Oklahoma! Inspires a Look at Poems of the Sooner State.

Oklahoma! at the Marriott Lincolnshire Theater.

Tonight, my wife Kathy Brady-Murfin and I are taking in a 75th anniversary production of Oklahoma! at the Marriott Lincolnshire Theater.  If you are a theater geek you know that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first collaboration opened on Broadway on March 31, 1941 and was a record-shattering hit.  It is revered as the first completely modern “book musical” seamlessly integrating songs and dance into a dramatic story line to advance the plot.  Based on a popular play, Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs, cast aside the standard conventions of revue musicals, frothy farces in which everything stops for musical numbers that seem to come out of left field, and European style operettas.

I’ve seen productions before—it’s a tried and true staple of high school drama departments and community theater, but I am really looking forward to seeing a production at the Marriott where high productions values, excellent casting, and innovating staging in the round are given.

In honor of the occasion, I thought we would take a gander at poetry of and from the Sooner State.  By the way, you gotta love a state that embraces a nickname for the cheats and chiselers in the famous land rushes for claims on land freshly stolen from Native Americans.

Every Territory and aspiring state had its own self-appointed poet laureate.  In 1895 Oklahoma had Freeman E. Miller, Professor of English and literature at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Oklahoma Territory.  That year he dedicated his book Oklahoma and Other Poems to the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley.  Riley was immensely popular, but derided by the Eastern literary mafia.  Unfortunately, Miller did not display the virtues of his hero—the folksy charm, and easy loping memorable rhymes.  Instead he aped the pretentious high-flown poetic rhetoric of self-consciously literary 19th Century bards.  It makes for turgid reading and an excerpt is offered here for its historical curiosity.  

The Race for Homes

April 22, 1889

Behold! As from the shades of night,

An army gathers full of might,

And strong with constant courage stands

‘Tween civilized and savage lands,

Where, vast in power, the legion waits

The turning of the desert gates,

That men of might may enter in

And progress all her glories win!

Lo, where these thousands make assail,

The barren ages all shall fail,

And swift advancement far be hurled,

O’er sleeping empires and the world!

The morning hours haste hurried by;

Behold! The noon is drawing nigh!

The anxious host with careful eyes

Marks well each rapid hour that flies,

While hope, exulting, wildly rolls

The highest, such as filled the souls

Of Jason and his comrades bold,

Who sought the famous fleece of gold.

Upon the trampled grasses beat

Impatient steeds with restless feet;

The dins of harsh, discordant cries

Above the thrilling thousands rise;

Shrilly the scattered children call,

And soft the words of women fall,

While men with voices hushed and weak

Their low commands expectant speak;

Till suddenly a mighty cry,

A shout of warning, smites the sky:

‘Attention! Ho,

Attention here!

Attention! Lo,

The noon is near!”

O’er hill and brake

Resounds the warning cry;

The moment great is nigh;

The hosts awake;

Awake, to strive with mad delight,

Awake to win the friendly fight;

And from the camps anear and far,

Where nervous haste and hurry are,

Vast legions gather on the plain,

While chaos and confusion reign;

The neighing steed with quickened pace

Impatient seeks the vantage place;

The slower ox with lightened load

Stands waiting in the crowded road.

And wagon, buggy, carriage, cart,

Vehicles formed with rudest art,

All forward, forward, forward dart,

Swift-forming on the level ground

Where most advantage may be found….

—Freeman E. Miller

 

Quinn Brisben in his signature red string tie during a minor party debate on C-Span during his 1992 Socialist Party presidential campaign.

J. Quinn Brisben and I were more than nodding acquaintances back in Chicago.  We had several mutual friends—Fred W. Thompson, Carlos Cortez, Slim Brundage, Studs Terkel, Franklin Rosemont—and we saw each other at the College of Complexes and the socials where the left mingled in the 1960’s and ‘70’s.  I was a Wobbly and he was a leading member of the old Socialist Party.  As a matter of fact, he was their last candidate for President in 1992.  He was a memorable hulking bearded gentle giant of man. 

Born in Enid, Oklahoma in 1934, his early childhood was shaped by the Dust Bowl.  Educated at the University of Oklahoma he was an active member of the NAACP as a student and continued to support the Civil Right movement including participation in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964—where he was briefly jailed—and in several Southern Christian Leadership Conference-sponsored activities in Alabama from 1965 to 1967.  By that time Bisben and his wife Andrea were living in Chicago where he dedicated a more than thirty-year career to working in inner-city schools as a high school history and social studies teacher.  He was also an active leader in the Chicago Federation of Teachers and served on several strike committees.  He was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, served as a boycott captain for the United Farm Workers, and later in life was an activist in the AIDs, LBGT, and disabled movements.   But he was also a gifted writer.  He published three collections of poetry including The Significance of the Frontier: Selected Poems 1966-2002, the novel V for Victory Blues, and a collection of short stories.  His stories and recollections were also included in four of Terkel’s classic oral histories.  Brisben died on April 17, 2012 at the age of 72.  Here are two short poems from The Significance of the Frontier.

Departure

Trees are not native to my native ground

Except thin growth that mark the banks of creeks

More surely than their phantom flow which leaks

So sluggishly that most months, past aching sound

Of dry winds rocking crooked cottonwoods.

Most useless trees, they must be soaked in pitch

To hold the raw barbed wire stretched tight and which

As posts still rot and crack.  Nice shade, though, hoods

That masked me often as I planned escape

From churches, dust, straight lines on prairies, scope-

Constricting worlds I did not know I held

Within me.  Fooled and happy, I went bold

Through fields like New Jerusalem revealed

To John on Patmos: bright, four-square, and gold.

—J. Quinn Brisben

Learning from Flaws

A pure perfection cannot teach.  It takes

Some clumsy journeyman to show us how

To breath a life in things so we can show

Good ways to break the form and cook the cakes

Of art, astonish tastes, build sound that makes

The mind start up and blows the straining prow

Through waves resisting thought.  So let us now

Praise famous clods who made mind forming quakes:

Our Steinbeck, Lawrence, Wright, O’Neill, Celine,

And Sandburg, Faulkner, Lindsay, Dreiser, Crane,

Brash country boys who never met the queen,

Matriculated in saloons, the bane

Of canons, coarse, unwashed, and green

In thought who broadened language with crude pain.

—J. Quinn Brisben

 

Wayne Dodd

Wayne Dodd was born in Clarita, Oklahoma in 1930.  He is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.  He has published 11 books including poetry collections, essays, and scholarly articles.  He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and has been a finalist for the American Academy of Poets’ Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize as well as receiving numerous other fellowships and other honors. 

“Of His Life”

Beside the gravel pile, the lizard
warms himself in the dazzling greenness
of his life, watching us casually
through half-lidded eyes.
It is May.
Next week he would have been 57.
My daughter holds my hand, 3 years old
and ignorant, the airsickness forgotten,
and the hurried trip
and interrupted sleep.
Below the road
the whiteface cattle graze
in the morning peace.
The house is quiet.
Inside, his daughters stare unbelieving
into coffee cups, unable to imagine
the future.
My child throws some gravel
and the lizard fixes us
with both eyes, but does not
run, unwilling to leave
the warmth of the sun.
I can hear everything so clearly.
Years later she will ask
what he was like, her grandfather.
And I will try to remember
the greenness of this lizard,
he loved the sun so.

—Wayne Dodd

Woody Guthrie.

  

These days Oklahoma has the reputation of being the Reddest of States and regularly dispatches far right zealots and loons to Congress and has a state legislature that regularly makes news for outrageous and bizarre actions.  But it has not always been so.  Oklahoma was once a cradle of progressive populism and even radicalism.  Among its noted citizens were Will Rodgers.  Within memory it was represented in the Senate by progressive icon Frank Harris.  We have already noted Socialist Quinn Brisben.  And its most famous son was Woody Guthrie.

We don’t usually think of Woody as a poet, but as a song writer.  But over his life he filled dozens of notebooks and journals with lyrics, only a fraction of which he ever matched to music, either his original tunes or any of the folk melodies he cheerfully commandeered.  Some were published as poems in venues like his Woody Sez column in the Daily Worker and in anthologies and collections.  No survey of Oklahoma bards would be complete without him. 

One such notebook gem made news recently, an ode to an odious slum lord and his racial red-lining.  You may recognize the name.

Old Man Trump

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
Eighteen hundred family project.

 —Woody Guthrie

 

But of course, Woody will ever be remembered best for his Dust Bowl Ballads.

Dust Storm Disaster

On the 14th day of April of 1935,
There struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky.
You could see that dust storm comin’, the cloud looked deathlike black,
And through our mighty nation, it left a dreadful track.

From Oklahoma City to the Arizona line,
Dakota and Nebraska to the lazy Rio Grande,
It fell across our city like a curtain of black rolled down,
We thought it was our judgement, we thought it was our doom.

The radio reported, we listened with alarm,
The wild and windy actions of this great mysterious storm;
From Albuquerque and Clovis, and all New Mexico,
They said it was the blackest that ever they had saw.

From old Dodge City, Kansas, the dust had rung their knell,
And a few more comrades sleeping on top of old Boot Hill.
From Denver, Colorado, they said it blew so strong,
They thought that they could hold out, but they didn't know how long.

Our relatives were huddled into their oil boom shacks,
And the children they was cryin’ as it whistled through the cracks.
And the family it was crowded into their little room,
They thought the world had ended, and they thought it was their doom.

The storm took place at sundown, it lasted through the night,
When we looked out next morning, we saw a terrible sight.
We saw outside our window where wheat fields they had grown
Was now a rippling ocean of dust the wind had blown.

It covered up our fences, it covered up our barns,
It covered up our tractors in this wild and dusty storm.
We loaded our jalopies and piled our families in,
We rattled down that highway to never come back again.

—Woody Guthrie

The Bard of a Generation Pulls Down a Nobel

A lot of us woke up this morning to the startling news from Stockholm that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature which in recent years has been noted for mostly honoring writers from the Third World and emerging voices.  The last American to win the most prestigious award in the world was novelist Toni Morrison 23 years ago in 1993.  Although Dylan’s name had been publicly proposed it was a stunning surprise when the Swedish Academy made the announcement—the first ever to an artist whose principle body of work was song lyrics.

The citation for the award declared that Dylan earned the prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” One member of the selection panel compared his work to Homer and Sappho—classic poets whose work was meant to be performed rather than read off the page.

The news this morning put a smile on my face and a spring in my step.  It was a tonic for a week befouled by Donald Trump.  I even felt validated personally and for my generation for having recognized this genius long ago.

To celebrate, I am recycling this post from March of 2015 about Dylan’s breakthrough first LP.

Bob Dylan--Minnesota urchin on the streets of Greenwich Village.

On March 19, 1962 Bob Dylan, the self-titled first album of 21 year old former Robert Zimmerman hit the stores.  Outside of the immediate precincts around Greenwich Village the Columbia Records LP landed with a thud.  Only 2,800 copies were sold nationwide in the first year.  Recording industry wise asses were deriding it as Hammond’s Folly and predicting the fall from grace at the label by producer John Hammond.  Luckily for him, despite the dismal sales the record actually turned a tiny profit thanks to its incredibly low cost to produce in just two, two hour sessions with no side musicians.

That the record was made at all, and on the biggest, most important label in the country managed under the steely eye of Columbia A&R Director Mitch Miller was a minor miracle.

Dylan—the name was brand new and stolen from poet Dylan Thomas—blew into the Greenwich Village folk scene at the age of 19 in January, 1961 shortly after dropping out of his freshman year and the University of Minnesota.  He had already reinvented himself personally and musically at least once.  In high school had idolized Little Richard and Elvis Presley, slicked his hair back in a greaser’s DA, and played electric guitar in garage bands.  But he had spent most of his time during his aborted college career mining the extensive folk music collection of a friend—he may have actually stolen much of it—especially the Folkways field recording of blues and hillbilly artists.  Then he discovered Woody Guthrie.

The trip to New York was supposed to be a pilgrimage to meet Woody, then in a sanitarium in the advanced stages of the Huntington’s chorea that would kill him.  His hair now an unruly curly mop topped with a little corduroy cap, Bob went to the hospital on several occasions playing music for the man who on some days could barely acknowledge his presence.

Dylan fell easily and quickly into the Village’s lively folk music scene.  The legend that he would later carefully cultivate was that he was something of an outsider and loner, a rebel like Marlon Brando in the Wild Ones against “what ya got.”  In point of fact seems to have warmly adopted the young ragamuffin.  Guthrie’s disciple Ramblin’ Jack Eliot was the first to take him under his wing.  Soon he was playing basket houses and hobnobbing with Dave Van Ronk, Fred Neil, Odetta, the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.  They would invite him to join with them for on stage jams and take him home with them at night and spend hours sharing songs and teaching him the fine points of guitar and harmonica.

Soon Dylan had a pretty girl friend, Suze Rotolo whose sister Carla was an assistant to famed folklorist Alan Lomax and who made her large record collection available to him to mine for more material.  Dylan was a sponge.  He soaked it all up.  “I only had to hear a song once or twice to learn it,” he said.

Dylan became especially close friends with a young poet and writer, Richard Fariña who introduced him to his then wife, Carolyn Hester, one of the reigning queens of the folk scene.  On September 14, 1961 they gathered in Hester’s apartment to rehearse for an album she was preparing.  Dylan was blowing mouth harp.  Producer Hammond turned up to check on progress and was impressed with Dylan.  He hired him on the spot to play on Hester’s album.  

After sitting in on the recording session on September 29, Dylan opened a two week stint at Gerde’s Folk City, billed behind The Greenbriar Boys.  That engagement got his first rave reviews in the New York Times.  Impressed, Hammond called Dylan into his office and offered him the standard Columbia five year recording contract.  Dylan couldn’t sign on the dotted line fast enough.  His dream was coming true.

Hammond first had to get the contract approved by Mitch Miller, not a fan of folk music that wasn’t Burl Ives.  Miller was skeptical but deferred to the judgment of one of his most successful producers.  Studio time for the first album was booked for late November.

Dylan spent the next weeks frantically searching Carla Rotolo’s and other’s record collections and going over song he had picked up in those late night sessions.  His set list in the clubs was still short and he did not yet have a lot of original material.  Besides, he wanted to cast himself as an authentic folk musician preserving the best of traditional American music in the tradition of those Folkways records he loved.

Dylan in the Columbia recording studio.

The recording sessions were held on November 20 and 21.  Dylan cut 17 tracks accompanying himself on guitar and harmonica.  Despite this simple set up, Hammond reported that Dylan was “the most undisciplined artist” he had ever worked with and hard to record because he “popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike...Even more frustrating, he refused to learn from his mistakes.”  And he generally refused to do more than one take.  Singing the same song twice bored him.  Hammond was left to perform what limited technical wizardry was available in those days of monaural recording.

In the end, 11 songs made it to the album, only two of the Song for Woody and Talkin’ New York Blues which was inspired by Guthie’s Talkin’ Dustbowl Blues, were originals.  The rest were an eclectic mix of blues, country, and folk.  Dylan claimed arrangement credit for In My Time of Dyin’, The Man of Constant Sorrows (a Carter Family staple), Pretty Peggy-O (picked up from Liam Clancy), Gospel Plow, and Freight Train Blues by John Lair.

The inclusion of two songs caused some hard feelings between Dylan and those who had graciously accepted him although he gave arrangement credits in both cases.  He learned the version of Please Let Me File You Down from Boston Folkie Eric Von Schmidt for whom it was a signature song.  And Dylan lifted Van Ronk’s version of The House of the Rising Sun before the Mayor of McDougal Street could record it himself.

The album was rounded out with Jesse Fuller’s Your No Good, Highway 51 by Curtis James, Bukka White’s Fixin’ to Die, and Blind Lemon Jefferson’s See That My Grave is Kept Clean.

Although disappointed by poor sales, Bob Dylan was exactly the recording  the singer set out to make.

The cover of the album featured Dylan in his cap and in a fleece-lined jacket holding his guitar. The image was flipped so the guitar head would not obscure the Columbia logo.

After release when sales lagged, both Dylan and Hammond professed to be disappointed in the album.  But it must be said that it was exactly the record Dylan set out to make.

Despite the setback, Dylan was growing fast as an artist.  He was moving up to top billing at Village coffee houses and clubs.  He was expanding his repertoire and improving his skills, particularly in bottleneck style guitar playing. 

Under the influence of Suze Rotolo, an activist with SNCC and the anti-nuclear group SANE, Dylan began writing more political songs.  Peter. Paul and Mary and other top folk acts began to cover his songs in concert and on LPs including the iconic Blowin’ in the Wind. Joan Baez famously brought him on stage with her at the Newport Folk Festival and brought him along on her tours, boosting his career, and then replaced Rotolo in his bed.  Pete Seeger took an interest in him and encouraged his move to protests songs.  Still under contract to Columbia, he recorded material for the Broadside Magazine record label under the thin cover name Blind Boy Grunt.

Dylan's personal and professional relationship with Joan Baez enhanced his image early in his career.

Dylan was emerging as a real star and Columbia gave him another shot.  Dylan and Hammond had fallen out over the failure of the first album so the young Black jazz producer Tom Wilson was brought in.  The result was Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan with the iconic photo of the singer with Rotolo in the streets of the Village on the cover.  Released in May of 1963 it included the classic protests songs that defined Dylan’s early career. 

He had re-invented himself not just as a folk singer, but as poet/bard voice of his generation.  Over his amazingly long and still thriving career, Dylan, ever the chameleon, would reinvent himself a dozen or more times.

As for that first album, well, with rising fame came respectability.  It sold steadily, if unspectacularly, to hard core Dylan fans for years.  Issued in Britain in 1965, it rose to #13 on the album charts there in the midst of the era of Beatlemania. Critics who ignored or panned it first time out, revisited it and found much merit in it.  It was re-issued as part of a box set of Dylan’s nine mono records in 2010 and in 2013 as a stand-alone CD Hoodoo Records with an additional 12 tracks taken from the B side of a single and radio performances contemporary to the original record.

One more thing.  Thousands more Dylan fans claim to have run out and bought that first album than actually did.