Folk the Vote!
Number 65, November 2, 2024
November is Voting Season!
As you are reading this, our hugely important election day, November 5, could have already come and gone and I trust that we will have/did have a good outcome! For November’s election season, I’ve decided to write about it as the subject of my November blog.
“Most folks don’t realize that your vote is about the best thing you got in the world because it is the best thing you can use to change the world and make it better.”
— Woody Guthrie, in an essay to Alan Lomax, ca. November, 1940.
Thanks to FolkWorks master Steve Shapiro, I’ve discovered the fantastic website of the Woody Guthrie Center’s work to “folk the vote” using Woody’s own words to talk about the voting process and its power for all Americans. Here is a great read from The Library of Congress’ Folklife Today-American Folklife Center & Veterans History Project “Woody Guthrie on Elections, Politics and the Power of Folksong” posted in July of 2016:
This piece reveals that the folklorist Alan Lomax specifically asked that Woody write on these topics. It turns out that Guthrie, who grew up in Okemah, Oklahoma, had a father who was a local politician. The essay he wrote for Lomax was called “Vote for Bloat,” and describes elections as he experienced them growing up. He describes the times as “a period of ongoing fighting between different factions that frequently became physical…and gives an impression of past and present chaos as being the norm.”
Anybody can set down and think up a lot of pretty things and all but that dont count no more than a sneeze in a cyclone. It’s the same way with voting. Most folks dont realize that your vote is about the best thing you got in the world because it is the best thing you can use to change the world and make it better. The trouble is that you just go down and vote and shoot your wad, and you do it this time just like you been a doing it all of your life and maybe that’s just what’s wrong with your life, unless you happen to be a living one of them lives that there aint nothing wrong with. Well there’s a few little things wrong with mine and I’ll keep a voting till I fix it — and if I dont fix it by a voting one way, I’ll vote another way, and finally, I’ll find out the right way, and then maybe somebody else will, and somebody else, until we’ll have the right fellers a holding down them easy chairs, but not a taking it so dadgum easy. And when I say taking it I really mean a taking it. They been a taking it just as fast as you can rake and scrape and they can carry more out the front door with a fountain pen than you can carry in with a ten ton truck. — Woody.
I quote from FolkLife Today and Woody’s witty writing within it:
Guthrie’s anti-fascist sentiments were printed on his guitar and folksong, for him, was a tool for social change. As he did in several letters, he speculated on what might happen to his songs in the folk music collections at the Library of Congress in this same September letter (pages 7-8), expressing the hope that members of Congress might get together and sing them. But in this letter he gives the best explanation of what that imagined scene might accomplish as well as his personal definition of folksong:
Here is Woody:
I think real folk stuff scares most of the boys around Washington. A folk song is whats wrong and how to fix it, or it could be whose hungry and where their mouth is is [sic] or whose out of work and how to fix it or whose broke and where the money is or whose carrying a gun and where the peace is — thats folk lore and folks make it up because they seen that the politicians couldnt see nothing to fix nor nobody to feed or give a job of work. We dont aim to hurt you or scare you when we get to feeling folksy and make up some folk lore, we’re doing all we can to make it easy on you. I can sing all day and all night sixty days and sixty nights but of course I aint got enough wind to be in office.
Here is the Woody Guthrie Center’s Website on Folk the Vote
Let’s all keep working with our folksongs to bring about a better world. Below is Woody’s “This Land is Your Land” and may we never forget it! Sing out loud and proud and keep the faith everyone!
And as always, thanks for reading!
Love and Blessings,

Photo by Cam Sanders
Susie
________________________________________________
Award-winning recording artist, Broadway singer, journalist, educator and critically-acclaimed powerhouse vocalist, Susie Glaze has been called “one of the most beautiful voices in bluegrass and folk music today” by Roz Larman of KPFK’s Folk Scene. LA Weekly voted her ensemble Best New Folk in their Best of LA Weekly for 2019, calling Susie “an incomparable vocalist.” “A flat out superb vocalist… Glaze delivers warm, amber-toned vocals that explore the psychic depth of a lyric with deft acuity and technical perfection.” As an educator, Susie has lectured at USC Thornton School of Music and Cal State Northridge on “Balladry to Bluegrass,” illuminating the historical path of ancient folk forms in the United Kingdom to the United States via immigration into the mountains of Appalachia. Susie has taught workshops since 2018 at California music camps RiverTunes and Vocáli Voice Camp. She is a current specialist in performance and historian on the work of American folk music icon, Jean Ritchie. Susie now offers private voice coaching online via the Zoom platform. www.susieglaze.com
Folk the Vote!
Number 65, November 2, 2024
November is Voting Season!