Book Review

Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. By Ed Cray. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. ISBN 0-393-04759-8 (cloth). Pp. xxiii, 488. $29.95.

“I walked away. And sobbed,” said Henrietta Yurchenko—a musicologist who in the early 1940s had often invited Woody Guthrie to perform on her folk-music show broadcast over radio station WNYC—after she saw the singer-songwriter at a 1962 gathering of urban folk-music revivalists in New York City. “I couldn’t help myself, remembering this absolutely marvelous creature who turned words into poetry . . . the life, the sense of justice, I mean, the whole way he expressed himself, with such tenderness and such expressiveness. And there he was, unable to speak” (387). Describing the toll that Huntington’s disease had taken on Guthrie by the early 1960s, Yurchenko’s quote is among the diverse materials about the Dust Bowl balladeer collected and interpreted by author Ed Cray in Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie.