Will Kaufman
Will Kaufman is both a Woody Guthrie scholar and an interpreter of Guthrie’s music. He has just spent several weeks rummaging through the archives of the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but he took some time to entertain the locals while he was there.
Personally this particular (and peculiar) music-and-history geek likes Will because he brings his scholarship together with his abilities as a musician to create wonderful performances that tell you the stories of Woody Guthrie. Books are good. I look forward to the next one. But as a Tulsa activist tells us below, “Hard Times and Hard Travellin”, and “The Long Road to Peekskill” reach an audience in a way that a book won’t.
Will Kaufman used a combination of live music, lecture and slideshow to inform and entertain a crowd of about 50. Will used several long forgotten or never before seen items he gathered at the new Woody Guthrie Center to tell a story of how Woody Guthrie morphed from the person created by the small town racist atmosphere he grew up in to a staunch defender of all. It was an entertaining time well spent.
You can see recordings of both these shows on his website: http://www.willkaufman.com/
So why have I chosen to post Will Kaufman’s rendition of the IWW classic? Well, like many an artist with a social conscience, he holds a red card. The quote below comes from his performance at the book launch of Woody Guthrie: American Radical. It gives me a nice lead-in to posting some more IWW music, classic and modern. And it’s always worth reposting this song, in an age of fundamentalisms.
Will Kaufman