Woody Guthrie's Advice To Your Inner 'Songbird'

Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia

The American songwriter Woody Guthrie spent time roaming and rambling through all four corners of the country including the California West Coast. He took in all that he saw and the people he met and wrote those experiences into 1000's of songs, ballads, books and articles. In 1941 Woody wrote the commentary on a collection of 150 plus songs called Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People:

Photo By Carl Callaway

The manuscript was finally published in 1967 by Oak Publications. In the book, Woody offers advice about songwriting and how to coax your inner 'songbird':

Now, I might be a little haywire, but I ain't no big hand to like a song because it's pretty, or because it's fancy, or done up with a big smile and a pink ribbon, I'm a man to like songs that ain't sung too good  .  .  .  

But it just so happens that these songs here, they're pretty, they're easy, they got something to say, and they say it in a way you can understand, and if you go off somewhere and change 'em around a little bit, well, that don't hurt nothin'. Maybe you got a new song. You have, if you said what you really had to say --  about the old world looks to you, or how it ought to be fixed.

Hells bells, I'm a going to fool around here and make a song writer out of you.  --  No, I couldn't do that  --  wouldn't do it if I could. I rather have you just like you are. You are a songbird right this minute. Today you area a better songbird than you was yesterday, 'cause you know a little bit more, you seen a little bit more, and all you got to do is park yourself under a shade tree, or maybe a desk, if you still got a desk, and haul off and write down some way to think this old world could be fixed so's it would be twice as level and half as steep, and take the knocks out of it, and grind the valves, and tighten the rods, and take up the bearings, and put a boot in the casing, and make the whole trip a little smoother, and a little more like a trip instead of a trap.

It wouldn't have to be fancy words. It wouldn't have to be a fancy tune. The fancier it is, the worse it is. The plainer it is the easier it is, and the easier it is, the better it is  --  and the words don't even have to be spelt right.

You can write it down with the stub of a burnt match, or with an old chewed up penny pencil, on the back of a sack, or on the edge of an almanac, or you could pitch in and write your walls full of your own songs. They don't even have to rhyme to suit me. If they don't rhyme a tall, well, then it's prose, and all the college boys will study on it for a couple of hundred years, and because they can't make heads of tails of it, they'll swear you're a natural born song writer, maybe call you a natural born genius  .  .  .