A Food Writer's 9-Year Obsession with Woody Guthrie's Hidden Archive and Censored Songs

Robin Wheeler [00:00:00] When you learned this land is your land, did you learn a verse about seeing people standing in line for welfare?

Vance Crowe [00:00:11] No,

Robin Wheeler [00:00:13] We didn't learn that line in school. That's the original song. This is

Vance Crowe [00:00:17] Jamal Seward, chief People Officer with St. Louis Bank in St. Louis, Missouri,

Robin Wheeler [00:00:21] And you are

Vance Crowe [00:00:22] Listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. I speak with a Woody Guthrie biographer by the name of Robin Wheeler. She came to me through a former podcast guest Lance Corbett that we had on a few weeks ago. And this was a fun conversation because I was talking with somebody I'd never met before about a person I knew nothing at all about. So we are going to jump into this interview. It is wide ranging. It is a really different feel from a lot of the other podcasts I've done, and it was really kind of a fun one. I had my, my big smile on my face the whole time, and you can tell that Robin is a very accomplished storyteller, loves to talk, and just she got into the driver's seat and knew exactly what we should talk about. So I had a great time. If you are interested in conversations like this that range for as wide of an audience as we talk to on this podcast, you might be interested in joining the Articulate Ventures Network. This is something I started to help people become a tangibly better communicator. So there are classes on there that you can take, but even more than that, we're finding out that this is a community and it's a community sheltered away from the high speed, random, anonymous things that go on on places like Twitter and Instagram. And it's not social posturing like Facebook where you're worried about are people going to agree or not agree. And instead we've created a place where people can practice, Hey, I wanna talk about an idea that I have.

Vance Crowe [00:01:52] I wanted to put it out there and I wanna analyze it, and I wanna not be quite sure if this is what I think until we say it out loud and we play with it for a little while. So we have things like a speaking gym where people gather once a week to sign up, to give talks, to sign up, to give feedback, and then practice giving off the cuff answers. It is growing into a fantastic community, one of which I am meeting people that are making me see the world in a much more rich and interesting way. So if you are the type of person that is really enjoying this podcast and you'd like to join a community like that, go to Articulate Ventures and you can sign up to join the network. I'll put a link in below, but I hope you join us. It's one of those things that people come in timidly and then before you know it, they're always contributing. They're putting things out there, they're trying things they've never done before. It's a great group and I would love to have you join. Well, now we're going to head to this interview with Robin Wheeler. Robin Wheeler, welcome to the podcast.

Robin Wheeler [00:02:58] Thank you.

Vance Crowe [00:03:00] So you were introduced to me through Lance Corbett, who is a guy I did jujitsu with, and we had a fantastic podcast. And then afterwards I was asking him, who do you know that can flip my world upside down the way that the conversation that he and I had had was? And he said, you gotta talk to Robin Wheeler and you gotta ask her about Woody Guthrie. So I'm excited to have you on to talk about this character that I've heard of, but I know nothing at all about.

Robin Wheeler [00:03:27] We'll set you up on that. And I have to say, I don't know if Lance told you, I have known him since he was 10 years old. So I have pictures of him at age 14 with my infant daughter sleeping on his chest. I mean, yeah, Lance, Lance is my guy. He is, and I love it.

Vance Crowe [00:03:48] So

Robin Wheeler [00:03:48] When,

Vance Crowe [00:03:49] When I heard about Woody Guthrie, I asked this network that I run, what do you guys think of Woody Guthrie? And there's a guy on there from Nova Scotia named Jamie, and he said, I don't think that any human being should have a sculpture made of them except for maybe Woody Guthrie. And that was a curious thing. So maybe let's start off with just like, who is Woody Guthrie and why do people feel so strongly about him?

Robin Wheeler [00:04:13] Okay, the well, I'm gonna ask you a question. When you were in elementary school, did you learn the song This Land is Your Land?

Vance Crowe [00:04:21] Oh, a hundred percent for sure.

Robin Wheeler [00:04:22] That's Woody Guthrie.

Vance Crowe [00:04:24] Okay.

Robin Wheeler [00:04:25] When you learned this land is Your Land, did you learn a verse about seeing people standing in line for welfare?

Vance Crowe [00:04:37] No,

Robin Wheeler [00:04:38] We didn't learn that line in school, that the original song.

Vance Crowe [00:04:43] Okay,

Robin Wheeler [00:04:44] What Gut Three was born in 1912 in Oklahoma in a little bitty town. His father was very questionable, most likely was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Yeah, very likely connected to a lynching that happened the year before Woody was born. Woody's mother had Huntington's disease, which is a degenerative neurological disorder. It it, I can't even go into Huntington's, there's so much there. But by the time he was 14, it led to her inadvertently burning his sister to death and his entire family imploded between his father at that point, having lost all their money. It was the beginning of the Great Depression. It was the Dust Bowl. So here's this 14-year-old kid in the middle of Oklahoma whose family just p exploded. He had this big personality though he kinda hung around his hometown. He finished high school, he followed his dad down to the Panhandle of Texas to another oil boom town. The, there was a woman who lived in Pampa, Texas, the town he went to who lived to be into her hundreds.

Robin Wheeler [00:06:16] And a couple of years ago she was interviewed for Woody's Centennial and she remembered him and her, what she had said was that he read the entire library in their town and became a Buddhist. That he just absorbed knowledge, he absorbed feeling, he taught himself how to play guitar, he started writing music, he got married, he had kids. He went out to LA to make his name in radio while writing songs. And he saw what was happening with the Oakies as they were called, these different workers that were coming out of the Dust Bowl, absolutely desperate levels of poverty going to California because the orchards was saying, we need workers come out here, we'll pay you a great wage. And no, they were living in shanty towns, they were starving and it was brutal. If you've read the book, the Greats of Wrath, this is what was happening. So he started writing songs about what was happening around him, and that is essentially Woody Guthrie. He had a very short life. He died at age 54, and he was only physically able to write for a small portion of his life. He did a lot of traveling, not as much as people think, people think he was, you know, this quintessential hobo. And he kind of played up that character early in his life during the 1930s.

Robin Wheeler [00:07:48] But that's just a small fraction of who he was. He observed America. He observed America from a political stance. He observed it from a day-to-day stance. One of my favorite stories about him is that he wrote, this Land is Your Land. After moving to New York City in 1940, the song had its 80th anniversary. In February, he had driven from California to New York, from California to the New York Islands. And the song is about everything that he saw along the way. The next day, the song he wrote was called Women's Hats, where he's looking out the window of his boarding house describing the hats he sees women wearing as they walk down the street. He, he was very prolific and he had this skill of observation where it's all, it seems very simple. He was, he was of the mind of, if you're playing more than three chords, you're just showing off. So you know, very simple. He never learned to read music, but he wrote, and he wrote, and he wrote, and more than anybody realized until long after he died, after his wife died, her children were going through her, her things, and they found boxes and boxes and boxes of notebooks and letters and records, and you name it.

Robin Wheeler [00:09:34] At that point, by the time they started going through these archives, they realized that what had been recorded by Woody and his musician friends and people who were influenced by him, like Bob Dylan, was maybe about 3% of what he had written. They went from thinking, or maybe 10%, they went from thinking that he'd had around 300 songs recorded. It's in well into the thousands.

Vance Crowe [00:10:06] And so why did he connect with people? Like, why is this such a prolific name? Why is this something you wrote a book on how, how did he connect with people?

Robin Wheeler [00:10:15] A lot of it is because of the nature of his songs. This, there's this authenticity and this realness to what he wrote for me. I can't speak for other people because what I have found in doing this research, which is involved talking to so many people, what I have found is we've all come to him in a different way. And the way I came to him, a lot of people came to him through the folk music movement of the 1960s. He was a huge influence on Bob Dylan. And that's like the most direct path. That's how most people get there. Well, that was 12 years before I was born. I'm almost 48. And we learned that this land is your land. When I was in third grade, and he wasn't somebody that I thought about until, and I write about this in the book, Bruce Springsteen changed my life as an adolescent. I was a blue color kid in a small town. My dad was a truck driver who got laid off, who went to work for a factory who lost his union job and went to a non-union job. And it was a Springsteen song. My parents met Cruising the Strip. My dad would go out and drag race illegally, drag race out in the back streets of Sedalia, Missouri.

Robin Wheeler [00:11:48] And it's like my, my life was a Springsteen song before I was even born and born in the USA came out when I was in fifth grade. And it clicked and I just started digging into his stuff. And when I was 14, he released a live series and this Land, ashore Land was on it. And he talks at the beginning of the song about it being an angry song. And he never said Why. And my 14-year-old brain's going, I don't get it. But it stuck. And then as the years passed, I started getting into punk. I, old punk, especially The Clash man, Joe Drummer, blew my mind in college. And here's not just angry for this, for the hell of being angry, but angry for a purpose, angry about the unfairness that's coming down from authority, angry about the state of the world and putting it into song. And what I didn't know at the time was that Joe Strummer of the Clash was a huge Woody Guthrie fan. His first stage name was not Joe Strummer, it was Woody Miller with Miller being his given name. So, okay, that Seeds planted. Well, my favorite band for the past 25 years has been Wilco. In the late nineties, Wilco were invited by Billy Bragg, who's also from the same era as The Clash from the UK to record songs found in the Woody Guthrie archive.

Robin Wheeler [00:13:33] This was right after Woody's daughter had gone through these boxes upon boxes and found this trove of thousands of songs. She invited Billy Bragg because he's in the spirit of her father, to come in and put music to these lyrics that have never been recorded before. He brings in Wilco, they record three albums, roommate Avenue, one, two, and three. If you've heard the song, California Stars, that's a Woody Guthrie song that was a Woody Guthrie song that did not have music. It was just the lyrics. Jay Bennett of Wilco who passed away 11 years ago, is the one who gave it. Its melody. You cannot go to a Wilco concert and not hear California stars. It's one of their signature songs. And that's what really kind of prompted me to go, okay, three of my favorite musicians, Springsteen, the Clash Wilco, are all tied back to this one Hillbilly Dust Bowl. Folky. What is this? It doesn't, this isn't, this doesn't sound like what I like, but they all had this thread. And what that thread was with Springsteen and the Clash, that thread was that rebellion putting that rebellion, that real life things kind of suck, but here it is. And putting this joyful jump around until your knees break music to it, that just captured me.

Robin Wheeler [00:15:10] And then there's Wilco going in and making these beautiful, intricate melodies with these songs that are just emotionally raw. And it's like, this appeals to, to two of the big things about me. And so at the beginning of 2012, that was Woody's centennial year, a music writer friend. I was writing about music and food for the Riverfront times. At that point, another music writer pointed out that 2012 was Woody's centennial year. And I said, Hey, we should do a project. I don't know anything about him, really. Let's do something. Woody had published a book in 1941. He called it an autobiography, but it was very, very fictionalized. He had a wife, I

Vance Crowe [00:16:07] Was gonna write a biography, I'd want mine to be a little fictionalized too. It was a lot fictionalized.

Robin Wheeler [00:16:14] It was called Bound for Glory. And we were talking, so everybody knows this land is your land, so let's do something different. We put out the call for musicians, writers, artists, people with political leanings to read Bound for Glory and write their impressions. And like most projects, it started out with 50 people going, yeah, I wanna do it. And one person doing it. I was going through a really bad time in my life and I just sunk myself into the book and picked it apart and realized like this guy had this other worldly idea about how, about humanity, about how we should be and what it means to be a loving, caring member of the human race. And how you can be skeptical and angry, but also be filled with hope and love and work for that. And as I'm having these revelations, by March of that year, there was an event that was happening in Tulsa to celebrate his centennial Tulsa's about an hour and a half drive from his hometown.

Vance Crowe [00:17:48] I love Tulsa. That's like, it looks like it's straight out of a Iron Rand book or something. It's just giant buildings in the middle of nowhere. It's just amazing.

Robin Wheeler [00:17:57] Beautiful. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:17:58] And I,

Robin Wheeler [00:17:58] I had never, I'd been through Tulsa once as a kid on heading to New Mexico and Grand Canyon on vacation, and I, I have spent so much time in Tulsa now, the Woody Guthrie archives are located in Tulsa, and I spent a month researching there two years ago. I have been to Tulsa so much, I miss it. I haven't been, I, I was there for my birthday in October. I saw Wilco at Kane's Ballroom on my birthday with some St. Louis friends and my friends from the Woody Guthrie Center. So it was pretty great. So I can't complain about having not gone, but man, I love Tulsa and it's, it's a fascinating place on a lot of levels, but I kind of, I burned some bridges at the Riverfront times, but I still had friends there who were able to kind of give me ado roundabout writing assignment covering this event, which it was a symposium at t Tulsa University during the day. And then this tribute concert that night with everyone from Arlo Guthrie, who's Woody's son. He did the song Alice's Restaurant, Jackson Brown, Roseanne Cash, flaming Lips Hansen. It was all over the board. It's like, all right.

Robin Wheeler [00:19:30] And I fell into this. I, I was looking to see, I realized I hadn't seen Old Crow Medicine show in a while. And one day

Vance Crowe [00:19:41] You're mentioning bands that I haven't listened to in years. This is like, this is great.

Robin Wheeler [00:19:46] This was 2012.

Vance Crowe [00:19:47] Yeah.

Robin Wheeler [00:19:48] I'm like, Hmm, I haven't, old Crow Medicine show hasn't toured in a while. Wonder what's up with them. Googled them. And that's how I found this Whaty Guthrie tribute because they were playing in it like, alright, I'm gonna find a way to go. And I found a way to go and get it paid for. And I went with another reporter friend of mine, and we sat through the symposium and it was putting all these pieces together for me because my family is from southwest Missouri, not too terribly far from that part of Oklahoma. And they came out of the evangelical Christian movements that happened in the early part of the 20th century, which Woody's family was a part of. And these were the people who believed that Jesus was a socialist and that you take care of people, you don't just get yours and hoard it. Everybody takes care of everybody else because that's what Jesus would do. I'm saying this as an atheist, but they're talking about that in this symposium. And these wheels are clicking. And I'm thinking of my grandparents who were both still living at the time. My grandfather is almost 96. And these stories were resonating, like, wait, this is my background and this explains why my grandparents are the way they are.

Robin Wheeler [00:21:24] And it was just this really, this moment of seeing myself in a place where I didn't expect to. And then that night we went to the concert and it was a trip. I'm somehow, I had a press pass because I was reviewing it and they put the press in the VIP section. So I'm surrounded by rich guys and cowboy hats who were not fans of the flaming lips. That was, I just remember one of them in front of me looking at the other going, this is weird. And I'm like, yeah, it's what, and it was, it was, it was great. But the next day, on our way back to St. Louis, we took a side trip down to Woody's, hometown, Okah, Oklahoma. Tiny, tiny little town. It's a Sunday, it's a few businesses are there. We're closed, it's March, it's cold, it's rainy. We drove around in circles, lost how you get lost in a town this size, especially when you're looking at two reporters with multiple digital gadgets. It was sad how lost we got. But we were looking for the site of his last childhood home, which is gone. It's just the foundation and some rickety stairs that go up a hill and a dead tree that the neighbor who's a chainsaw artist has carved into a monument to Woody.

Vance Crowe [00:22:55] Wow. So

Robin Wheeler [00:22:56] That's what we're looking at looking for. We finally find it, climb up the hill in the rain, took pictures of the tree, and I wound up standing in the, what had been the cellar of the house. They're still, you know, the rocks, rock walls are still there, and it's freezing rain spit and sleets. And I look, and the floor of it is in full bloom, just these, these violets, it's like, it's below freezing. And this is a foundation of a house. And there's a part in the book. I had just read about him going to the cellar and how between those rocks, the people who had lived there before would stuff their snuff cans in between the rocks, because that's how poorly insulated it was. And it had shifted. And I'm standing there, it's like these flowers are blooming where no flowers should be blooming. And I can't, well I've described it in the book, but it was just this moment of I have to follow this trail. And so I spent that year with so many events around the country that pertained to Woody that I was working with, no budgets, no job. My daughter was eight, I should not have been able to travel around the country, dropping in at events where I didn't have tickets, but somehow winding up with tickets, meeting people.

Robin Wheeler [00:24:38] I had no business meeting. And before it was all said and done, before the year was all said and done, I had, I, I started out, you know, I was writing articles and freelancing, and then the events started coming faster than, than I could get the work. So I'm like, all right, I'm gonna just dip into our money and go, and I'll throw it on a blog and we'll see what happens. And, and it ended, I mean, and it was, it was insane. It was driving through Illinois on the 4th of July after seeing Wilco. It was being in New York City the day they evacuated for Hurricane Sandy and being on one of the last flights out. It was unreal. It was, you know, walking across the street with rambling Jack Elliot at the, going to the Library of Congress. He's also a folk singer. He's 89 now. He was also Bob Dylan, copied rambling Jack's voice. That nasal Dylan voice is not Bob Dylan. That's rambling Jack. And I looked down, I'm crossing the street with him. It's like, Hey, you remember me? We were drinking whiskey shots in St. Louis last month. Yeah, I remember you hanging out in a field in Okah, Oklahoma with Billy Bragg at one in the morning because he remembered me because he recognized my tattoos.

Robin Wheeler [00:26:22] And those were just the famous people I was hanging out with Homeless street musicians who knew more about life than I ever, ever will.

Vance Crowe [00:26:32] So when you think about the fact that you were going on this adventure, like there must have been a call somewhere. What very

Robin Wheeler [00:26:39] Much

Vance Crowe [00:26:39] What did, did? Yeah. So where, tell me about that. And did you, did you find something at the bottom of all of this?

Robin Wheeler [00:26:46] Oh yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, the call very, very much came from standing in those violets and having that moment of these violets shouldn't be here, but they are. What else is where it shouldn't be? But is

Vance Crowe [00:27:06] That's really interesting. And so when, like with Woody Guthrie and you're talking about all these people and they, they, they have a almost like a, like a deity quality to them too, right? Yeah. You're talking about these, what, what do you, what did you discover by spending all this time with these people that you didn't know before you left?

Robin Wheeler [00:27:28] I've realized that, and again, it comes back to this whole of humanity. And that there are no small people, there are no small members of the human race that, you know, we're all deserving, we're all equally important. We're all a piece of this puzzle. And everybody, it's, well, it's what you're talking about with your podcast. Everybody has a story. Everybody has something that they can tell you about being a human being that will make you say, yeah, I get that. Yeah, I know that. And now I know you. And that we are all connected and we're all, oh, that, there's a line that Woody borrowed from John Steinbeck. He was commissioned to write a song that basically tells the story of the grapes of rap, and it's called Tom Jode. And the line that he borrowed from John Steinbeck that's in the, at the end of this song is, I guess we're all just one big soul. And that's what I kept coming back to that entire year. We're all one big soul.

Vance Crowe [00:28:45] You know, there's something interesting about the thing you found in the basement of, of Woody Guthrie's house, those violets. So I just had a daughter two weeks ago and we named her Violet.

Robin Wheeler [00:28:56] Oh, cool. Awesome. See, it's things like that. And a violet is a living, breathing thing. It's a part of it. It's, it's a messenger.

Vance Crowe [00:29:12] So if you think about like the world that Woody Guthrie inhabited and the world that exists now, what do you think that people should learn from, from what he was speaking about then? I mean, you've talked about people being all connected and there's no small people, but yeah. What else do you think there?

Robin Wheeler [00:29:30] Oh, here's where we're gonna get down to more of the nitty gritty. Like I said, I went to the archives in Tulsa and spent four weeks researching. And I didn't this, I didn't know what I was looking for at, at this point. I had made friends with the people who are, they're the people who really know about Woody. I, I, I was like, I'm just a flunky hanging out. And they kind of pulled me in. We all, every, we all meet in Tulsa once a year. The archives throws a big anniversary party. And I would go down there and just kinda hang out in the back. It's like I'm this weird little housewife from Missouri who has a manuscript and doesn't know what to do with it. And they all, they're, they wound up being, I guess some, I wonder who she is. Let's find out. And I made friends and I made awesome friends, and they are the people who are the Woody Guthrie scholars at this point. And they convinced me, even if I didn't know what I was looking for, to apply to research in the archives. And I did, and I got accepted, which I thought was, which I did not expect to happen. But I went in with a list. I was thinking, I'm gonna find postcards and letters that he sent from the places that I traveled to, and maybe I can drop those between my chapters.

Robin Wheeler [00:31:02] And on the first day I opened the wrong notebook. It was one that wasn't on my list, and it was digitized. So it was, I meant to click the one that was on above it, but I clicked this other one and I started reading it and whoa, it blew my mind. And it turns out it was a notebook from the end of 1942, the situation. And I do, I do, I do have a point with this, but it needs some backstory. Woody was living in New York City. He had separated from his first wife, it's a couple of years after he wrote this Land as Your Land, which was not like a big radio hit or anything. He is just living in the village, writing songs, playing, playing gigs. This letter was around the first anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Woody was writing to a woman named Marjorie who was living in Philadelphia. Marjorie was married, she was a dancer with Martha Graham Company. So she worked out of New York City, but lived in Philadelphia. Marjorie was pregnant with Woody's child. Oops. And in this letter, they're trying to figure out what they're gonna do because she has this nice, comfortable life with her husband, where she knows her child will be cared for, and she doesn't know she's gonna have her career.

Robin Wheeler [00:32:48] Because at that point in time with dancers, if they got pregnant, that was the end of their career. There was this belief that when she were pregnant, you could not dance. Woody thought that was ridiculous and reassured her otherwise. And so I, I dug into this and what I found was six weeks of letters between Marjorie and Woody figuring out what to do with their life, which I'm not gonna go into details on this, but kind of mirrored what I was going through at the beginning of 2012. Not nearly as dramatic, but I mean, there is some high drama going in these letters. But at that same time, and what is weaving through this story is you've got World War II happening and Marjorie's husband is waiting to get drafted. He knows he's well, he is been drafted, he's just waiting for the time. And he gets called up. And that was the decision they made, was that once he got called up and sent to war, they would very quietly separate and it wouldn't draw any attention that would save him the embarrassment. He was very, very cool, all things considered. But that was what he asked was for, for them to keep it quiet until he was out fighting the war.

Robin Wheeler [00:34:25] But at that point, I had this, this day where I was reading these letters and they're talking as much as they're talking about their own relationship, they're talking about fascism, they're talking about fascism in Europe, and they're talking about fascism in the US in the form of Jim Crow laws and how they have to fight to beat this. And Woody's idea was, we ha, it's through our love and our union that we can begin to fight this. And he was not all peace and love. Never throw a punch. Pacifist. He was, yes, punch Nazis, let's punch Nazis. That's a good thing to do. But one day I was sitting there reading these letters about fascism in Europe, and I had this realization, Marjorie was Jewish, her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. Her mother was a very well-known Yiddish poet at that point in 19, late 1942, early 1943. They're talking about Hitler, they're talking about fascism, they're talking about what's happening to Jewish people in Europe. And it just dumbfounded me all of a sudden that they knew it was bad. They did not know it was going to be millions of dead people bad. And I had this thought of, we know things are bad in the us what if we're doing the same thing and we just know the tip of the iceberg?

Robin Wheeler [00:36:08] What if five years from now we find out just how bad it is and seeing that they were coming from this place of innocence that we don't have. I mean, except for Holocaust deniers. But you know, that's another thing. And that just struck me of looking at these at how similar the world was then, and the reaction to where we are now, and that we have some really evil things happening that were happening in the 1940s. Are we reacting the right way? I don't know. I don't have the answer for that. But Woody had his answers and they involved getting people together. You can't sit in your room by yourself or tap away on your keyboard by yourself and say, this shouldn't be this way and this is terrible. You gotta get together with other people if you're gonna fight it, if you're going to overcome it, if you're going to make anything happen a lot. He was, he was very anti-racist. He worked with a lot of black musicians when a lot of white musicians wouldn't work with them. He refused to play a lot of gigs when he was playing with black musicians and they weren't allowed.

Robin Wheeler [00:37:42] He would walk too, which meant walking away from a paycheck. And he was never well off. I mean, he was always I in financial need. But the types of things he was talking about, this unity, this getting together and fighting together is very similar to what we wound up seeing in the sixties and the late fifties when the civil rights movement started.

Vance Crowe [00:38:13] Do you see the unity now in the way that people have reacted to, to, you know, the, the George Floyd things? Tell, tell me about the difference between those

Robin Wheeler [00:38:25] We're getting there. I think with George Floyd, we're getting there a little more. And I think, and this is not a unique idea by any stretch, this is one of those things. I heard somebody else say it and I went, Hmm. Yeah, that's probably, I don't think people would've united over George Floyd's death and Breonna Taylor's death the way they have had we not been sitting at home because of COVID. I think that's the filter of COVID and of not being out running from thing to thing. I think that gave a lot of people the chance to see what's happening when in the past few years, you know, we're a very, very distracted society. Extremely distracted.

Vance Crowe [00:39:19] Yeah. You know, actually as you were talking, that was one of my thoughts about if you were to say to somebody, you're gonna write thousands of letters or fill notebooks, it'd be like, when I don't have time, and yet you have time to write hundreds of tweets or thousands of tweets or put out photos on Instagram. And yet those are so quick and passing Yeah. That it's not something, I mean, it's not like paper is permanent, but it's certainly permanent enough for you to be able to, to find years after he's gone.

Robin Wheeler [00:39:48] Yep. Yeah. And he wasn't using good paper either. You know, those black and white marbled composition books.

Vance Crowe [00:39:53] Oh yeah.

Robin Wheeler [00:39:55] Because they, to this day, they're not even a dollar a piece. That's what he used. They do not age well, she wrote her letters on old hotel stationary. She would take, when she was touring with Martha Graham company, she would take the hotel stationary and keep it, and then write letters on it later. So yeah, but not, it's not So

Vance Crowe [00:40:16] The character you're describing of Woody Guthrie is still not clicking in my mind. I mean, like, he has this song that is so permeated society that I sang it in the We Love America program and that, and that, my friend Jamie is saying, build a statue of him. But what we've only heard so far is that he connected with these singers and he had it like a weird affair. But there's something else that was, that that must have built to him. Yeah,

Robin Wheeler [00:40:44] There is so much, and like I said, so much of it comes from how people came to him because you know, like I, like I just said, it's not like he was rich and famous at the time of his death. He wasn't, he like his mother. He had Huntington's disease. It's hereditary, extremely hereditary. As in if you have a parent who has it, you have a 50% chance of having it.

Vance Crowe [00:41:14] Wow. There

Robin Wheeler [00:41:15] There is no very little treatment then. There was no treatment. They treated it like they, they put him in a state hospital. Yeah. And because that's what he could afford. Yeah. It all, like I said, it comes well here, we haven't talked about how divisive he is. And I was, I was kind of bracing when you were talking about your friend Jamie, because I thought you were gonna say something else. And this goes back to why there are three verses removed from the school textbooks of this land is your land, it is a We Love America song. When those three verses are out, when those three verses are in, one is about walking by the relief office. One is about Sienna, no trespassing sign and going, nah, private property. Nope. On the other side. It didn't say nothing. That side was made for you and me. And then the other verse that gets left out is that nobody living will ever stop me as I go walking that Freedom Highway. He was very defiant. He was very, he was, had he not been ill, he almost certainly would have been called to defend himself in the McCarthy hearings.

Robin Wheeler [00:42:58] There are places you can go in Oklahoma where they still call him that red commie bastard. He was not a communist. He didn't belong to any group because he didn't, he didn't like groups and he wasn't that organized. I was being, he had other things to do. He was not,

Vance Crowe [00:43:16] I mean, there's a profound irony in what you're saying, like that you have all these kids singing this song and that they remove lyrics to, I mean, that's almost a blasphemy in a way, right? Like it's a, you wanna say, well, it's great that he gets to live on, but he didn't, they got to color around or, or cut out. That's a so

Robin Wheeler [00:43:34] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:43:35] Weird quirk of history

Robin Wheeler [00:43:36] That is well, and that, and that tells you all also it's like, okay, if they can cut out three pretty innocuous verses of a song. And, and he, he loved America. He loved democracy. He, you know, he was a fan. He wrote about it at length. He wrote, God, I I have a bumper sticker. I haven't put it on my car because I can't find it, but it's from a cartoon. He drew cartoons from a cartoon he drew telling people to vote. I mean, he was very much pro-democracy, very, very leery of the money that was involved in political office, very leery of millionaires. Those were the issues he had. And he had issues with the impact that money and influence and had over politics and how that affected the people who didn't have any power. And people like the Oakies in the Dust Bowl and people like the black musicians he worked with and on and on and on. So, but yeah, there were there, especially when he was living. Yeah, there were a lot of people who were just dead set. He's anti-American. He's a communist. And, and he said that he wasn't a communist, but he'd been in the, in the red all his life, but at Woody.

Vance Crowe [00:45:19] So you've described yourself in some very interesting ways. You've, you've described yourself both as a journalist and then clearly as a punk rock lover. Somebody that, that, you know, had something that you wanted to rebel against, but you also described yourself as a homemaker or you know, the, the, so tell me about this, like, this seems like many things, colors that clash in some, in some dramatic way. Well,

Robin Wheeler [00:45:47] As, as Woody's friend Bob says on his most recent album, I contain multitudes. I think we all do. But, but yeah, I mean, I grew up in rural Missouri. I went to school at the University of Missouri with intentions of being a journalist. It took about six weeks for me to realize I really didn't like any of my fellow journalism students. And so I switched to English and communication. I'm very, very glad that at the age of 18, I had the, I, I mean, this is like the only insight I had at the age of 18. I had the inside of, you're going to spend the rest of your career with these people. Do you really want to,

Vance Crowe [00:46:29] What was it about journalists that, that struck you that you didn't particularly like?

Robin Wheeler [00:46:33] Oh, they were so pushy and loud and I'm loud. But no, it was, it was, it was kind of a knee jerk reaction. And it was, what it came down to is I didn't like the level of competition. I'm not a competitive person. I'm, I'm like Woody, I want everybody to kind of have a, a fair playing field. And I think we can all win. I at our own thing. So I switched to English and communication left a couple, like three classes shy of graduation. And I worked in video production for the university for a few years, and then moved to St. Louis because of a boy, and knew I didn't wanna continue the career path that I had. I wasn't happy with it. I wanted to write, I mean, that was the whole reason I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be a writer. And all through my childhood, parents, teachers, no, be a journalist because, you know, writers are broke.

Vance Crowe [00:47:42] So are journalists.

Robin Wheeler [00:47:44] Well, now they are. Yeah. In 91 it was a little different, but

Vance Crowe [00:47:48] Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah.

Robin Wheeler [00:47:49] Yeah. But not, I mean, it, it tanked out fast. When I moved to St. Louis in 99, I went to culinary school. I enjoyed cooking. I've always loved to cook. And I got great idea and it was, it was a good idea. I'm gonna go to culinary school and learn everything I can. And I'd worked in restaurants too, and I'm gonna write about food. And I made that happen for a long time. It also led to cooking professionally up until last December, which is why I was taking painkillers when we logged on, because I blew out both of my knees in the kitchen a couple of years ago. So, but yeah, I

Vance Crowe [00:48:34] What does writing that's, this is an interesting thing. What is writing about cooking? Like, I mean, is that, is that end up so, 'cause I know that music, people that write about music, they're in this eternal curse, right? Yeah. You go to find music you like, but you can't stay. You have to keep listening to new music is the same thing. Go on with food

Robin Wheeler [00:48:52] A little bit. Yeah. By the time, well, when I was at the, I wrote for Sauce magazine in St. Louis for a long time. I wrote for St. Louis magazine. I helped the riverfront times get their food blog up and running. I took a few years off when my daughter was born, and that was when the whole mommy blog thing started. I jumped right into that. I was a great fit. And by the time I left the riverfront times, I was so burned out on writing three pieces a day about food news and local restaurants and what have you. It's like, I pretty much lived on cereal and yogurt for a while. It's like, I don't even think about what I'm going to eat. I mean, I was that sick of it. So, yeah, I mean, it was, it was fun while it lasted. And I think part of my thing is also I have a lot of interests, so I get bored and move on to the next thing.

Vance Crowe [00:49:55] And so when you were talking about you like people getting along and you don't like competition, it's, it's interesting to me, like for me, if there's no competition, there's almost like, it's almost not put the point fun, right? Like it's, I I, and I'm not like, you know, like I see the documentary on Michael Jordan and he's like the the most insane competitive person. I'm not like that. I don't like to gamble. That's not, but I do like to know like winners and losers or how did things stack up? And mostly it's because I wanna know how can I just keep moving forward?

Robin Wheeler [00:50:28] Yeah, yeah. What

Vance Crowe [00:50:29] Is it, what is it like when you're like, it's not like this, I don't like that.

Robin Wheeler [00:50:35] Okay, here's an example. This comes to mind because this is what I'm going to be doing this time tomorrow night. One of the people that I mentioned that I've met through this process, my friend Gus Staler, his Woody Guthrie book is coming out in October. And a handful of us are gonna have a Zoom happy hour tomorrow to toast his book. And mine is still sitting here in manuscript form. And I have no problem with that. I am so damn excited for Gus and that his book is happening and it's like his baby's being born and yeah, mine isn't yet, but that's okay. This is there and that's awesome. And that's just how it is. It doesn't mean that his is better than mine or that mine's better than his, or it's, everything is different enough. Every person is different enough that I, I don't think we can ever, I mean, you can't ever accurately pinpoint, I mean, I mean down to like little tiny things you can, but there's just so, everything is so subjective that it's like, okay, you beat me to it on that. That's cool.

Vance Crowe [00:51:53] And so tell me about your manuscript. Are you, like, is it one of those things where you've gotten all the material together and now you've gotta isolate it out? Like where, where are you at with it?

Robin Wheeler [00:52:02] It's written. It is written. I'm still dealing with some copyright issues with Woody's estate because I got a lot of stuff from the archives. So there, that's a lot to work out. They're awesome about it though. They're extremely fair. And again, this is that home. I'm not competitive thing. It's like, yeah, his daughter wants to use some of the same materials that I want in my book. Go for it. You're his, you're his daughter. Yeah. Because of you. This is available to anybody. Go for it. I'll wait. And I'm good with that. I still, I need to do some polishing. I've set it aside for a little bit, which I've done here and there over the years because I do, I have a day job and I have a 16-year-old daughter and, and I have a life. I write other things too. I've got another book I idea that I just started working on about three weeks ago. And

Vance Crowe [00:53:01] Can we hear about that?

Robin Wheeler [00:53:03] Sure. It's a lot simpler. I love to travel and when I travel, being the music nerd and, and loving music history, I always, if there's any sort of music history place, I have to go to it. And what gave me the idea was I was in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago visiting my cousin and one of my favorite bands, one is The Replacements, which they were a punk band from Minneapolis. And their album that's, oh, it's argued on which one is their best. But one of their albums Let it be, the cover is a photo of the band sitting on the roof, on the porch roof of, there were two brothers in the band sitting on the roof of their childhood home. The band always rehearsed in the basement where they grew up. The two brothers grew up. And of course everything is pretty much locked down while I was there. And I'm, I'm being very, very strict on the whole COVID thing for the most part. But I had gotten a coffee, have coffee houses too. I was sitting on the patio at this coffee house and I was thinking, you know, there's something about this neighborhood that seemed the name of it seems familiar. I read it somewhere. So I pulled up some stuff that I had saved on my phone. I'm like, oh man, that house is like less than a mile away from here. So I went to see the house and had another similar moment to the virus.

Vance Crowe [00:54:36] You are a music nerd. You are, you were like way over the top total.

Robin Wheeler [00:54:42] You can ask Lance, he can tell you he has benefited from it. Yeah, I went to the house and there's three people sitting out on the porch playing guitar. I'm like, no way. So I got out and I talked to him and like, yeah, music's in the bones of this house. And, and you know, the band's just obscure enough. They don't get a ton of people stopping to take pictures, but so they were excited to talk. And it's like, and then there was also this experience with, there's this one replacement song and I saw something down the that's on that album and saw something on the same block that tied into that song and it was like, oh man, 40 years past. And they predicted this. It's incredible. So it's like I'm working on an essay about that and I got to thinking, I grew up less than a mile from the club where Scott Joplin composed the entertainer and the Maple Leaf rag. And I live in the town in the town where Jeff Tweedy from Wilco grew up just a couple blocks down. And I, that's I I just go to like, like I did with Woody. I, I just go to these places that are, you know, not necessarily Graceland, although there's gonna be a Graceland chapter, but these little places where these little pieces of music magic happen and, and just go and see what I, what I feel and what happens and who I meet.

Robin Wheeler [00:56:20] And

Vance Crowe [00:56:21] It's an exceptional thing that you hear this call to adventure and you pursue it. I think there are many people that hear a call to adventure and they never go. And, and it sounds like you, you hear heed the sirens, call anything, any chance you get. I,

Robin Wheeler [00:56:38] I can't not go. And I, I mentioned to my grandfather earlier, and I feel I've been thinking about this a lot because on Sat, he, he had a health incident on Saturday and on Sunday we were told to start saying our goodbyes. He has since rallied. He is almost 96 years old and he is recovering from sepsis, which people don't recover from that. But so far he is, he was an over the road trucker and saw every state in the continental us most of the provinces of Canada, a lot of Mexico. He saw things that, and, and he still, to this day, he is mentally 100% there On Sunday. I talked to his nurse as Ill as he was, he was telling trucker stories, he talks about the places he goes, when I travel, he always asks me, where are you going? And like the last trip I made before COVID, less than a week before everything shut down, I was in Los Angeles. Like, man, I love driving in Los Angeles. Only person who will ever say that

Vance Crowe [00:57:49] Driving. Yeah, you are. Yeah, that's right

Robin Wheeler [00:57:51] In Los Angeles. But you know, and when he was on vacation, when he wasn't working, you know what he did? He and my grandmother traveled. They had an r they had an rv, they'd hit the road. And in thinking, you know, as we get, I mean he's almost 96 then sooner than later, but in thinking, okay, what, what have I gotten from him? I got my love of music from him and I definitely got the travel bug from him. And that if there's someplace to go, it's not that hard to go, just go. And I, I also, I am really lucky that my daughter has a father who is an awesome parent and I know she's in good hands when I take off. My day job now is 100% remote. I can take it and work wherever. I've worked in airports. I've worked, oh God, I was in New York City in February for the 80th anniversary of this Land is Your Land. And I was writing articles for my day job sitting in my hotel bed the morning after the concert for that. I, yeah, it, it's something that it's, I don't even have to make it a priority, it just is a priority. There's, there's too much out there to see to,

Vance Crowe [00:59:17] I can completely relate to that. Right? And I think that if you have something that you care about, you find a way to make it happen. And that's a really good determinator of whether or not you do care about it because you make, happen what you wanna see happen.

Robin Wheeler [00:59:28] Yeah. Well, and one of the things that I've been doing, and my friends have all made fun of me for this, and that's all right during COVID man Air Airfare is cheap right now. They are almost giving them away. I keep booking trips and then I just push 'em back and postpone and keep pushing back and postponing. And that's okay. I know they're gonna happen.

Vance Crowe [00:59:55] Oh, that's a very interesting idea. That is a really good idea. Actually

Robin Wheeler [00:59:59] Southwest, Southwest is being really lenient on rescheduling and postponing right now. So yeah, I've got about four or five trips purchased just as soon as soon as people get it together.

Vance Crowe [01:00:16] Well, I'll be excited to hear where you go and what magic you go encounter next. And so I,

Robin Wheeler [01:00:23] I've got a list, I've got a list,

Vance Crowe [01:00:25] Robin, I have a, a little violet upstairs that I need to go take care of. But I wanted to say thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you introducing me to Woody Guthrie and I will spend the evening listening to some new music tonight.

Robin Wheeler [01:00:38] Go listen to, since you have a little one, I will send you a copy of his album of kids songs. He wrote tons and tons and tons of music for his own children and his granddaughter recorded them.

Vance Crowe [01:00:55] Oh, I would love that. That'd be great. They did

Robin Wheeler [01:00:58] Such a fun kids' album. I I will send you some Woody Guthrie kids music so that your Violet can grow up with him.

Vance Crowe [01:01:05] Well thank you so much Robin Wheeler, thank you for joining me. If people wanted to find you, are you out on social media or are you out on the Twitter or anything? I'm,

Robin Wheeler [01:01:15] I am Robin Dawn, again, DAWN on Twitter. I am r Wheeler 10 22 on Instagram, which despite being a writer, Instagram is my social media of choice. My website is robin d wheeler.com and that's where all the book stuff should be happening soon. Yeah, those are the best places to find me.

Vance Crowe [01:01:42] Great. I'll put 'em in the links and let us know when you finally, when, when you get to the place where you publish and we'd love to know more about it. And

Robin Wheeler [01:01:49] Finally, birth this baby that's gestated for almost nine years.

Vance Crowe [01:01:53] Godspeed Robin, thank you so much. Thank

Robin Wheeler [01:01:55] You Vance,

Vance Crowe [01:01:57] Thanks so much for joining me. And thank you to Robin Wheeler for talking with me about Woody Guthrie. A man I knew nothing at all about, as you heard me say before, I have an Articulate Ventures network that I would love it if a person like you joined it and how do I know? 'cause you're a person that stayed all the way through this podcast talking about subjects and hearing ideas and concepts that usually don't get airplay in other places. But this is a whole community of people that are talking about different ideas, they're sharing concepts. Oftentimes they give me new ideas for podcast guests. And every once in a while I pull somebody from out of the Articulate Ventures network and have them come on the podcast. So if you are interested in joining, go to Articulate Ventures. There is a link below and I would love to have you there. Thanks so much. And we'll be back again probably in the next couple days with another interview. Ah.