![]() ![]() ![]() His major aim is to provide a textual analysis of Guthrie's lyrics and prose (Jackson is by training a literary scholar) so there is less attention to Guthrie's music than, as Jackson says, "the music of the words" (8). ![]() Jackson is up front about his advocacy of Guthrie as one of America's greatest proletarian spokesmen, and fortunately he maintains enough critical distance to remain this side of hagiography (the title comes not from Jackson, but rather from a tongue-in-cheek letter from Guthrie to President Harry Truman). Consequently, one of this book's greatest strengths is its substantial engagement with previously unstudied material. 1 Jackson has delved into the three major repositories of Guthrie's unpublished writings-the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York, the Alan Lomax collection at the Library of Congress, and the Ralph Rinzler Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. Up to now, the most significant studies (not directed at juveniles) have been the two biographies by Joe Klein (1980) and Ed Cray (2004), a collection of essays edited by Robert Santelli and Emily Davidson (1999), and a number of chapters in general works devoted to the folk protest movement. Prophet Singer is a valuable contribution to Woody Guthrie scholarship, the first book-length analysis of Guthrie's writings in their social and historical contexts. ![]()
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