"We Used Our Natural Voices": Occupy Protesters Use Woody Guthrie 100th Birthday Sing-a-Long to Shut Down City's Most Bailed Out Bank

"We did not ask or need a stage or even a microphone, we used our natural voices and feet to carry Woody’s spirit right out on the street and brought his songs back to his kind of people"

After Woody Guthrie hitchhiked cross country in 1940, he landed in a New York City, in a "little boarding house on 43rd Street and Sixth Avenue," and according to his daughter Nora. While busking in front of the sailor bars by the docks, and living in that cheap flophouse, Woody would quickly pen many songs, including "This Land is Your Land," about the sights he'd seen hitchhiking East. As Guthrie biographer Will Kaufman puts it, "[Woody] had just come from the Dust Bowl. He’d just come from the barbed-wire gates of California’s Eden there. He’d seen the Hoovervilles. He’d seen the bread lines. He’d seen labor activists getting their head busted." Today that boarding house Woody wrote his most famous song in has been torn down and Nora Guthrie says. "What stands on that corner? Bank of America's headquarters." Little folks singing and struggling together in an economic crisis against powerful financial institutions would become a central motif of Guthrie's music, just as foreclosure defense would become a central motifs of unemployed workers movements of Guthrie's time. The much ballyhooed train hopping Guthrie mystique was commemorated internationally on the centenary of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie's birth, July 14th, 2012. Perhaps nowhere though was Woody celebrated quite like Burlington, Vermont.

Marching, "from the food shelf to the bailed out bank," as Credit Union historian and Occupy Vermont member Matt Cropp explained, represented "the sort of connecting the dots between the suffering of the poor and the excesses of the powerful that was integral to Woody's work." They gathered on the scrappy asphalt at the corner of North Union and North Winooski Avenue where a lengthy foodshelf breadline congregates: a tuba player in a red jump suit, a Grammy nominated banjo player who studied with Pete Seegar, a man in a wheelchair with an electric guitar, a veteran, Vermont's former leading political journalist, a doo-wop singer, a woman in a Sunday Church hat, a trumpeter, a train car worth of IWW members, anarchists, and Occupiers, and perhaps enough guitars and banjos to ignite a second American folk revival. 

Industrial Workers of the World member and veteran John MacLean said, "From the beginning everything was grand. Rik Palieri, and the musicians, helped us greatly in getting the tunes right. There were people in wheel chairs there and youngsters with their fathers, as well. I lead the march, because I was holding a "Happy Birthday Woody Guthrie" piece of cardboard, and everyone went to the street even though I started on the sidewalk. I was so happy at that collective choice. I've seen similar street marches and pickets get attacked by police, but in Burlington it went off without a problem. Woody would approve, I'm sure."

Belting out the Woody Guthrie dust bowl anthem "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad," the birthday sing-along left the emergency food shelf, marching down one of Burlington's main North-South avenues, in true Guthrie style, absent permit or permission. "Public marches are a rituals which indirectly affirm community values," trumpeter Brian Perkins explained, "The ritual of taking the streets is an expression of the importance of our message. It is a way of asserting that our message is equally important as the unimpeded high speed passage of the drivers." As Cropp put it, "After practicing most of the songs in the [food shelf] parking lot, I felt a powerful sense of comradery with the people with whom I was marching. It was as if the experience of shared singing cemented our mutual trust, and it felt effortless to break the taboo of taking the street, an act which I've seen approached tentatively by marches ten times the size of ours. We exuded joy and confidence, and even the drivers inconvenienced by our march felt it and didn't seem to resent us terribly, many even smiled and waved." Guitarist James Billman agreed with Perkins assessment that Woody would approve saying, "Taking the street and the bank step without permits or permission is significant because it demonstrates that we don’t feel the need to respect laws that don’t serve us or promote the fulfillment of our collective needs." 

Faces transfigured by the spectacle dotted the sides of the impromptu parade route, waving from increasingly gentrified rental housing; jumping in for the choruses; and in several cases joined in on the march. Leaving the poor end of town, the sing-a-long spilled across Burlington's invisible line into the financial center of Vermont's largest city. Marching nearly the length of the Church Street Marketplace, which increasingly has criminalized poverty, the birthday folk singers hung a right turn by the upscale French restaurant which bought homeless folks one-way tickets out of town, before ending at the most bailed out bank in town. 

Building on a History of Struggle and Reclaimed Social Space

The 100th birthday sing-a-long revelers didn't randomly choose just any public space to reclaim, but rather one that fits into a history of local struggle. As Matt Cropp said, "The bank picket grew out of the Occupy Burlington community as an on-going, several day per week direct action campaign against the most bailed out bank in Burlington and the world. That bank had been the site of our initial speak-outs and the International Credit Union Day fliering last fall, so the space has some symbolic importance to the local movement," said Cropp. Indeed, the steps of the most bailed out bank in town  became a transformed social space last fall, as Vermonters one after another, after another, after another told their stories of struggling through the wreckage of America's Too Big to Fail Economy. Months later Cropp says "the Occupy Burlington General Assembly came to consensus to demand that Citizens Bank close its Burlington branch. Until it does so, we maintain pickets outside the doors Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 4-5pm and Saturday from 11am-noon, where we engage the bank's customers and encourage them to move their money to locally controlled cooperative credit unions credit unions." Citizens Bank, "has hired a private security guard who observes, and sometimes films our actions, as well as having hired a person to clean our chalk off of the sidewalk after our actions with a broom and watering can."

Behind the veneer of Vermont policy makers' soundbites of Vermont skating across surface of the nation's Wall Street created economic crisis, startling inequalities are growing.  81% of Vermonters can't afford the median priced Vermont home. A recent analysis by USA Today of the U.S. Census Bureaus American Community Survey shows Burlington’s middle class is "shrinking faster than almost anywhere else in the country"  According to alternative weekly Seven Days, "In June 2008, 23,000 households and 51,000 individuals received 3SquaresVT, formerly known as “food stamps.” By June 2010 those numbers had exploded to 43,000 and 86,000, respectively." The average Vermont one-bedroom apartment is 191 percent over minimum wage. The average two-bedroom Vermont apartment is 234 percent over minimum wage. Despite politicians claims of Vermont exceptionalism, University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute reported in 2007 that Vermont ranked second among all the states in growth of income inequality for the 15 years before 2007. Meanwhile Sam Houston State University researchers found the wealthiest 1% of Vermonters saw their share of our income almost triple between 1970 and 2005. 

Cropp says the social movements are tired of waiting for politicians to respond, "The economic and political systems have demonstrated themselves to be so hopelessly intertwined, corrupt, and dysfunctional that it is no longer reasonable to hold out any hope of justice being delivered by the hegemonic political order. Instead, we as communities must push back directly against the nodes of oppressive and exploitative institutions that exist in our midst. Singularly, we can't topple them, but such institutions can only experience so many nodes going into crisis before they run out of resources to staunch the bleeding. The time for electoral politics to take the lead is past; only direct action will get us satisfaction."

A Deep Knowledge of Woody Guthrie 

"Woody Guthrie was an unusual man and musician," said Grammy nominated, mustachioed banjo player Rik Palieri, who honed his folkie chops with Pete Seegar and Utah Phillips. "While most balladeers of his time were content to sell records and try to make as much money as they could. Woody was trying to use his music to give the poor and downtrodden people a voice.  He did have a a few well paying radio shows back in the early 1940s but as soon as he was told what he could sing -and more importantly what he couldn’t- he left them behind. He is one of the true pioneers of what today we call the singer-songwriter, where instead of singing a song written by tin pan alley, he wrote and played his own songs and wandered around the back roads of America taking his music to the people. Our sing-a-long followed in Woody’s foot steps. We did not ask or need a stage or even a microphone, we used our natural voices and feet to carry Woody’s spirit right out on the street and brought his songs back to his kind of people." 

Alluding to Woody's ties to radical politics and the march's symbolism, MacLean waxes poetic like Steinbeck's Tom Joad. "Many lesser known IWW songs were about bread lines, and it's important to understand that these services mask and reveal how un-equal things have become in the US. The country has been looted by a bloated financial sector. And, as with climate change, the crisis lingers because our institutions have been so horribly corrupted. In Wisconsin, you see people fighting over recalling a governor, being played by characters from the two parties, and the robbery sits there as a backdrop. Yes, these are urgent times, requiring of a spiritual awakening, a whole other path."

Ariel Zevon, a Doo-Wop singer singer and organizer with Occupy Central Vermont, who drove up to Burlington for the sing-a-long said, "it is so important to honor Woody, not only on his 100th birthday, but everyday, [because] he was a truth teller in a world full of corruption and lies fueled by greed. That was the world he saw and lived in, and, sadly, it is the world we find ourselves still living in. So long as basic human justices, rights and freedoms are not being met in our societies, we should be carrying the torch for Woody and ourselves using his words and writing our own new verses to continue the fight.' 

"There were many events honoring Woody all across America but I am happy to say that the way we did  it, was a  way that Woody would have approved of," said Palieri.  You could see that the people hearing Woody’s music in such a natural way were both surprised and moved and many joined us,  while others just  sang a long from the other side of the street. For me, this event was done in the best way, not hitting someone over the head with a message, but getting them to enjoy themselves and then realizing that there really must be something to this event.  Hearing our music encouraged them to ask for more information. On the day of our rehearsal [a] young man asked In today’s world most of us are frustrated  with the way things are going and where we are heading. We look  to our leaders for help and direction but all we get is more slogans and rhetoric with no real action or change in site.  Having a positive event like the Woody Guthrie sing-a-long shows people that we are all in this together. Woodybelieved that you used your music as a tool or weapon against the dark forces of the earth. Right on his guitar he had a sticker ”This Machine Kills Fascists!” and he meant it! He used his guitar and voice to wake people up and tried to fix up this world to make it a better place for you and me. Yesterday we brought Woody’s spirit right back to the people and perhaps gave them something to think about."

"When dust storms are sailing, and crops they are failing, 

I'm a jolly banker, jolly banker am I." 

As the sing-a-long rounded the corner towards Citizens Bank, hundreds of farmers market goers jammed up up against the farmstands, and City Hall Park's sidewalk edge, to glimpse the cacophonous, old-timey musical phenomena coming down the street. Sing-a-long participant Anna Shireman-Grabowski said, "What I really took away from this action is the ability of music and performance to create an inviting spectacle and build community. I found the audience participation from the farmer's market goers to be very exciting, and simply invoking the historical presence of Woody raised the stakes and accessibility of the bank picket." To bridge audience and performers Occupy Burlington organizers photocopied many copies of songbooks, covering a small swath of the Guthrie cannon: Jolly Banker, Hard Travelin', Going Down the Road, Union Maid, Pastures of Plenty, So Long It’s Been Good to Know You and several more anthems of common folk banding together in a bank created economic crisis. (In true community organizer style each songbook souvenir contained days and times for upcoming bank pickets).  "I passed out 50 copies of the songbook probably in the first ten minutes," said Cropp. "People heard and came over from [the farmers market] across the street. It was really a powerful moment of music bringing people together in a public space, and really putting the pressure, we didn't do this in some neutral location we did this right up at Citizens Bank and they could hear it loud and clear. We had some signs going so people knew this wasn't simply a sing-a-long, but a political act." 

At one point a private security guard appeared on the scene and began filming, but after playful entreaties to join the sing-a-long, his stoney fasade cracked into a smile and then he quickly disappeared. "We actually had one rendition of Jolly Banker where we surrounded the door of the bank and serenaded the bank itself," said Cropp. "During the the final song we were singing This Land Is Your Land, some of the people in the group decided to take the steps of the bank a few minutes before it closed, and the bank closed a few minutes early. It's a small victory but a victory nonetheless." In trying to understand the songs and solidarity that made the action successful Cropp theorized, "It felt as if the power and trust the group had build over the course of singing together over the previous hour made it so people who might have never considered pushing the boundaries of the bank on their own all leaned a little in and supported the people on the steps with their voices when the bank tried to push back. I believe the collective power working for justice in that moment is about as close as we can come to channeling Woody's spirit." 

In this age of Libor and Too Big to Fail, what are international financial institutions in the final sense, but rapacious vampire squids draining the lifeblood of our communities, vital institutions, and families, no matter what the consequences. These are no longer the Jolly Bankers Guthrie lampooned, foreclosing on Tom Joad's family farm, rather this is the age of the financialization of everything, robo-signing foreclosure mills, and student debt suicides. Just as unemployed workers movements of the 1930's stormed City Council's and relief office demanding and winning food and housing; perhaps bailed out bank sing-a-longs will become a new means for people's voices to supplant those of powerful institutions as the economic crisis deepens in the US.  Not content to wait for the rest of the movement or the calendar, Matt Cropp and his fellow Occupiers are already planning their next sing-a-long. "Unfortunately Woody Guthrie's birthday isn't every weekend," Cropp says, "[W]e're trying to do more musical events, so this could become a trend. We're looking at other folk singers Utah Phillips, Phil Ochs to create a spectacle with trumpets and banjos and tubas and dozens of people singing in relative harmony."

Jonathan Leavitt is a community organizer and journalist, living and teaching college classes about social movements in Burlington, Vermont. He can be reached at jonathan.c.leavitt(at)gmail.com