I, too, have hesitated to jump into the discussion
about whether Woody Guthrie is a country singer,
certainly not from any fear of skewing the
conversation, but because I once had to be
physically separated from my opposite number in an
argument about this very question. (We have since
reconciled and she is following this discussion with
some satisfaction, I think, through forwarded posts.)

I also believe that it is a distortion to call Woody
Guthrie a country singer. It strikes me that any
consideration of genre has to include not only
musicological criteria but also issues of audience and
industry. On the latter point, although Guthrie emerged
from the same channels (no pun intended) that produced
many hillbillies, his recording career was built
primarily through Moe Asch at Folkways and his work
with the Almanac Singers, and it is to that promotional
machinery and the audience it served that he owes his
lasting prominence.  In short, on the production end,
Guthrie is clearly associated with the "art world" of
folk rather than that of commercial country.

As to audience, I am reminded of Simon Frith's observation
that musical genres "must refer to an implied community,"
and that they offer their listeners "a part in some social
narrative." I have no doubt that a good number of country
devotees enjoyed Guthrie's music and that they identified
with his personal history as an Okie. But the social
narrative he offered in his work was not the one I believe
the bulk of the country audience embraced: an acceptance of
postwar consumerism and capitalism and an effort to achieve
success within that system (though I will grant that most
felt entitled to or were unaware of the government assistance
they received in that quest). I think it is only fair to
take seriously the audience's own definition of genre
boundaries, even if that includes a political dimension.

Finally, while I agree that any kind of political litmus test
for determining genre boundaries is simplistic, I do think
that there is an important aesthetic component of country that
is politically informed. Commercial country in the 1940s and
1950s, and arguably even earlier, included an embrace of
commercialism, consumerism, and middle-class ambitions and
respectability in both its visual and lyrical aesthetics.
One has only to look at a couple of Nudie suits to know that
part of country's appeal was its embrace (ambivalent though
it sometimes was) of materialism as a road to respectability
and even personal fulfillment. I think Woody Guthrie consciously
disassociated himself with that aesthetic.

But maybe he was just alt.country before his time.

Diane Pecknold
University of Louisville

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