Today’s
6th night of Hanukkah song may
come to a surprise to many. It was penned
by a non-Jewish Okie—Woody Guthrie, the American folk music icon and radical
activist.
When
Nazi Germany invaded the USSR Guthrie and the other members of
the loose collaboration of musicians known as the Almanac Singers had to pivot on a dime and abandon their earlier anti-war pacifism and become anti-fascist/anti-Nazi. In songs like The Good Ruben James about
an American freighter torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat Guthrie and his pals tried to whip up public sentiment to enter
the war.
When
the U.S. finally did get in the
fight after the attack on Pearl Harbor Guthrie joined the Merchant Marine with Almanac pals Cisco Huston and Jim Longhi. He shipped out
in trans-Atlantic convoys during the
Battle of the Atlantic until the government yanked his seaman’s papers for being a “premature anti-fascist” and probable Communist.
Woody Guthrie in his Army fatigues in 1945. The rebellious Okie was not a very good soldier.
Beached, he was drafted into the Army in
1945. Entering the service late in the
war as an over-age private, Guthrie
never got overseas and his deep
natural anti-authoritarian streak
made him a bad soldier. He spent most of his time on KP.
But
he did make it back to New York from
time to time on leave. He had divorced
his first wife Mary Etta Jennings and soon took up with Marjorie Mazia, the former principal
dancer in Martha Graham’s famous
troupe and a dance teacher. They already
had their first child together, Cathy,
in 1943. The couple wed on one of those leaves in 1945.
Woody and Marjorie--a happy couple in Coney Island.
Marjorie
was Jewish and the couple settled in
Coney Island, a working class neighborhood around the famous amusement park. Guthrie
became entranced with her religion and traditions learning
from and collaborating with his mother-in-law, the Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt.
He also enjoyed playing on neighborhood stoops for the Jewish, Italian, and other immigrant children.
During
this time, he wrote several poems or song
lyrics inspired by Judaism in
his voluminous notebooks. Among them was Happy Joyous Hanukkah. It is unclear what melody Guthrie intended for
the song, or if he ever performed it
even for the local children.
Nesfesh Mountains 2020 Holiday concert from Levon Helms's old barn studio was recorded for an album.
Years
after her father’s death Nora Guthrie,
Marjorie’s daughter and Arlo’s sister
began to curate Woody’s notebooks
and launched a project to give the unpublished
songs in them new life by asking contemporary
musicians to put them to original
music in a wide variety of genre. It was included on the album Live From
Levon Helm Studios: A Hanukkah Holiday Concert and recorded by Nefesh Mountain, a bluegrass and old-time band
with a Jewish perspective who added
traditional fiddle tunes between verses featuring the group’s founders, and husband and wife, Eric Lindberg and Doni Zasloff, with Alan
Grubner on violin, Maddie
Witler on mandolin, and Max Johnson on bass.
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