Woody Guthrie’s Fan Letter To John Cage and Alan Hovhaness (1947)

I’ve always felt a cer­tain close affin­i­ty with Woody Guthrie. Could be my admi­ra­tion for his unstint­ing working-man’s pol­i­tics or that he hails from my mother’s home state of Okla­homa. Those are strong appeals, and I sup­pose it’s all of that and more: Guthrie could carve out com­pact gran­ite sen­tences even Robert Frost would envy. If the let­ter above doesn’t con­vince you, read the man’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy. In the let­ter, the unapolo­getic work­ing-class folksing­ing Okie who embod­ied depres­sion-era authen­tic­i­ty writes to “Disc Com­pa­ny of Amer­i­ca” to enthuse over John Cage for his “over­haul of the fam­i­ly piano” and his “choked down odd and unusu­al kinds of things.”

Odd and unusu­al are two words that spring to mind when imag­in­ing Guthrie writ­ing a let­ter in praise of Cage. (He also prais­es Armen­ian com­pos­er Alan Hov­haness—Guthrie spells it “Hov­aness”). Writ­ten in 1947, it is the kind of text one wants to quote in its entire­ty. For­tu­nate­ly, we have the repro­duc­tion above, and you can read it for your­self. What isn’t repro­duced is the post­script, in which Guthrie wrote: “I need some­thing like this odd­strik­ing music to match the things I feel in my soul tonight.” He also wrote that that morn­ing, his wife, Mar­jorie, had “giv­en birth to a big 7‑pound boy”—Arlo.

Guthrie’s let­ter ref­er­ences a (now extreme­ly rare) two-disc set enti­tled Piano Com­po­si­tions by Alan Hov­haness and John Cage played by Maro Ajemi­an and Alan Hov­hanes, fea­tur­ing a hand-drawn cov­er by acclaimed jazz-record illus­tra­tor David Stone Mar­tin. Accord­ing to LA Times music crit­ic Mark Swed, the Cage com­po­si­tion on Guthrie’s 78-rpm record was the pre­pared piano solos from Cage’s Amores, com­posed in 1943. Below, watch a per­for­mance of the “odd­strik­ing” Amores by Span­ish ensem­ble Neop­er­cusión.

Thanks to Tris­tan for point­ing us to this let­ter orig­i­nal­ly blogged over at Stool Pigeon.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.