When I dropped out of Harvard in '38, after a year and three-quarters, Alan had me help him out in the Library of Congress. He had thousands of records he was trying to listen to and evaluate.
He went up with John Hammond, up to the CBS factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut. They were going to throw out old country records, what they called hillbilly records, or what they called race records. Alan just piled up all these records and said,
"Don't throw them out."
He went down to Washington with literally a ton of 78 rpm shellac records. He said, "Pete, now, you listen to them first. I don't have time to listen to all of them. If there's something strictly schlock, throw it out. If you come along something that sounds interesting, then make a note and I'll listen to it.
So I went through thousands and thousands of records. This is how I became a great fan of Uncle Dave Macon, who played his banjo on the riverboats in the 1890s, and sang a song about the Coal Creek Rebellion of 1892. So it was a great education for me.
I was working for Alan when Will Geer, the actor, writes me a note saying, "Pete, I've run into a great ballad singer in California. I'm going to try and persuade him to come to New York and you'll meet him. His name is Woody."
And in February of 1940, Woody Guthrie hitchhikes to New York. There we had a midnight benefit concert on Broadway. Will Geer was playing the lead in Tobacco Road. The scenery on the stage had two sharecropper cabins, and one of them had a porch. I remember Leadbelly up on the porch of one of the cabins singing some songs.
I was twenty-two. Can you imagine Woody in the month of February with his thumb stuck out into the February winds, and the cars going zoom? And he'd go in for a cup of coffee and there on the jukebox, Kate Smith was singing "God Bless America." Woody made up another song, of six verses. It was "This Land Is Your Land." His original last line was "God blessed America for me".
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