This is the text of an article I wrote for the Times Higher Education Supplement in September 2007, in advance of the fortieth anniversary of Woody Guthrie's death.

Voice of the Other America

            In March of this year I received an impromptu history lesson from one very tall Prince Andrew, who leaned over me and said: 'Oh, I don't agree with you. I don't agree with you at all. America was built by people who went there and had something to contribute, to give. It's only now, with all the migrants coming in, that your country is in danger'. The occasion was a Buckingham Palace reception for Americans working in the UK, hosted by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in advance of their state visit to commemorate the founding of the Jamestown colony. It was four hundred years ago that the great English migration to America began. As I was a guest in his parents' house, I refrained from reminding the prince that his own father was a migrant, as were a number of his ancestors going back to George I — all of whom came to Britain to seek a better opportunity than they would have had if they had remained at home. For that matter, I was a migrant who, as a dual national, had taken the oath of allegiance to his mother and her 'Heirs and Successors' — which I suppose meant him, too. So I shut up.

            At any rate, I was saved from further awkwardness by the approach of the queen's cousin by marriage, the Duchess of Gloucester — a fellow migrant — who politely and unnecessarily apologised for her Danish accent. I told her that I had just returned from Copenhagen myself.

            'Copen-hah-gen?' she teased. 'You sound just like Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Andersen. We would say Copen-hay-gen. But what were you doing there?'

            I told her that I'd been introducing Danish university students to the music of Woody Guthrie. In response to her puzzled expression, I explained that he was an American songwriter who, back in the thirties, wrote about the dispossessed, the Dust Bowl refugees, the migrants….

            'Oh, yes', she said. 'I know that was a very difficult time for America. And … you sing to these students?'

            I replied that I did.

            'Would you sing some for me?'

            I gulped and looked around — crystal chandeliers, oil paintings, admiralty, royalty, diplomats, Jerry Hall — and I launched into a verse of Guthrie's great ode to migrant labour, 'Pastures of Plenty':

It's a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed;

My poor feet have travelled a hot, dusty road….

I wasn't too surprised that the duchess had never heard it. So I quickly tried the chorus of 'This Land Is Your Land'.

'Ah', she said. 'That one I know'.

            This was good to hear. And for the rest of the evening it was just me and one big sloppy grin. Goddamn, I've sung Woody's songs in Buck House! I have brought Woody Guthrie to the world's greatest seat of hereditary privilege. Maybe something of the man's great heart, his empathy with the hard hit and the hard travelling, is seeping into the foundations of this palace right now. Maybe a few notes of his music are still floating up there around the chandeliers, like Tinkerbell — a faint echo in the ears of the powerful. Who knows, maybe Prince Andrew will wake up tomorrow morning humming 'Pastures of Plenty' and wondering how the hell that tune got into his head. Sheesh, maybe I've had too much champagne.

            Woody Guthrie died forty years ago this October. For the past year I have been taking his songs and his story to school and university students throughout Europe. Most have never heard of him, but some write to me with the news that they've gone out and bought a CD or two — as one said, 'He's a pretty good antidote to George Bush'. Others feel that Guthrie offers a re-acquaintance with the poor, resilient, decent people they've met in American literature. As one Swiss student wrote to me, 'I often pictured Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath while you were singing, as if Guthrie was travellin' along with the Joad family'.

            In Studs Terkel's Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, an Oklahoma migrant woman recalls, 'When I read Grapes of Wrath, that was like reliving my whole life. I was never so proud of poor people before as I was after I read this book'. This was, of course, Steinbeck's intention, similar to that of Guthrie, who wrote: 'I hate a song that makes you think you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing.... I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down or rolled over you, 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 your work'.

            When I first put together my presentation, I wrote to some prominent musical figures on both sides of the Atlantic for their thoughts on the value of introducing Woody Guthrie to a new generation of Europeans, at a time when the dominant American voices over here seemed to be those of the belligerent, the know-it-all, the messianic and the mean-spirited — in short, those with the power and influence to commandeer the global bullhorn. Eighty-seven-year-old Pete Seeger, still swamped with daily correspondence in the wake of Springsteen's The Seeger Sessions, invited me to telephone him. Pete Seeger, who had sung and travelled with Woody Guthrie, who had faced down the McCarthy Committee and — as Ry Cooder sings of him — 'stood up to tyranny with just a banjo in his hand', compared Guthrie to Robert Burns and Taras Shevchenko. 'You know', he said, 'Woody wrote thousands of songs, and they're known all over the Other America' — referring not only to Michael Harrington's description of 'the unskilled workers, the migrant farm workers, the aged, the minorities, and all the others who live in the economic underworld of American life' but also to the progressive and radical American left that has always championed them. Tom Paxton's response was powerfully succinct: 'No one can understand the American people without listening to Woody Guthrie'.

I was particularly gratified by the replies from this side of the Atlantic — from the Irish folksinger Christy Moore, who wrote: 'I learned from Woody that songs of protest should be sung on the front line. It is fine to sing them in folk clubs and concert halls but they really come to life when sung on the picket lines and at the prison gates'. Ralph McTell wrote that Guthrie had changed his life and 'continues to be an inspiration', while another of England's national treasures, Martin Carthy, called Guthrie 'among the very bravest of very brave political activists', a man who 'wrote about ordinary people … in a way that lifts the soul'. Carthy made the connection, too, between Guthrie's mid-twentieth century and our twenty-first, quoting Franklin Roosevelt: '"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all citizens whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice and hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilisation."  Woody Guthrie and his songs are as important now as they ever were'.

If only Guthrie could have sung into the ear of that same Franklin Roosevelt who signed the Japanese-American internment order in 1942 —

You keep me in jail and you lock me in prison;

Your hospital's jammed and your crazyhouse full….

— and if only he could have sung that, and more, to Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice:

What makes your boats haul death to my people?
Nitro blockbusters, big cannons and guns?
Why doesn't your ship bring food and some clothing?
I've sure got to know, folks, I've sure got to know.

I know that I will never have the chance to sing Woody Guthrie's songs in Buckingham Palace again. But I look forward to many more years of singing them where it matters most — in the classrooms and wherever else it might do some good to hear from the Other America now and then.