Woody Guthrie: IEE

 

With his famous "This Machine Kills Fascists" guitar

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.

I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it's hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work."

One of the most significant figures in American folk music, Guthrie (1912-1967) is a fairly typical specimen of the IEE type. Despite the trauma-conga-line of his childhood (his mother was sent to a mental hospital due to the neurogenerative Huntington's disease, his sister had earlier killed herself by setting her clothes on fire during an argument with his mother, and the family's home burned in another accidental fire), Guthrie managed to find relief in music, working odd jobs and busking for money and food. Notably, according to Wikipedia, "although Guthrie did not do well as a student and dropped out of high school in his senior year before graduation, his teachers described him as bright. He was an avid reader on a wide range of topics," quite characteristic of the IEE type that finds it hard to stay in one intellectual lane, as opposed to types like ESE, who is, on average, a touch less intellectually bright naturally, but is also more dutiful "for the team", and can maintain internal burning for one single cause for more time, or the dutiful, workaholism-valuing EII. Instead of attenting high school classes, Guthrie "spent most of his time learning songs by busking on the streets and reading in the library at Pampa's city hall."

During the Dust Bowl period, Guthrie migrated to California to look for work - something he, as a natural vagabond, probably minded less than others. There he first achieved game as a music performer, and began to write socialist songs, eventually becoming a "fellow traveller" of the Communist Party. If he was a member at all — this is disputed — his membership didn't last long, and it was not because of any ideological dissent. He was characterized as "an outsider who agreed with the platform of the party while avoiding party discipline", which is also typical of IEE, who is not that much an individualist, doesn't like the role of a "black sheep," and, unlike ILE, can adapt to the collectivist positions without any particular scruples (the anti-Qi traits of the type) — he was fine following the official Soviet political line — as long as you don't expect strict discipline from him. Later hired by the Model Tobacco Company to host their radio program Pipe Smoking Time, he quit after the seventh broadcast, claiming he had begun to feel the show was too restrictive when he was told what to sing. This "I'm with you on the cause, don't ask me to show up on time" posture is quite typical for the exaggeratedly irrational IEE's.

Around that period, he composed his most famous song, "This Land is Your Land":

I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps

To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;

And all around me a voice was sounding;

This land was made for you and me.

...

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;

Sign was painted, it said private property;

But on the back side it didn't say nothing;

This land was made for you and me.

The radicalism here isn't disciplined or even Ti-systematized doctrine (he never showed any systematizing instinct), it's an "intuition of freedom" that rejects all arbitrary boundaries. The politics come from an ethical response to what he sees. 

During WWII he made several voyages on Atlantic battleships, serving as a mess man and dishwasher, and frequently sang for the crew and troops to buoy their spirits. After the war, the singer Jack Elliott studied under Guthrie, later recalling his advice: "if you want to learn something, just steal it" — a very IEE-style cultural integration.

By the late 1940's, Guthrie started to show symptoms of the same mind-and-body-destroying disease which had killed his mother, and his behavior became increasingly more aggressive and erratic. The eventual inability to travel must've been hard for Guthrie as a natural vagabond, and it resulted in his divorces with his second wife Marjorie and then third wife Anneke (he was married three times). Although it's still notable that he managed to eventually reconcile with his second wife even so. In 1954, he wrote a now-famous song denouncing the race-segregatory practices of his landlord, Fred Trump, the father of the US president:

I suppose

Old Man Trump knows

Just how much

Racial Hate

He stirred up

In the bloodpot of human hearts

When he drawed

That color line

Here at his Beach Haven family project

Inspiring many other musicians, from Jimmy LaFave to Bob Dylan, Guthrie has shown a Ne-style multifaceted talent whose new recordings still continue to resurface.