"Вуди Гасри. Bound for glory (engl)" - читать интересную книгу автора

guitar around and sing the longest long outlaw ballad you ever heard, or
some Rabelaisian fantasy he'd concocted the day before and might never sing
again.
His songs are deceptively simple. Only after they have become part of
your life do you realize how great they are. Any damn fool can get
complicated. It takes genius to attain simplicity. Woody's songs for
children are now sung in many languages:

Why can't a dish break a hammer?
Why, oh why, oh why?
Because a hammer's got a pretty hard head.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

His music stayed rooted in the blues, ballads and breakdowns he'd been
raised on in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. Like Scotland's Robert Bums and the
Ukraine's Taras Shevchenko, Woody was a national folk poet Like them, he
came of a small-town background, knew poverty, had a burning curiosity to
learn. Like them, his talent brought him to the city, where he was lionized
by the literati but from whom he declared his independence and remained his
own profane, radical, ornery self.
This honesty also eventually estranged him from his old Oklahoma
cronies. Like many an Oklahoma farmer, he had long taken a dim view of
bankers. In the desperate early Depression years he developed a religious
view of Christ the Great Revolutionary. In the cities he threw in his lot
with the labor movement:

There once was a Union maid.
She never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks
And the deputy sheriff that made the raids.

He broadened his feeling to include the working people of all the
world, and it may come as a surprise to some readers to know that the author
of This Land Is Your Land was in 1940 a columnist for the small newspaper he
euphemistically called The Sabbath Employee. It was The Sunday Worker,
weekend edition of the Communist Daily Worker. Woody never argued theory
much, but you can be quite sure that today he would have poured his fiercest
scorn on the criminal fools who sucked America into the Vietnam mess:

Why do your warships sail on my waters?
Why do your bombs drop down from my sky?
Why do you burn my towns and cities?
I want to know why, yes, I want to know why.

But Woody always did more than condemn. His song Pastures of Plenty
described the life of the migrant fruit pickers, but ends on a note of
shining affirmation:

It's always we've rambled, that river and I.
All along your green valley I'll work till I die.