Music You Can't Hear On The Radio

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SFlKgaTMeI&feature=youtube_gdata_player

With a show featuring Earl Scruggs last week and yodeling the week before, I have no idea about this one yet. Meanwhile, this piece/speech/performance by Wynton Marsalis is amazing. My daughter Molly and I saw him saw him do this at the Kimmel in Philadelphia last night and were both blown away:

http://wyntonmarsalis.org/videos/view/the-ballad-of-american-arts

Woody Guthrie’s full name was Woodrow Wilson Guthrie. Born on July 14, 1912, the rambling musician, writer and activist’s 100^th birthday is being noted this year with concerts, new recordings including several that set some of his writings to music for the first time, and other tributes and appraisals.  It’s also led me to wonder why a couple, living in Okemah, Oklahoma, chose to name their son for the then-governor of New Jersey.

Had his parents been fans of the President at the time, William Howard Taft, the man who wrote “This Land Is Your Land” might be remembered as Billy or perhaps Howie. He could have been Lee Guthrie if they had looked to their own governor that summer, a Democrat named Lee Cruce whose first major success, according to Wikipidea, was establishing Oklahoma’s Department of Highways. Instead, they were drawn to the Governor working in Trenton, a state capital Mapquest calculates as 1,487 miles from their home in Okemah.*

While Woody’s father Charles was politically active and had been elected District County Clerk in Oklahoma, the names he and his wife Nora selected for their other children – Roy, Clara, George and Mary Josephine – had no known political associations. So why name their middle child for Wilson?

In July 1912, though he had been Governor of New Jersey for less than two years, Woodrow Wilson had received some national notice as an effective, reform-minded, progressive leader. But what must have elevated his name in the consciousness of the very expectant parents in Oklahoma was the drama of the Democratic Party’s national convention that only 12 days earlier had selected Wilson as its Presidential nominee.

Held in Baltimore from June 25^th through July 2^nd, the frontrunner among half a dozen candidates going into the convention was the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Champ Clark from Missouri. Clark received 440 votes on the first ballot to Wilson’s second-place tally of 324 but because Democratic party rules in 1912 required support from two-thirds of the delegates Clark was well short of the 694 he needed to secure the nomination.

As voting continued in subsequent ballots, it seemed that Clark would get to the magic number and Wilson prepared a concession statement. But when Clark picked up New York City’s delegation controlled by Tammany Hall, it cost him the backing of William Jennings Bryan who until then had then been neutral. Bryan, still popular despite having been the party’s unsuccessful nominee in three of the previous four elections (hard to imagine today), endorsed Wilson in a speech  that denounced Clark as a candidate of Wall Street and helped move enough delegates to eventually enable Wilson to gain the nomination on the 46^th ballot.

And now 100 years later, Charles and Nora’s baby, born less than two weeks later, is known and celebrated around the world as Woody Guthrie.

Wilson went on to be elected President in November with 42% of the popular vote and 82% of the electors, defeating President Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt, as well as Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs and Eugene Chafin of the Prohibition Party, while his namesake began a life that became defined by both incredible personal tragedy and lasting musical contributions and cultural influence.

Coincidentally coinciding with Guthrie’s 100^th birthday is the unlikely but oft-mentioned possibility that the hundred-year anniversary of that election in 1912 might also include an open, multi-balloted party convention. If indeed no candidate wraps up the Republican nomination before August when the party convention opens in Tampa, perhaps the resulting excitement will lead some young 21^st century parents to bring into the world a baby Mitt or Newt or Rick or Ron. Or, if history truly repeats itself (maybe if Stephen King gets to write it)  and the convention goes to 46 ballots and then once again chooses the first-term Governor of New Jersey, there’s always cute little Christopher.

*My sources for this far from exhaustive research are not only Wikipedia and Mapquest, but also Joe Klein’s wonderful 1980 biography, Woody Guthrie; A Life (Alfred A. Knopf),  “Challenges of a New Century: Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era,” a chapter by  John Milton Cooper, Jr in A Legacy of Leadership: Governors and American History, edited by Clayton McClure Brooks and published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2008, and an interesting piece of historical fiction called Memoirs of a Texan: Empire by Tim Murray, published by FastPencil.com.

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