Hear Them Sing
Published September 2023
By Ben Luschen | 14 min read
July heat has lingered throughout most of the day, but now a cool, gentle breeze rolls in over Pastures of Plenty. Steadily, people claim their spot by plopping down yard chairs and blankets on the open field. The water tower overhead is printed with the phrase OKEMAH INDUSTRIAL PARK in capital letters. This is the familiar setting for the 2022 Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, the twenty-fifth edition of the annual music and cultural celebration honoring the birthday week of the seminal Dust Bowl scribe who was born and raised in the town.
More than fifty artists have shared their songs in Okemah throughout the week, but now it’s Sunday evening, and only a handful of performances remain. If any of the faithful find this bittersweet, it’s not at the forefront of their minds as Tulsa-based singer Branjae and her band make their way through the smooth rhythm of one of their opening numbers.
Tulsa musician Branjae at the 2022 festival. Photo by Mike Duncan
Branjae’s stage theatrics separate her from the festival’s more stationary musicians. She takes heavy drinks from a prop bottle as part of a song about being addicted to love. Later, she grabs the mic stand and mimes playing it like a guitar. There are even costume changes mid-set. The audience loves every minute.
Branjae’s blues, R&B, jazz, and hip-hop might seem out of place for a folk festival, but above all else, she is a songwriter and a storyteller dedicated to peace. Her show is an extension of those qualities, which couldn’t be any more Guthrie. At WoodyFest, she’s right at home.
“Are you happy to be alive?” she shouts from the stage with a huge smile. The crowd responds with an enthusiastic affirmative.
“Excellent,” the artist says. “That’s why we’re here.”
Before there was a Bob Dylan, a Bruce Springsteen, or a Joni Mitchell, there was a Woody Guthrie. And before there was Guthrie, there were Will Rogers, the Carter Family, and Lead Belly. And before any of them—before anyone at all—there was the wet plop of a diving alligator, the pitter-patter of rain dripping down on dry leaves, the steady gale of wind and sky wisping through the desert sands.
Crowds gather every year in front of the familiar Woody banner. Photo by Lori Duckworth
“Life is this sound, and since creation has been a song,” Guthrie wrote in Bound for Glory, his partially fictionalized 1943 autobiography. “And there is no real trick of creating words to set to music, once you realize that the word is the music and the people are the song.”
In his fifty-five years, Woody Guthrie never experienced booming digital surround sound, Ticketmaster presales, or worldwide arena tours. In that spirit, WoodyFest feels like a return to the natural order of music. This July, the folk festival, entering its twenty-sixth year, will feature headliners like Folk Uke (the country-folk duo of Cathy Guthrie, Woody’s granddaughter by way of Arlo, and Willie Nelson’s daughter Amy), John Fullbright, and Parker Millsap, in addition to days’ worth of other music and programming. It has no gimmicks, no façades. Nothing separates listener and artist. Musician, message, instrument, stage—music made with simple, natural ingredients without artifice.
WoodyFest is a festival that primarily attracts folk-loving acoustic singer-songwriters, but what matters here more than genre is a dedication to message, storytelling, and peace. Branjae might stand out from the other acts with her performance style, costume changes, and soulful R&B grooves, but in songcraft, she fits right in.
“Everyone is so welcoming at WoodyFest,” she says after the show. “They really love the music, and they aren’t stuck on, ‘Well, you’re not folk.’ They really listen to your message.”
Guthrie remains a folk icon around the globe, but even the most legendary figures can fade into obscurity if no one puts in the effort to preserve their memory. Randy Norman, president of the Woody Guthrie Coalition—the organization that works year-round to put on the festival—has been involved with WoodyFest since its opening year. He says awareness of Guthrie and his monumental anthem “This Land Is Your Land” is not as automatic with today’s youth as it has been in generations past.
Folk singer Jaimee Harris Photo by Mike Duncan
“Time moves on; people don’t remember stuff like that,” Norman says. “People care about right now. Our job as a festival is to hopefully educate and help them learn.”
Guthrie’s legacy takes many forms at WoodyFest. There are musical performances from fifty artists and bands over five days in venues like the historic downtown Crystal Theater and the cozy Corral, in addition to the stage at Pastures of Plenty on the east side of Airport Lake near the edge of town. But the music is just the beginning. Ticket holders can attend a variety of unique educational presentations and programs each year. The 2023 festival will include lectures like “Finding & Using Your Songwriting Voice” from author and songwriter Mary Gauthier and “A Conversation Around Mental Health” with music photographer Chad Cochran. WoodyFest isn’t just about passively taking in songs but sparking dialogue and building a sense of community. Miranda Huff, the festival’s treasurer, says the event’s power to foster conversations and new understandings between strangers never ceases to amaze.
“They see perspectives of the world they never would have, simply because they come here and meet somebody and become their friend,” she says.
WoodyFest’s concurrent annual Children’s Festival has become one of the biggest aspects of the schedule. Hundreds will gather for free in Okemah City Park for family-friendly music, face-painting, jewelry-making, a giant water slide, and more. Best of all, the first two hundred kids receive prizes like free ukuleles, harmonicas, music lessons, and T-shirts just for showing up. The Children’s Festival produces a lot of happy families, but longtime WoodyFest board member and volunteer Cheryl Graham knows the importance of this outreach goes well beyond Saturday fun.
“That’s our start,” Graham says. “That’s getting Woody into these homes. These kids are taking Woody home.”
The buzz of activity also transforms the town of Okemah and its population of around three thousand. Every parking space downtown is full. Hotels in city limits are booked—as they are in surrounding towns as well.
The Children’s Festival is a popular draw for families at WoodyFest. Photo by Lindsey Flowers
“The town has a completely different vibe that week than it has the rest of the year,” says Bobby Green, marketing manager at Okemah Casino, which is operated by the Muscogee Nation, one of WoodyFest’s sponsors. Green grew up in Okemah and says his friends come back for the festival each year. “Every business in town, they profit from it.”
WoodyFest’s boon in Okemah did not come unearned. Longtime festival organizers tell stories of a time decades ago when Guthrie’s legacy in the town was not at all honored. Visitors could find signs in storefronts decrying the songwriter as un-American and communist. Norman says it took a couple of years before the majority of the town started to come around on the festival.
Joel Rafael, a California-based singer-songwriter and Guthrie aficionado has, impressively, performed at every iteration of WoodyFest since it began in 1998. His dedication is so great that he received an official artist legacy award from the festival and even has a song, “Talking Oklahoma Hills,” that explicitly details his early experiences with WoodyFest. Rafael says the generational difference WoodyFest has made in Okemah is clear. Guthrie’s reputation has been largely rehabilitated here.
“Someone who is younger, they want to perform in the festival, whereas when the festival started, the only people to cast judgment were the people who were already there and already had opinions,” he says. “For the younger folks, this is just part of the legacy of their town, and they’re proud of it.”
Rafael’s experiences in Okemah predate WoodyFest. As an obsessive student of Guthrie and his writings in an era before Tulsa’s Woody Guthrie Center or the proliferation of the internet, new information about his life and career was hard to come by. Rafael read what little was available to him, including Bound for Glory, but while on a cross-country tour in 1996, he noticed a sign on the highway for Okemah and recognized it as Guthrie’s birthplace. He immediately pulled into the town to see the troubadour’s former stomping ground with his own eyes. He walked into a quiet local shop and talked to the owner about Guthrie. She went back to the storage and returned to show him an old town sign naming Okemah as the songwriter’s birthplace. The placard had been vandalized, painted with a misspelling of the word communist and other defamations. But Rafael explains that pinning a particular ideology or set of beliefs to the freethinking Guthrie is likely a fool’s errand.
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A Woody Guthrie mural and nearby statue in downtown Okemah pay homage to the iconic musician. Photo by Lori Duckworth
“You hear people ask the question, ‘Well, what would Woody do?,’ like they’re going to come up with the answer,” he says. “But I don’t think there is an answer to that question when people ask it. He was pretty unpredictable.”
Back at Pastures of Plenty, as sunset slips to dusk on WoodyFest’s final day, the illuminated main stage stands out in a sea of rural darkness. The sky is so big and the terrain so flat that the starlit heavens bend in a dome over all who gather. Looking up at the same summer sky Guthrie once did, it’s easy to imagine how the sight might have shaped him. There’s something about the smallness of existence that brings what truly matters in life to the foreground. Closing out the festival is the Guthrie Girls duo, Cathy and Sarah Lee, Woody’s granddaughters. As they lead the singalong of “This Land Is Your Land,” a song they once assisted their father Arlo with in the years he performed here, there is no possible way to feel closer to those famous words. The crowd joins in with smiles they can’t contain. The world might never know peace, but for a few days each July, this land sure does.
Woody Guthrie Folk Festival
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