As it turns out, I was only few hours drive from Woody's bed at Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens. In a dreamy sort of way, I'm proud to be able to say that I lived a part of my life while he was still in the world. Despite the fearful physical shape he was in at the time, his living soul had to make the world a better place. Didn't it?

It was over 25 years later that I got to know Woody, the same way most of us have....through his reedy, dusty voice and his acerbic, touching, at at time astounding written words. And, with no disrespect to Bob Dylan...I also realized that the visionary breakthrough's that I had attributed to his royal Bobness where in fact simply regurgitation's from what he had learned from this wiry little man from Oklahoma. In fact, most of the music I considered important at the time (and still do) seemed to come from men and women who were simply adding bricks to the foundation that Woody had laid years before.

As a new Guthrie disciple, I began preaching the word, only to be met with the inevitable..."oh yea, the guy who wrote This Land is Your Land"...or worse...."didn't he die of Lou Gehrig's disease or something?"

Seems everybody heard of Woody...but nobody freaking knew him. That began to change some with Joe Klein's illuminating 1980 Woody bio called "Woody Guthrie - A Life." And during the early to mid 80's, when Bruce Springsteen was on top of the world...he began talking about Woody in interviews and singing This Land is Your Land during his shows...explaining to his audience that it was no patriotic anthem that Woody wrote, but rather a pissed off response to the jingoism of Irving Berlin's God Bless America. Of course even Springsteen, who one suspected should have known better, sang the sanitized verion of the song known to school kids everywhere, and left 2 crucial verses on the cutting room floor. In any event, at that time pundits were even dissecting the way Springsteen wore his headband (looking for the elusive soul of Americana one suspects).....so inevitably the Guthrie name showed up in print more and more.

But something was missing for me. As Woody got sicker and sicker, it seemed to me that this man was being made the butt of some cruel cosmic joke. Here he was, the great communicator, who wrote down seemingly every random thought that went through his head....unable to pluck a typewriter, or perhaps to even form a series of words in his head. A man who put himself at the head of the world's picket line, wasting away like an apple left on the bed stand overnight. They say eveything happens for a reason....but that's bullshit. No reason for this. I suspect Woody was pissed about it all along.

So, I wanted Woody to set the record straight....and that's what I tried to do with God and the Ghost of Woody Guthrie. Give Woody a chance to tell people, in a lot of his own words, what kind of a man he was...and why he became that kind of man. But I also suspected he'd have some things to say to God....not Jesus, who to Woody was always kind of a Pretty Boy Floyd kind hearted outlaw character, but to God himself. I don't think Woody thought they were the same entity. I'd like to think that he'd look at Jesus as the worker and God as the boss.