Woody Guthrie's Songs Against Franco

Kaufman, William orcid iconORCID: 0000-0002-5206-647X (2017) Woody Guthrie's Songs Against Franco. Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies, 39 (1). pp. 91-111. ISSN 0210-6124

[thumbnail of Version of Record]
Preview
PDF (Version of Record) - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives.

2MB

Official URL: https://www.atlantisjournal.org/index.php/atlantis...

Abstract

In 1952 Woody Guthrie wrote a series of songs condemning the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. These songs were never published or recorded. The present article, based on research at the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is the first study of Guthrie’s anti-Franco writings, situating them in the context of Guthrie’s abiding anti-fascism amidst the repressive political culture of McCarthyism. Guthrie’s songs against Franco are also placed within the broader history of the songs of the Spanish Civil War as they were adopted and perpetuated in American leftist circles following the defeat of the Second Spanish Republic. Written coterminously with the onset of Guthrie’s fatal Huntington’s disease, they are the legacy of his final assault on what he perceived to be the transplanting of embryonic fascism to the USA, a small but coherent body of work yoking the Spanish past to Guthrie’s American present.


Repository Staff Only: item control page