Guthrie, Woody. (1912 - 1967)
Original Painting For "So Long, It's Been Good To Know You."
Large original brush-and-ink painting by the legendary and influential troubador and artist, illustrating his song "So Long, It's Been Good To Know You," playfully adapted here as "Looks good to see you." Accomplished in ink and watercolor, signed and dated 1951 lower right and titled upper right in blue ink, from spiral sketch pad. 14 x 17 inches, nicely framed under UV plexi in a new wood frame. Sold together with a 1972 33 1/3 rpm LP record (Golden LP-268), a collection of Woody's childrens songs as sung by Louise and Bob De Cormier, titled "Looks Good To See You" and featuring a reproduction of this artwork on the cover.With our contemporary sensibilities, we are surely more committed to the notion of fixed lyrics than most classic folk singers, including Woody Guthrie. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the genre is the fluidity of both text and context, with songs such as "Little Boxes," "Old Man River," "This Land is your Land," and many others being adapted into and out of the folk/protest idiom and put to use in a variety of contexts. The present drawing, with the adapted lyric from one of Guthrie's most celebrated songs, is emblamatic of this practice, an artifact of the uneasy relationship between aural and material culture in the 20th century and of folk music's uprooting of the classicizing tendancy to fix a text for all time.
The drawing is dated 1951, suggesting that Guthrie, who frequently performed this song, thought of the lyrics in this fluid way for many years, having composed the original version back in 1935. An interesting and notorious story about one of Guthrie's adaptations of the lyrics, dates to 1940 when, having recently been surviving on odd jobs earning dimes and quarters at saloons in Los Angeles and the Sierra foothills, Woody needed money pretty badly. He moved to New York, and took a contract to host the Pipe Smoking Time program on CBS for the Model Tobacco Company. "In November of 1940, for the fee of two hundred dollars a week, Guthrie was briefly seduced as far away as he would ever go from his mission to constitute American folk music as radical agitation. For fear of his Pipe Smoking Time contract, he gave up writing his columns for the People's World and the Daily Worker and buthered his first Dust Bowl ballad “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” into a contemptible jingle for Model Tobacco:
Howdy friends, it’s sure good to see you
Howdy friends, it’s sure good to see you
Load up your pipe and take your life easy
With Model Tobacco to light up your way
We’re glad to be with you today.
This travesty of folk singing continued for a month until, apparently sickened by his his self-betrayal and his momentary political weakness, Guthrie uprooted himself and his long-suffering family and fled from 'the one and only New York," whose capitalist temptations had finally overpowered the revolutionary potential he had initially celebrated." (Will Kaufman, "Woody Guthrie, American radical," p. 52). When he packed up in disgust, Woody said that he had done "seven of them pipe-smoking shows" and "that was six too many." “They wanted to choose his songs and tell him what to say,” said Mary Guthrie, “and nobody told him that” (Cray, Ed. Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. New York: Norton, 2004).
From the collection of record executive Michael Klenfer (1946 - 2009) and his wife, Carol, a former publicist for such Rock and Roll legends as The Rolling Stones, The Who, Elton John, The Doors, Cat Stevens, Aerosmith, Jethro Tull, to name a few. (9056)
Signed Document/Item Song