I could have posted about this one in the first few weeks of this project, because Woody Guthrie was pretty much where I started — him and Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston, and the Almanac Singers and Union Boys 78 albums, which included him, and Bound for Glory, which changed my life. After reading that book, all I wanted to do was hit the road as a rambling hobo folksinger. My folks presumably thought I’d grow out of that, but I just waited till I turned eighteen, then took off and spent most of the next dozen years hitchhiking, occasionally hopping freight trains, playing guitar for tips or barter, taking a few odd jobs, and generally living that dream.

I was following Woody’s admonition “to sort of vaccinate yourself right into the big streams and blood of the people.” Everything I’ve done since has been informed by those years on the road, riding with strangers (I used that as the title of a book about hitchhiking), hoboing with hobos, sleeping on people’s couches, or under bridges, or under the sky. It was a very sociable existence; not a lot of close relationships, but lots of short ones with the intimacy and honesty that comes from knowing you’ll soon go your separate ways and never see each other again. It was like what Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi: “When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before — met him on the river.” Same with hitchhiking and throwing yourself on the mercy of the world.

I was inspired by Woody and Twain and lots of other stories of young guys going off to seek their fortune — and that’s “fortune” in the sense of luck or fate or future, not money. It was a romantic dream and a great education. Which is to say, it was very different from the reasons that put most people on the road.

Most people don’t choose to leave home and live hand to mouth. When I started hopping freight trains in the Pacific Northwest, all the real hoboes were baffled that I wanted to do that. They were old drunks, on the trains because they had no choice, but I was a clean young guy with a driver’s license, and they kept advising me to go to the welfare office, get a check, and buy a bus ticket.

It was fun and exciting for me, but I wonder if it would have been fun and exciting if I’d had no choice. I met some young folks on the road, women as well as men, who were out there having a wild youth and enjoying it, despite not having the safety nets I had — parents with a house I could go back to anytime and an easy stepping stone to a comfortable middle class life. But I also met a lot of folks who were out there because they had no choice, escaping bad situations or trying to find ways to support themselves, their parents, their families. And that was back in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was a lot easier…

I’m not nostalgic for that period. There were plenty of problems, plenty of places with ghastly governments, plenty of people suffering for all sorts of reasons. But, if someone really wanted to get out and change their situation, the opportunities were much more available. Economies were in better shape; immigrants were not being demonized the way they are today; there were still a lot of jobs that you could pick up for a few weeks or months, or stay in for decades, and that paid enough to support a family. It was hard for a lot of folks, but homeless encampments were still something you were more likely to associate with the Great Depression than to run across in the middle of a modern American city.

There’s plenty more to be said about all of that, and about the increasingly garish theater of cruelty that is replacing any sense of civic decency or basic humanity… but Woody’s songs are reminders that none of this is new and, along with the people grinding other people down, there are people trying to help other people and make the world a better place. Good songs won’t fix things, but they can give us some energy and bring us together. Woody had a gift for keeping things simple and saying what needed to be said, and his songs have aged well… better than I sometimes wish they had, given the situation then and now.