Woody Guthrie show reprises spirited tunes for tough times

You know more about people by the songs you hear them sing than anything else, folksinger Woody Guthrie might have said while rambling through the back roads and depots of America. With fiddles, foot stomps and yahoos, the Missouri Repertory Theater brought Guthrie’s musical saga of strife and spirit to the Maine Center for the Arts on Saturday night. A full house of fans reminisced about what Guthrie’s populist tunes said about the search for dignity, goodness and meaning during harsh years in American history.

The show, adapted by musician Peter Glazer from Guthrie’s proflific songs and writings, chronicled Guthrie’s trek from the Oklahoma dust bowl to the California migrant-worker camps in the 1930s, and then to New York’s skid row in the 1940s. The collage of melodies and stories didn’t attempt to explore the personal life of Guthrie, but instead portrayed the scenarios in which he became inspired as a poet and musician.

“I’ll listen to you talk, watch your work, hear your songs and use them,” said an actor portraying Guthrie, who professed that he borrowed the words for his well-known songs from the masses of people whose lives crossed his own as he traveled. It was his responsibility, the show seemed to say, to transform those words and give them back to the people to sing. And Saturday night, plenty of audience members did sing, particularly during such recognizable tunes as “Bound for Glory” and “This Land Is Your Land.”

Guthrie knew what the slaves of an earlier century were doing with their spirituals. He heard what the seafaring men of days gone by were singing in their chanteys. He understood what all hard-edged lives come to know: If you lift your voice in song, you can find strength and endurance. And that, more than anything, is what Guthrie’s songs were all about. In the midst of toiling sweat and humiliating discouragement, dry mouths and hungry bellies, Guthrie found a way to raise the human spirit.

Even though the script of the Missouri Repertory production was at times trite, the show was faithful to the free rhythms, rich harmonies and undying energy of Guthrie’s songs. The musical and dramatic vignettes ranged in theme from sad to silly, but always emphasized how the people of these eras relied upon one another and shared their all-too-infrequent joy as well as their misery.

The string players on guitar, mandolin, banjo, bass and fiddle lent a fullness to the pleasurable voices of the cast, but never really broke out into impressive picking, which would have been a perfect addition to the high spirits of the show.

Although the evening was one of light entertainment with the jigs, jokes and sing-alongs of another time, the scenes and sentiments might have been the ones of the American homeless in 1990. In this way, the songs of Woody Guthrie know just as much about American people today as they did in the earlier part of this century.