Ain't no art on the railroad, 'Bo.
Woody Guthrie missed his calling as an artist. In his book “Bound for Glory,” Woody muses on his love for drawing, color, and imagery. He didn't take the route in life of an artist -even if he could have. He had talent. As he writes in his story, it was just one of the roads he could have taken (but didn't.) The many drawings made by Guthrie illustrating his book “Bound for Glory” are proof of his natural talent for art. Lacking only the vital encouragement to get the training needed for an art career, he might have been a historic artist. Woody Guthrie was born in 1912. The year 1912 was, incidentally, the same year Jackson Pollock was born. A coincidence, perhaps; but consider the many similarities between the two rugged, individualistic, and above all independent loners. The main difference was early support and encouragement. In a word: A good home. If anyone had given Woody so much as a box of crayons, when a child, he might have become a famous Abstract Expressionist. Conversely, without the support he received as an aspiring young artist, Jackson Pollock might be remembered today as the great American song writer of the Hobo experience.
...For the next few months I took a spell of spending all of the money I could rake and scrape for brushes, hunks of canvas, and all kinds of oil paints. Whole days would go by and I wouldn't know where they went. I put my whole mind and every single thought to the business of painting pictures, mostly people.
...I made copies of Whistler's ”Mother,” “The Song of the Lark,” “The Angelus,” and lots of babies and boys and dogs, snow and green trees, birds singing on all kinds of limbs, and pictures of the dust across the oil fields and wheat country. I made a couple of dozen heads of Christ, and the cops that killed Him.
...Things was starting to stack up in my head and I just felt like I was going out of my wits if I didn't find some way of saying what I was thinking. The world didn't mean any more than a smear to me if I couldn't find ways of putting it down on something. I painted cheap signs and pictures on store windows, warehouses, barns and hotels, hock shops, funeral parlors, and blacksmith shops, and I spent the money I made for more tubes of oil colors. “I'll make 'em good an' tough,” I said to myself, “so's they'll last a thousand years.”
...But canvas is too high priced, and so is paint and costly oils, and brushes that you've got to chase a camel or a seal or a Russian red sable forty miles to get.
...An uncle of mine taught me to play the guitar and I got to going out a couple of nights a week to the cow ranches around to play for the square dances. I made up new words to old tunes and sung them everywhere I'd go. I had to give my pictures away to get anybody to hang them on their wall, but for singing a song, or a few songs at a country dance, they paid me as high as three dollars a night. A picture—you buy it once, and it bothers you for forty years; but with a song, you sing it out, and it soaks in people's ears and they all jump up and down and sing it with you, and then when you quit singing it, it's gone, and you get a job singing it again. On top of that, you can sing out what you think. You can tell tales of all kinds to put your idea across to the other fellow.
...And this has held me ever since.
(Quotes in ellipses were transcribed verbatim from pages 177 & 178 of the Penguin Books 2004 edition of "Bound for Glory," by Woody Guthrie)