I didn't write some brilliant article during my free time at the archives and get a publication to show off, and no brilliant researcher, dazzled by my historical acumen and wisdom beyond my years, whisked me away to become their precocious understudy and collaborator. I didn't find out definitively that archiving is the only profession I could ever love, or even that it's one I could realistically do. Nothing was decided or even clarified much by this internship. At the end of the job, the only thing that really changed was the handwriting on a couple boxes of archival material and the "work and volunteer experience" section of my resume. But was it worth it?
Of course. And I'll tell you why: because of the things I found that I wasn't even looking for.
I'm gonna tell you this story in two parts. I would condense it, but a) things I learned fall into one of two distinct categories, and b) I just got Confessions of a Prairie Bitch from the library and am eager to start in on it tonight. So, two parts.
Part One: Things I Learned about WG (I'm going to assume you know who I'm talking about, but probably need to distance this blog from anyone or any organization I recently worked for...)
WG was my folk music idol from high school. He helped me ace AP history (everything I know about the Depression, I learned from WG), taught me that hard times and situations can be funny, and even gave me an intro to the world of songwriting when a poem I wrote at school won a competition and a cash prize. I took his word as the honest, sensible observations of a poor man who had the great misfortune to live through the lean times of the '30s as many did, but whose talent in writing about the suffering of the common people set him apart. I thought that he was the legitimate article, come to the city and consciousness of the middle-class to show the nation how a great many forgotten souls were living out beyond the streetlights and paved roads. Uneducated but wise in the ways of the world, WG wrote simple songs that told it like it was for the poor people, his people, the dusty dustbowlers.
Well... not exactly.
WG was an artist trying to make a living in the '30s and '40s, and even as a folk singer (or really, especially as a folk singer) this meant conforming to a certain image. Just like VU educated Dr. Humphrey Bates and his band were dubbed "The Possum Hunters" to give people what they expected to hear on the Opry (see before and after), WG was playing into a stereotype for profit. While spinning himself as the humble son of toil who observed the modern world with an aw-shucks and a snap of the suspenders, he proved himself an articulate, political, well-traveled, and thoroughly modern songwriter whose business sense was confirmed when the public took him at face value.
This was a really weird thing to learn, especially coming from a state that, when they even bother to acknowledge him, tends to frame WG in similarly romantic and cliched terms. Getting the full story was a months-long affair, reinforced every day by conversations with my bosses or material found buried in the archives.
Asking my boss why NY had the archives instead of his home state: well, because he lived in NYC longer than he did in OK. But who was gonna listen to the "Brooklyn Balladeer"?
Poring through letters to his wife from aboard a WWII Merchant Marine ship: "Did he just name drop Buddha, God, and Marx in a single sentence?"
Digging through '40s photo albums: "Is that... a turtleneck?"
Rubbing elbows with the Greenwich Village intelligentsia and becoming a labor activist while maintaining the persona of the country rube requires more sophisticated navigation and aplomb than I possess, I know that. I don't think he was playing his listeners for fools, really... just that, to broadcast his message out and across, he had to adopt the frequency they were expecting it to come in on. Not that that stopped him from getting political and topical:
"Can you make up a joke that'll get us all a job?" Will Rogers Highway
My time at the archives revealed my old idol to be a much more complex, human, and ultimately tragic figure than I was expecting. It's hard not to get some kind of insight into a person's life and mind when you're paging through years of their journals and letters. Like how he felt about his wife, his children, and occasionally himself. Turns out you can be famous and genius while simultaneously experiencing all the stuff us mortals do, like jealousy, anxiety, and self-doubt:
"I don't feel any too well pleased when I hear my voice because it is dry and dull and thin and it rattles like a bucketful of rocks." 1944
His letters to his wife during the war were almost comically human, in their chronicling of the everyday aboard a ship and repeated requests for more frequent letters. What? I thought. If WG were my husband, wouldn't I be writing him every day? Geez lady, don't you know you're married to a folk legend?
Well, no. He was just a dude -- her husband, but still just a person. Just W.
One of the most eye-opening days was the one where the archivist showed us one of the few recorded clips of WG (others can be seen here and here). It's a home video they usually keep under wraps because of its private and sensitive nature. It's WG and fam having a visit after his disease got really bad and he'd been hospitalized for years. From the late '40s to his death in 1967, WG suffered the effects of a genetic degenerative nerve disease, the same that had plagued his mother and led to her hospitalization and death. I'd always known what he had and vaguely what happened to a person with HD, but seeing a scrawny withered little man whose limbs were going every which way without him telling them to, and knowing that the boxes of heart-breakingly hopeful letters marked "Greystone Asylum" and "Brooklyn State Hospital" came from him was almost too much.
"And I will never dread the day I will die/ 'cause my sunset is somebody's morning sky." My Battle
The letters themselves are almost enough to make you wish you hadn't seen them, or at least couldn't compare the unsteady, childish, nearly illegible handwriting and repetitive childish thoughts with the fluid, articulate letters of ten years previous. Where once he had filled every inch of a sheet with tiny neat cursive, now there were only pages and pages of wobbly misspelled words that documented the decline of a great mind that was failing even faster than the body that housed it.
"Just be patient and one day I'll write you a letter you can read." c. late '50s
When I first saw them in the archives, I thought they were notes and doodles from one of his kids, which also crop up a fair amount in the archives. But no, they were from the man himself, as each day he lost a little more control over his body and mind and the person who inspired millions gradually and cruelly slipped away.
"Teach me how, how to love this battle of life." My Battle
My fave WG song, as far as lyrics go.
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