This article by Christopher John Stephens first appeared on the website popmatters

Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Myth, Truth, and Anger Posted on November 9, 2020 by Tony Attwood This article by Christopher John Stephens first appeared on the website popmatters. How we begin to understand the way Dylan, Guthrie, and the senseless Christmas Eve death of 73 men, women, and children at an Italian Hall in Calumet, Michigan are connected will probably depend on what we want to believe. The disaster, memorialized 28 years later by folk legend Woody Guthrie in the song “1913 Massacre”, followed the topical ballad tradition of both passively reporting on a news event and definitively taking sides. Which side are you on? The whole wide world is watching. Such lines are mantras in a topical folk ballad. We bear witness in order to be those who remain standing to tell the story, 28 years later or a century after the fact. Guthrie’s song, recorded and released in 1941 for Mose Asch’s Folkways label, was a cornerstone in the enormous burst of activity from the singer. He would spend the ’40s building his legacy. By the end of the decade, facing diagnoses as varied as alcoholism, schizophrenia, and eventually (by 1952) the degenerative Huntington’s disease, Guthrie would fade from the spotlight and live the rest of his life in a series of psychiatric hospitals. It’s within the context of what is commonly known — the rise and fall of Guthrie as a rambling tramp folk singer who brought “This Land Is Your Land” into the public consciousness and ushered in the folk revival of the late ’50s and early ’60s — that Daniel Wolff’s remarkable story unfolds. From its start, Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913 is about searching for direction, about starting to understand where to start. Wolff lays it out with his first five words: “I was thirteen and angry.”