors and CNAs and first responders will remember that it was Trump who left them unprotected against the COVID-19 scourge. When it happens again, and it will, we need an adult in charge.

Scouting report: Finding the best Wyoming spot to watch the eclipse

View from The Castle, looking west toward Laramie Peak.

The family and I drove to Guernsey State Park for Mother's Day. This is only my second visit to the park in the 26 years that I've lived in Wyoming. The first visit was in May 2008 when I joined my colleagues at Wyoming State Parks and Cultural Resources to celebrate the 75th anniversary of FDR's New Deal, which included the Civilian Conservation Corps and WPA projects for writers, artists and actors. Writers earned a buck from Uncle Sam by writing field guides of the states and conducting oral histories of residents, as Zora Neale Hurston did with ex-slaves in Florida. Nelson Algren and Richard Wright researched and wrote in Illinois. Noted author Vardis Fisher wrote the Idaho guide, still regarded as one of the best of its kind.

CCC workers built many magnificent structures in this park. Guernsey is home to The Castle, a rock-and-timber shelter that overlooks the park. A few paces down the walking path is a restroom dubbed the Million Dollar Biffy. The interpretive sign says that workers gave it that name not because it took a million dollars to build, which is a lot of Depression-era money, but that it took so darn long to build. Unemployed young men from Iowa and Tennessee hewed the timbers and cut the rock and forged the iron. It should last a thousand years, causing archaeologists of 5017 to remark, "These ancient humans certainly built quality restrooms." In 5017, the biffy and The Castle may overlook a teeming inland sea. The waves will be bitchin'.

We visited the park to see if it would serve as an outpost to watch the total solar eclipse set for high noon on August 21. We are a bit late getting started. Some have been planning eclipse activities for years. Hotels in Casper, eclipse epicenter, have been booked up for months. Campgrounds, too along the event's path in WYO, which runs from touristy Jackson in the west to sleepy Torrington in the east, with stops in Riverton, Hell's Half Acre, AstroCon 2017 in downtown Casper, the burg of Glenrock, and Douglas, home of the state fair,  Chris and I  are trying to find an eclipse-watching spot somewhere in there. We bought a Guernsey day pass for Aug. 21. We also got on the campsite waiting list. We thought that might be fun during this grand ol' party celebrating the majestic universe which can't be any older than 6,600 years, give or take.

Chris and I won't be around the next time, when Colorado gets the nod in 2045. By then, we will have experienced a total eclipse of the heart. We hope that the words of the Federal Writers Project will survive, although in what form it's hard to say. Thee printed word has gone through amazing changes since Gutenberg. Since the 1930s, books have gone from typed-and-printed form to e-books. It happened a lot quicker than that -- from the 1980s to now.

One hopes that books survive as long as the biffy.

Wyoming Community Media to do film on New Deal artists

Jackson Pollock and Thomas Hart Benton visited the Saratoga, Wyoming, rodeo in 1938. According to Alan O'Hashi at WCM, Benton painted this mural with Pollock as the harmonica player at the card table on the left.

This news comes from Alan O’Hashi at Wyoming Community Media:

WCM was funded by the Wyoming Humanities Council and the Wyoming Arts Council to produce a documentary about New Deal artists in Wyoming. We have some leads but need more. Are there any historians out there who have any info or can point us in the right direction:

• EE Stevens murals in Niobrara County

• Jackson Pollock and Thomas Hart Benton in Saratoga during July 4th in the 1930s

• Alan True asked by Lester Hunt to design the license plate bucking horse

• Robert Russin did his WPA art elsewhere but moved to Wyoming and taught at UW

Production will happen when the weather breaks in the spring.

Let us now praise famous songs, and those creative types who begat them

Chris and I attended the "American Tapestry" concert this afternoon at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Cheyenne. Our daughter was singing, as she's in the Laramie County Community College Collegiate and Cantorei choirs. She does both well. You're probably not surprised to hear a proud father say that.

Several of the selections were taken from the page -- poetry, to be specific. First came three selections from A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad. My accountant father gave me a copy of that book when I was still in high school. He thought it might be an encouragement to my budding poetic soul. It wasn't (I was more attuned to Jim Morrison back then), but it was still a nice gesture. Housman is still not my favorite, but his verse sounds great when set to music and sung by collegiate voices.

Robert Burns made an appearance as the Men's Ensemble sang "My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose." The men, all dressed in black suits, held a rose as they gathered around the piano and intoned Burns. Very nice.

The recessional song was "The Promise of the Living" from the opera The Tender Land. Music was composed by Aaron Copland with libretto by Horace Everett, a pseudonym for dancer and choreographer Erik Johns. Copland was inspired to write the opera after viewing the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with text by James Agee and photos by Walker Evans. The book arose from a 1936 magazine assignment Agee and Evans accepted in 1936. The goal was to document the lives of white sharecroppers in the South. The magazine article didn't pan out, but the book did, and is now one of those volumes studied for its trail-blazing blend of straight reportage, creative nonfiction, poetry and photos.  Another one of those interesting works of art to emerge from the Great Depression.

Fine concert today, and I'm looking forward to the next one. Thanks to talented  singers, and the wonderful teachers who trained them.

Happy 100th birthday, Woody Guthrie -- "He loved writing!"

On the eve of Woody Guthrie's 100th birthday, Nora Guthrie talks about her father's love for writing in an NPR piece: "He loved writing — he loved it. My mother would say, 'He loved the feeling of a pen on paper' — just that visceral experience. He loved that. It was his energy coming out of his fingertips." Pictured is one of Woody's notebooks (circa 1942) from his extensive archive.