Woody Guthrie

NOTES:

p. xiv - "The songs Woody sang and wrote all his life were inexorably bound to his own being."

p. xxiv - "Let me be known as just the man who told you something you already knew."

I wonder if it is possible for folks these days to wander and observe the world the way Woody Guthrie did. You need time and commitment and a certain level acceptance of spontaneity, I imagine. With digital navigation systems at my fingertips, I find it really difficult to be in a position where no one knows where I am, including myself. I wonder if in order to command a language of observation that is independent in the way Woody Guthrie's might have been, one would need to create their own map of the places they traveled, figuring it out step by step. Not to say that Woody Guthrie didn't have maps he could read, but that the presence of maps at particular moment would have been limited to the weight and volume of those maps.