Woody, Brownee, Sonny, Butch and Pete

Sometime early on in my discovery of YouTube I thought to search on Woody Guthrie. I found this one forty-five second clip, which noted that it was

[o]ne of the two surviving film clips of Woody Guthrie performing. This one is from 1945. The other, with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, is already on YouTube.

Somehow I can't even remember if I ever found my way over to the other clip. You'd think I would have, since it sounds so cool—Woody with two Blues greats.

But what I just discovered the other night is that the one other clip of Woody Guthrie is actually one of two clips (making a total of three) from a sixteen minute, 1947 film, called "To Hear Your Banjo Play," featuring Pete Seeger playing and narrating. Just recently clampittandgaddis posted the short film to YouTube in two parts. Conveniently the clips with Woody are at the beginning of the second part.

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The first clip is with Baldwin "Butch" Hawes, sometime member of the Almanac Singers. I'm not sure what the song is; if anyone out there can identify it, please leave a comment. The second clip is the one with Brownee McGhee and Sonny Terry---the three of them playing "John Henry." This is pretty much the whole thing (the older YouTube clip cuts off and is blurry), though with some voice overs and jump cuts. It's a great performance; and there is something incredibly thrilling about getting to actually see Woody perform: his recordings, and Pete Seeger's performances of his songs, are some of the earliest musical memories that I have. And of course it should not be lost on us that this is a rare scene of racial integration in the sixteen minute film from 1947. (It looks like the the work crew laying down railroad tracks in one of the jump cuts from the "John Henry" clip is also integrated.)

Though the film presents itself as a history of the banjo, really, it's a history of American folk music, which has an underlying message about race. Early in the film, in a contrived dialogue with an off camera Alan Lomax (who wrote the film), Pete says,

American Negro slaves made the first real banjos a couple of hundred years ago, out of old hollowed gourds and possum skins, I guess, but then the banjo spread all over the whole country. Everyone loved it. It traveled west in the covered wagons. Later on the banjo went out of style. Got countrified. Nowadays, you're liable to hear it played by some old farmer...

And this brings the banjo into Southern white folk culture. Later in the film, leading in to the Woody Guthrie clips, Pete says,

Two races met here in the South. Together they built the South, and together they made a new kind of music.

Pete moves through a number of settings, from New York City, to the Appalachian hills of Virginia, to the deep South, and makes the point that much of what we think of as American has its roots in African American culture and labor. The energy and attractiveness of pop culture in NYC and of white Southern folkways and customs come from those places where Blacks and whites meet---as laborers and as cultural workers. While this may not be news to many now, it was probably a radical assertion to make in 1947.

The film closes with a hokey set up to get Pete sitting in with a guitar player and fiddler at a square dance. You watch as Pete wails on his African instrument to whip up the all white Margot Mayo American Square Dance Group (they are great!).

You should also watch for the near 80-year-old Uncle Buck, early in the film, as he tears up the dance floor. (JDJ: do you have any comment on the dancing he's doing? Does it fit into the film's scheme of cultural migrations and transformations?)

And for the Appalachian gospel rendition of "What Wondrous Love is This?" It's beauty is unearthly and haunting.

You can watch "To Hear Your Banjo Play" all the way through, in a single, higher quality, larger format mpeg on Google Video. The video is also posted on the Internet Archive.