Rafael Joel. Interview, October 21, 2025.

00:00:00JENNIFER FABBI: Hello, this is Jennifer Fabbi, and today I'm interviewing Joel Rafael for the California State University San Marcos University Library Oral History Program. Today is October 21, 2025. This interview is taking place at Joel Rafael's studio at his home in Escondido, California. Joel, thank you for interviewing with me today.

00:00:21JOEL RAFAEL: Of course. Thank you.

00:00:23FABBI: So, at our last interview, we left off with the Joel Rafael Band. So could you tell me a little bit more about the band, what you were working on, and what happened with the dissolution of the band?

00:00:38RAFAEL: Well, I just say that it's pretty difficult, I think, to keep any band or musical group together for an extended period of time unless there are things that happen that inspire people to want to keep going 'cause it's a lot of work. And so, I would say the duration of the Joel Rafael Band was just under ten years that we worked together, and we had some really interesting tours. We played a lot of festivals. Eventually--probably around turn of the century going into the first few years of the two thousands--people in the band, other members of the band besides myself started to develop some other interests and started to work towards some personal projects. And it just made it more difficult ultimately to keep the continuity of a group 'cause people were just off on their own, on their own projects. But there's a couple things that we did that I'd like to highlight before we sort of end the chapter on the Joel Rafael Band. And one of those things was in about 2002, somebody, the guy who was the director, and I can't remember his name right now, we can probably research that 'cause he's not the director anymore. But he was, at the time, the director of the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California. And they were approaching the centennial year of John Steinbeck's birth. And so they were doing some special events and programs. And one of the things they were gonna' be doing is presenting The Grapes of Wrath, the Frank Galati adaptation for theater, of The Grapes of Wrath, as a radio play in Los Angeles at the Skirball Theater (Skirball Cultural Center), which is right next to the Getty Museum. And they have a beautiful theater there. And they asked me if I would--he had heard some of the Woody Guthrie tunes that I had recorded, even though my album, first album of Woody Guthrie Tunes wasn't out yet. He'd heard one of the songs, which was the Billy Bragg-Woody Guthrie co-write, Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key on, I think it's on Hopper is where he heard the song, which came out around 2000. And they really liked it and liked my approach to the Guthrie music. And they asked me if I would write original music for the centennial performance of The Grapes of Wrath at the Skirball by the L.A. Theater Works. And so, got together with the cast, which starred Shirley Knight, the late Shirley Knight. She was an amazing, amazing person. Just a sidebar, after she had passed away, I found out that another big influence on my art and my creativity, a guy named John Cooper--a painter that I met when I was living in Washington--he's probably like fourteen years older than me. And he's passed away now, too. But I was telling him about The Grapes of Wrath program. I was gonna' send him a copy of it. And I mentioned that Shirley Knight had starred it. And he told me that, Oh, she was my girlfriend when we were in college. So I thought that was kind of a good side note. But anyway, she was a wonderful person, wonderful to work with. And what we did is we did seven radio play performances of the play at the Skirball Theater. And they recorded the audio for all seven performances along with the music that we played throughout the performance. And then they took those seven performances and edited that into one performance that was then released with, in a program called The Theater's the Thing (the Play's the Thing), which is a syndicated radio program that the L.A. Theater Works puts on. They do a number of plays throughout the year, and then they present these radio plays that then air it on like PBS stations. That kind of thing. And so, we were really proud to do the music for that. That was basically myself, my daughter, Jamaica Rafael, and Carl Johnson, my guitar player. So it was the three of us that did those shows. And then the other really cool thing that we did with the Joel Rafael Band, right towards the end, was we had put out our first recording of all Woody Guthrie songs called Woodeye. And it's kind of an interesting story, so I'm gonna' go ahead and tell it. I had finished the album, and we'd had it pressed. It wasn't distributed. We just had like a thousand copies of this album, Woodeye, and Joan Baez was playing in San Diego at Humphreys. And so, we got a couple tickets to go to the show, my wife and I, and we went to the show, and I took a copy of Woodeye along just on the chance that I might be able to see Joan and give her a copy of my Woody Guthrie record. That didn't happen. But while we were sitting in the audience--and we were, had really good seats, we were like a third or fourth row--I was sitting next to a little girl. She was probably ten years old, maybe nine or ten years old, and her father was next to her. And somehow, I don't know how, we got onto the conversation, but I asked her at a certain point if she knew who Woody Guthrie was. And she did because she and her dad were Joan Baez fans. They had come down from Los Angeles to see Joan play. And so, when she made it clear that she knew who Woody Guthrie was, she's only nine years old, I thought, well, I'm just gonna' give her the CD. So I gave her the CD, and her and her dad listened to it on their way home. So the next day, I got a call from this guy, the father, his name's Larry Shapiro, and he called me up--got my number somehow 'cause I don't think it was on the record, but somehow, maybe my, my website was on the record, somehow he got my number. Maybe he wrote me an email. It's a long time ago now. So, he contacted me the next day and said that they'd listened to the recording on the way home, and that they loved the recording, and he wanted to know if it was distributed, and I told him no, it wasn't distributed, that we were self-distributed. So we were basically putting it in places on consignment, that kind of thing. And he said, Well, my best friend is the president of ADA record distribution, which is like ADA global (Worldwide). It's the biggest distributor, you know. And so, he said that he had a small label, and he would--it was like a boutique label called Nine Yards Records. And he said, We'd like to put your record out. So I put him in contact with my manager, and initially, before Inside Recordings put out my double set of Woody albums, Larry Shapiro and Nine Yards Records put out the initial release of Woodeye, the first album. And as part of that--I don't know how he did it--but somehow he arranged for us to be the opening act for Joan Baez, who was going out on a southwest tour of the U.S. So she was gonna' be playing like California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. And so, we ended up getting that opening act, and we had--our first show was at UCLA, and then from there we went to, I think it was like Scottsdale (Phoenix), and played the Celebrity Theater with Joan Baez. And then from there we went to New Mexico, and we played in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. And then we went from there to Austin and played Austin, Texas. So we rented a van, like a conversion van with a camper in it. And the four of us set off on tour, kind of tagging with Joan Baez. They were in their bus. And so, they had a bus driver and everything, and we were self-driven. But anyways, we followed them along on the tour. And that was probably about the biggest performances that the Joel Rafael Band did during the time that we were together as a group, was with Joan Baez. And a couple little anecdotes about Joan, 'cause I just think they're kind of fun and interesting because she's just a really interesting--kind of an enigma--but a very interesting person. First off, they always ask you when you go on tour what you'd like to have on your rider, which means when you get to the show, it's like, any kind of food or any kind of comfort you might want to have there. The promoter will ask you to submit a rider, which we did. But as an opening act, we never got anything that was on our rider. It's like we would get to the shows, to the venues, and there wouldn't be anything for us except the dressing room, you know? So right off the bat, Joan's management and Joan basically told us, Look, we have a really good rider. And when we get to the theater, there's always--not the meal, but a snack. Like, there'll usually be a tureen of soup, china dishes, cloth napkins, and silverware (laughter), and some snacks to eat before soundcheck. And they just wanted to let us know that we were completely welcome to their area when we got to the theater, knowing that anything on our rider was never gonna' be fulfilled (laughter). So they were very generous. She was very generous in that respect. I had a pair of shoes that I was wearing for that tour. They were Doc Martens, but they weren't the regular black Doc Martens, they were kind of like these special custom Doc Martens. They were like wingtips, and they were two colors. They were like red and green, sort of candy apple red and then sort of this Kelly green with a what do you call it? I'm trying to think what the name of those shoes are. Wingtip. So they had the wingtip designs on them, and Joan noticed them right away (laughter). And she said, I really like your shoes. She said, I'm really into shoes, and where did you get those? And I said, Oh, they're Doc Martens. And she said, I really like those. Well, then the next day I passed her backstage at the next theater, and she said, I love those shoes. I wear size seven- and-a-half (laughter). I don't know if I told you this story yet or not. Anyways, I made a note of it. Okay. Oh, cool. She wears size seven-and-a-half. Okay. And then the other thing about her is that every night, every show that we played--and I think we did five shows with her--when we were sound checking, she would show up at the monitor board over on the side of the stage. All of a sudden, we noticed Joan was standing there by the monitor guy listening to us play our songs. Well, I backtrack. She'd be in the theater for our sound checks, like the theater's empty, and all of a sudden, one person comes walking in the theater, and it's Joan Baez. And she sits down in the theater and listens to us play our songs during our sound check and then claps (laughter)--one person in the theater. So she made a made a point of letting us know how welcome we were and that she liked us, you know? Then when we would actually do our show, our opening act, our first and second song. We would look over, and Joan would be standing with the monitor guy at the monitor board listening to our first two songs. And then right after the first two songs, she would leave to go get ready for her show. But every night she came out and listened to our first two songs and would stand there and applaud for us from the side of the stage. So she was just really, really a treasure to work with, such an icon and an early influence of mine. So in a way, I've been fortunate, not just with Joan Baez, but I've been fortunate enough to meet some of my biggest influences and share the stage with some of my musical heroes. So when we got back from the tour, I went and I found a pair of those shoes for Joan Baez and I sent them to her--

00:14:19FABBI: Nice, nice.

00:14:20RAFAEL: So that's my Joan Baez story. And then the other thing we did was the Steinbeck thing. Those are two really great things we did with the Joel Rafael Band. And that kind of ended our run was--right around 2003 were probably the very last shows that we played together.

00:14:43FABBI: So, let me ask, your daughter, Jamaica, was part of the Joel Rafael Band--

00:14:49RAFAEL: She was--

00:14:51FABBI: --how was that to work with your daughter and for her to work with you during that time?

00:14:56RAFAEL: Honestly, it was really rewarding, but really difficult. I don't think you can ever transcend the relationships--like you're the parent and she's the child. I mean, even though she's an adult--I'm not sure why that is. But we had a really good run as a band because she was a great player. Actually, everybody in my band--in that band--was, the three people playing with me were just all extremely excellent musicians, natural players that just had a sense about how to dress up a song. They're all songwriters. And that's probably part of the reason that eventually everybody went their own ways because they wanted to express their own art. They don't wanna' just be backing me up all the time. And I understand that even though it was a tough breakup, because we worked really hard at being successful, which, it's an elusive term. And success, I think, in general, can be elusive because it's hard to define. What is success? Is it financial? Is it notoriety or visibility? Or is it just the satisfaction with doing something--being able to pull off doing something that you want to do and that you love to do? And in my case, I'd say, all three of those came into play at one time or another. I think when you're younger, you have these visions of where you want to go with something that's artistic, like a band, or as a painter or an artist. Success is sort of synonymous with visibility or fame, but they're really, completely have nothing to do with each other. Success, I don't think should ever be measured by monetary success. That's just one aspect of what you could call success especially in the art world. So it was about a ten-year run, and we played a lot of great music. My daughter--we still play music together. We had a long break because of some complications in her life. But we still play music together, and we still have all the same issues we had when we were both younger due to our relationship with each other. But the music is great. And I think that it's a real reward to be able to be involved with any endeavor with your children if it could happen. Sometimes I think relationships make that more difficult. So I guess that's how I'd characterize it, is just to say that you can't really transcend relationships, but you can make really good art together.

00:18:27FABBI: Thank you. So, moving to the kind of next topic is can you tell me more about your deep connection to Woody Guthrie and especially the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival that you've played at for twenty-seven years?

00:18:45RAFAEL: Well, I knew quite a bit about Woody Guthrie before the Festival started. I might have covered this a little bit earlier, but one thing I've always said is that when I first started to play the guitar, a number of songs that came along or that I came across to play happened to have been written by a guy named Woody Guthrie. You know, you don't forget that name (laughter). It's just Woody Guthrie. It just sounds almost like a caricature or a cartoon character out of the past. People that are younger than me, like the people in my band, for instance, that were younger than me, when they thought about Woody Guthrie, they pictured him as some person out of distant history. But Woody Guthrie only lived to be fifty-five years old, and he died in 1967, which was the year I graduated from high school. So he was relevant and active during my lifetime, and when I was a kid. I think some of the younger folks that think of him as being a sort of a historical figure, part of that is because Pete Seeger made sure that every kid in the country learned This Land Is Your Land when they went to school (laughter). He went around to schools and did programs, and he made sure that everybody knew that song. And I can go up to almost anybody and ask them if they know who Woody Guthrie is. And usually they don't. But if I say, This Land Is Your Land, then they know that song. And then I can tell them, Well, Woody Guthrie wrote that song. But then what I always like to add to that is something that's the description that Billy Bragg uses. Billy Bragg from England, he's a musician from there. His description of Woody Guthrie is Woody's the guy who wrote This Land is Your Land. In the United States, he's the guy who wrote this Land is Your Land. In the rest of the world, he's the guy with a sign on his guitar that says, This machine kills fascists. And that's how the rest of the world knows Woody. He did two--what do you call it? Two deployments with the Merchant Marines, because when World War II started and the Allies joined--or I should say the U.S. joined the Allies to fight the fascist Nazis in Europe? At that time, there was an American Communist movement in the States that a lot of people were supportive of. It wasn't the communism of Russia or Stalin, but it was the communism in pure philosophy, or which is basically a communal sharing of resources in a country. It never turns out that way, as it turns out, in other countries. At least it hasn't. There was a movement at that time in the late thirties going into the early forties. It was an American communist movement, and a lot of the people in the folk movement and a lot of artists were involved with that movement because they saw it as maybe an antidote to the harsher sides or harsher parts of capitalism. So when the war started and America joined the Allies, a lot of these artists saw the writing on the wall that it wasn't gonna' play out to be supportive of communism anymore in America. But they didn't wanna' fight. They were basically pacifists in philosophy. And so, some of them became conscientious objectors. Others joined other areas of the service where they didn't have to fight but could be supportive of the U.S. and Allied efforts. And so, Woody joined the Merchant Marines, along with Cisco Houston and some other friends of his. And they were involved with helping transport troops and munitions to Europe. Woody Guthrie famously wrote the song, The Good Ship Reuben James (The Sinking of the Reuben James). And actually there's a story, an anecdotal story, about being on a ship transporting troops and weapons to Europe that was being hit by depth charges. And so the whole crew was down in the hull hiding out. And the crew--not the crew--but the troops were down in the hull hiding out. And the crew, of course, was still manning the ship. And at a certain point, Woody said--grabbed his guitar and his harmonica and started to head down into the hull. And his friend Cisco Houston said, Where are you going? And he said, I'm going down to play some songs for the troops. And they said they didn't wanna' go down there. That's the worst place to be when you're being hit with depth charges is in the hull of a ship. And so, the three of them (Woody, Cisco, and Jimmy Longhi) went down there and sang songs until the tragedy was over and calmed the troops down. And that was just kind of the way Woody was, you know?

00:24:44RAFAEL: So I knew a few Woody Guthrie songs when I first started out. And then as I became a young adult, I became aware of the fact that Woody had been a big influence on, well, actually a lot of people, but Bob Dylan in particular. And I was pretty hugely into Bob Dylan at the time. And so, I decided to kind of go back a little further and see what was it about Woody that attracted Bob, you know? And so, I started to look for Woody Guthrie materials, and this was probably about 1973, 74, into the mid-seventies. And there wasn't much there to find. If you were lucky, you could find a copy of Bound for Glory at a used bookstore. But Woody's recordings were pretty much out of print. There were a couple things I did find. I found a collection of cowboy songs sung by Woody Guthrie, along with Cisco Houston singing harmonies. A real treasure. And then I also found Songs to Grow On, which was the songs that Woody and his wife, Marjorie, wrote for their kids. And they were unique as children's songs because--we had children's records 'cause I had young kids. But a lot of the children's music that we encountered, a lot of it was just kinda' silly, you know? And occasionally you'd find some songs that did, could really impart some educational values and some meaning within the lyrics to the kids that were young. And the thing that I loved about Woody Guthrie's children's songs were that they were about real stuff. About real things. About being angry, about playing with your toys, about washing your face and brushing your teeth, just sort of the practical life stuff was really covered in Woody Guthrie's children's songs. And so, we got copies of those on cassettes at a store we found up in Santa Monica that carried a lot of this kind of alternative stuff. And my kids grew up on those songs, listening to those songs in our car and singing along with those songs. So we sort of got educated about Woody's material together. Turns out that Woody wrote like over 3000 songs and only recorded about 80 tracks. So there's a lot of uncovered material there. A couple times I tried to put together programs about Woody Guthrie with the songs that I'd learned off the Cisco Houston album. I came across the Library of Congress tapes that were recorded by Alan Lomax. He was the son of John Lomax. And they were both musical, I guess you'd say they were ethnomusicologists. But they uncovered a lot of music from the deep South, sung by Black people, slave songs, field songs. And these were basically unknown artists that they would find, and they would go to where these artists lived and make field recordings of their songs and their music so they could provide a historical reference for some of this music that had influenced so much other music that maybe we had heard of. But we hadn't heard of the stuff that had influenced this music. And so the Lomaxes were real musical historians. I think that Woody was probably introduced to the Lomaxes by Will Geer, the actor. And I don't know if you know who Will Geer was. Okay, well, not by name, but if you've ever seen the show, the Waltons, Will Geer was the grandpa on the Waltons. Okay. And he was one of Woody Guthrie's best friends. You didn't see Will Geer in a lot of movies or a lot of shows until The Waltons because he was blacklisted during the McCarthy Era, during the McCarthy hearings. So his career was pretty much put on hold. And he was a Broadway actor. He was the star of the Broadway show, Tobacco Road. And I guess probably it was in the thirties or forties. And when Woody got to New York, that's one of the people he met was Will Geer. And Will Geer, as far as I can tell from what I've read, introduced Woody to many, if not almost all of the I important people that Woody met, like the Seegers, the Lomaxes. I'm not sure who all, but I mean, when Woody got to New York, he was just like this folk singer from Oklahoma. And he kind of got taken under wing by Pete Seeger and Will Geer and put on some programs where people realized the folk movement was pretty vital at that time in the forties. But a lot of it were performers that had learned songs of the people that had kind of created this music. And when Woody got to New York he was perceived and seen as an authentic. He had actually lived in Oklahoma and through the Dust Bowl and traveled across the country with the Dust Bowl migration and sang the songs of the people. And so, he was like, wow. When he got to New York, people were just like, Wow, this guy's really special. And so, he recorded a number of songs with Moe (Moses) Asch, who had a recording studio and was recording folk musicians in New York. And then he recorded the Library of Congress interviews with Alan Lomax. And I think that the, it might be like two or three hours of interviews, just Woody and a guitar, with Alan Lomax asking him questions about growing up in Oklahoma and about the Dust Bowl migration, the country life that he led, his traveling across the country and different people he met. And that's all preserved in the Library of Congress. Those are just wonderful recordings. If you ever get a chance to hear those. They're just called the Library of Congress Recordings by Woody Guthrie and Alan Lomax. So when I found those recordings, I learned a lot about Woody Guthrie and him telling his own story, and at one point, I decided, well, I could, I know a lot of these songs, and I'm learning some other ones from these Library of Congress recordings and then Woody talking about his life and songs. I was a pretty good, I was a quick study for copying musicians, emulating music I had heard. And I think that most artists go through that process. They emulate what they love, and eventually what they're emulating, the distillation of all of the things they're emulating becomes another more unique original thing that becomes your own. I've always told artists that have asked me--I've used the "fake it 'til you make it" method. You know, you start copying things you like because you decide you want to do this. And if you've got an knack for it, you can keep going. And then what happens? It's almost like a learning to skate, like learning to ice skate, you know, you're really wobbly and you're falling down all the time, but then all of a sudden one day you're just doing it, you know, wow, I'm skating, you know? Well, with the musical influences, it's sort of like that. That's kind of the analogy I make for that, because all of a sudden, you're doing it on your own. You don't sound like somebody else anymore. But you're still using all those resources that you've learned, but it's been distilled into your own unique voice. I think that that's at least one road to becoming an artist. And when people ask me, that's what I always tell 'em. For me, it was the "fake it 'til you make it" method. So at one point, I had these songs and I was listening to these interviews, and I thought, well, I could put together a program and take it around to my kids' elementary school or middle school and do an educational program about the Dust Bowl, about Woody Guthrie and about the folk music of that era. And so, I decided to work on some of that. And I started to put together some ideas and make a list of songs and figure out which of the interview pieces I was gonna' try to learn so that I could do this program, and I wanted endorsement for it. And I knew that Harold Leventhal was Woody Guthrie's manager, was looking after his estate. Woody had died in '67, this was probably like in the seventies, mid-seventies to late seventies. So I found a number for Harold Leventhal in New York City. He was listed, and I called him up and he answered the phone. And I expressed my idea about how I wanted to do this Woody Guthrie program. He heard me out, and then he said, You cannot do this. You cannot even play any Woody Guthrie songs publicly because we are in the process of doing a Woody Guthrie program right now called Woody Guthrie's American Song--it was a play they had put together. I guess probably in the seventies, late seventies. And he said all of those songs and all of those interviews and recordings are all spoken for and protected, and you can't use any of it, so just forget it (laughter). And I thought like, wow, man, that wasn't very nice. I got off the phone with him, and he pretty much gave me a nope (laughter). And so, I let that idea kinda' slide, and I kind of thought, well, Harold Leventhal, he's kind of an edgy guy. So many years later after I started playing on the Woody Guthrie Festival, and I'll backtrack onto that a little bit, but I was given the first Woody Guthrie lyric by Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter. A song called, Dance a Little Longer. And we put it to music, and it was on the first collection of Woody Guthrie songs. And when Harold Leventhal heard it, it turns out he loved it. Now he didn't connect that I was the same person that had called him twenty years earlier to ask permission to do this program. And it had been turned down. And so, turned out I was on my way home from the Woody Guthrie Festival the year that I had finished that first album. And all of a sudden, my cell phone rang, and I answered it, and it was Harold Leventhal, and he'd gotten my number. He called my manager and gotten my number, and he called me just to tell me how thrilled he was with the song Dance a Little Longer, and that he was thanking me for keeping Woody's legacy alive. And I just always thought it was really ironic. He never knew that I was the person who had called him that he had so harshly turned down twenty years earlier. And here now he was calling me and thanking me for writing music to a set of Woody Guthrie lyrics. So it was kind of cathartic. And kind of full circle in a way.

00:37:50RAFAEL: But anyways, the Woody Guthrie Festival started in 1998. And I had a lot of background in Woody at that point. I had learned a lot of Woody Guthrie songs on my own. I had found my used copy of Bound for Glory and read it. And right around that time, there were a couple other books that came out that were biographical, biographies of Woody. They call Bound for Glory an autobiography, but it's really not. It's autobiographical, for sure. But he took a lot of license, and as I understand it, the original text of that book was like maybe 700 pages and just completely outta' chronology. And it took a really good editor, and I should find out the names, so I can tell you the name of the woman that did the editing for Bound for Glory, but she was able to take all of Woody's writings at that time and organize them and edit them into a novel that is autobiographical that Woody wrote. It's probably, well, it was on the bestseller list for a time. And I think it probably was an influence of writers like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, some of those beat writers were probably influenced by Woody's writing because Kerouac's book, On the Road is not dissimilar from Bound for Glory in its cadence. And it's just the way the story's told, traveling around the country, hitchhiking, riding freight trains, and stuff. So I guess it was probably the end of 1997, maybe early 1998, I got a postcard from another artist, whose mailing list I was on--a guy named Ray Wylie Hubbard, Oklahoma, Texas guy. And he had actually written one hit song. He's a really great songwriter, but the one hit song that made it was called, Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother (laughter). I don't know if you remember that title (laughter), but it was not what he usually wrote, but that's the song that made it. Anyways, so I had met Ray Wylie Hubbard, and I was on his mailing list, and I got this postcard listing his shows and listed in July, he was gonna' be playing the first annual Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma, Woody's hometown. And I knew the history--that town, Woody Guthrie's hometown, had mixed feelings about Woody. Historically, half the town had hated Woody because of his, what they perceived as his political views. They thought he was a communist. They thought he was a leftist. And Okemah, Oklahoma, if you look on a map, is pretty much dead center in the middle of the United States, and it's about 70 miles east of Oklahoma City--a very small town. I think it's still population about three or four thousand. And they had decided to do this festival. They had tried to do things for Woody previously in the town, but it never panned out. You know, something had always gone wrong or just never happened. But in the nineties, there was actually a woman and her husband that we met, became really good friends with once the festival got going, Sharon and Dee Jones. That were residents of Okemah, Oklahoma. And Sharon Jones had a cousin from San Francisco, and they got together in Oklahoma, probably in, I don't know, late nineties for a family reunion. And the liberal cousin from San Francisco said to Sharon, You live in Okemah, Oklahoma, and this town doesn't do anything for Woody Guthrie. That's shameful. You know, just kinda' shamed her about it (laughter). And so, she decided, we need to do something for Woody Guthrie. And so, turns out Woody's little sister lived right nearby in a town called Seminole. And so, Sharon had met her before 'cause Mary Jo Edgmon Guthrie, Woody's little sister, had spent a lot of her adult life going around to school classrooms to tell the kids about her brother, Woody Guthrie, who wrote, This Land Is Your Land. You know, sort of like Pete Seeger had done, but in her way. Telling her story about her big brother. And so, they knew of her. And so, they (phone interruption). Sorry about that. Just gotta' get rid of this call. So they knew about her, and so they contacted her and presented the idea of doing a Woody Guthrie Festival. And she said, Well, Woody's son, my nephew, is gonna' be coming through town in a couple months. I'm not sure exactly whether it was a couple months or sooner. Let's get together and tell him about your idea and see what he thinks. So they got together, and this is the story Sharon and Dee told me, so it's secondhand, but this is as I heard it. They got together with Mary Jo and Arlo Guthrie and Sharon and Dee and had a dinner and presented this idea of this Woody Guthrie festival. And Arlo said, Well, this town has never been that appreciative of my dad. So I don't know how successful something like this would be, but what I would suggest is that if we do it, we make it free. So we could pay artist expenses to get there, but I think it would be best if no artist was paid to play on the festival except for expenses to get there. And if no one had to pay to go see the festival. So we could call it the Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival. So for the first several years, that was the name of the festival, and it was free. They charged for parking, like $5 a car. So they were able to raise some money that way. And then on Wednesday night, the day before the festival started, the night before the festival started, they had a show in the Crystal Theatre in the town, which is an old theater that was there when Woody was a kid. And he used to go to the movies there. And his mom used to go to the movies there with Mary Jo when she was a baby. In fact, there's a story that one time, because she had Huntington's Disease, which is the disease that Woody died of, when she was showing signs of that, she would just go to the theater and just sit in the theater for hours and watch the movies. And one time she was in the theater, and Mary Jo, who was about three years old, wandered out of the theater into the middle of the street. And somebody picked her up saying, who's got a kid on the loose? So that's when they knew that Nora (Belle) Guthrie, Woody's mom and Mary Jo's mom, was in the throes of Huntington's disease. So they established this festival, and it was 1998. And I heard about it on this postcard that I got from Ray Wylie Hubbard. And I thought, man, it's gonna' be just in like a month or two. It wasn't too far away. And so, I know how these things are booked, and you have to book your shows a good six months in advance, sometimes even a year in advance, to get on some of these venues. And I really thought, man, I should be on this festival 'cause I've been looking for Woody Guthrie for a number of years now and kind of putting that into my performance portfolio and learning his songs and taking ideas from the songs and incorporating them into my own writing. And so, I called my manager and told (her) about this festival and said I'd really like to try to get on this maybe next year, and realizing I probably couldn't get on it in 1998. And so she said, you know what? I just got a letter from the people putting on the festival asking for a quote from one of our other artists, a more famous artist that they managed. And she said, So I can get the quote for them and then send the quote to them and send some of your material and pitch you for the festival. So she did that. And I was just so fortunate to get on that festival, even though it was only a couple months away. So I was one of the opening acts for that festival. I went there by myself the first year. I had just read Joe Klein's book, Woody Guthrie: A Life, by Joe Klein. And it's a voluminous book about Woody Guthrie's life. It doesn't pull any punches. And I just read that book. And there were some things that happened in that book that you don't hear about, just hadn't heard about it. They weren't in Bound for Glory or any other things I'd heard about Woody Guthrie.

00:48:34RAFAEL: One of the things that I had read about in that book was a lynching that had happened in the town of Okemah, Oklahoma, of a woman named Laura Nelson. And also of her son, her teenage son. Her and her son were lynched from a bridge about six miles outside of town in 1911. Her husband had been accused of stealing a sheep from a white farmer. And so, the sheriff and a deputy went out to arrest the husband, Lawrence Nelson, I believe was his name. And there was a standoff. And during the standoff, their son, who I think was about 14, had grabbed a shotgun and was hiding under the stairs of the house and shot the sheriff and hit him in the leg. And he bled to death in the yard begging for water, which the family wouldn't bring him. And so then the deputies left, they formed a posse and came back out and arrested the whole family. And took them to Okemah, placed the husband in the jail, and then right across the alley from the jail in another building that also had barred windows, they held Laura Nelson and her son and her baby. She had an infant. So the husband in one cell, and then Laura Nelson, the son, and the baby in another building right across the alley waiting for the circuit judge to come through so they could have a trial for the murder of the sheriff and for the lost or the stolen sheep. That didn't happen because before the circuit judge came, a mob was formed, and they broke into the building that had Lauren Nelson and her son and the baby, and they took them about six miles out of town to a bridge and lynched them from that bridge. There's a photograph of that. 'Cause these photographs of lynchings at that time were popular in the South, and they were sold as postcards in in like drugstores. It'd be like these postcards of these various lynchings that had happened. And so, this is one of the photographs from that series of photos is the picture of Laura Nelson hanging and then her son hanging next to her. The baby was left on the shore to die. And anecdotally it's told that that a family adopted the baby. And there's different stories. Some say it was a Black family that picked the baby up. Others say it was a white family that took the baby in, and then later she was actually a privileged Black that could, that had privileges in town that other Blacks didn't have. (Phone buzzes) Lets turn this off. I'm getting a lot of spam calls for some reason today. So I had read this in this Joe Klein book, and I had been invited to come play the festival, which was like a month or two off. And I thought, well, I'm gonna' have to bring a Woody Guthrie song or some Woody Guthrie songs with me. I mean, it just seemed like that's what you had to do. If you're gonna' be on the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. And I knew a lot of Woody Guthrie songs, but a lot of them were the popular songs, like This Land Is Your Land. This Train (This Train is Bound for Glory), I Ain't Got No Home (I Ain't Got No Home in This World Anymore), 1913 Massacre--maybe not one of the most well-known ones. But I had learned a couple of songs in the early seventies from Jack Elliot, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, from some of his recordings and then seeing him play live when I was about 20, 24 years old. I was on a trip to Colorado and saw Jack Elliot live and got to meet him and John Prine. And John Prine was just starting out. He wasn't famous yet (laughter). So I'd learned these couple of songs from Jack Elliott. I'd learned Pretty Boy Floyd, and I'd learned 1913 Massacre, which--two of Woody's most powerful songs. But I knew that someone would probably be doing those songs, you know? Because there's a lot of people already on the festival. I didn't know most of 'em. I knew a handful of them from other festivals I'd been on and maybe we'd been on shows together, that kind of thing. And so, I had a book called Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-hit People, and it was a compilation book of songs that had been compiled by Alan Lomax and his father, John Lomax, folk music historians. And then the musical notes, or the musical melody line had been transposed from the recordings by Pete Seeger. So he had actually done the musical notation. And then every song in the book--and there's probably a couple hundred songs in the book--but every song in the book had an introduction, just telling about the song, where it came from and what was important about it. And those were all written by Woody Guthrie. Now he only had maybe four songs in the book that he had written, but he did the notes for all the songs. So I was looking for the songs that he'd specifically written, and I found them, there were like four or five songs, and a couple of 'em were songs that were the popular songs that people knew. But there was this one song in there called Don't Kill My Baby and My Son. And it was about the lynching of Laura Nelson just outside the town of Okemah, Oklahoma, which is Woody's hometown. The lynching happened in 1911. Woody was born in 1912. He didn't write the song until about 1940. So it happened before he was born, a year before he was born. He must have heard talk about it, like for his whole childhood. It was a very traumatic event. I mean, even for the people that did it. It wasn't like a party. It was a very horrible, noteworthy event that had happened in that town in 1911. Wasn't soon forgotten. So I know he heard about it. And there were probably other lynchings because when I actually looked for the location there, one person who I had asked about it that was from there, said, Oh, you mean the bridge where they hung the Blacks? Plural. So I think there was more than one lynching there, but the one that was documented was the lynching of Laura Nelson. So I found this song, Don't Kill My Baby and My Son, in the book. And it was notated and had the words. And so, I set about learning it, and I wasn't thinking, you're going to Oklahoma to the town where this happened. Yeah, it was a hundred years earlier almost. But it was still a very intense thing that had been. Most of the people that lived in that town didn't know about it. It had been buried by the time it was like 1998. But I just naively took this song. This is a song that nobody's gonna' do (laughter). Yeah. That's for sure. So I got there, and I told a couple people about it, that this was the song I was gonna' play, the Woody song I brought. Who was it I told--was it Ray Wylie Hubbard? I'm gonna' have to think on that for a second, because I've messed that story up a couple times and got it with the wrong person. But I told somebody, one of the artists at the show, and it will probably come to me here, but I told one of the artists at the show about the song and played it for him. And he said, You're gonna play that here? (Laughter). And he was from that area. And I said, Well, yeah, I was thinking about it. He said, Okay. He said, I'll have the car running out back just in case you have to leave really quick (laughter). So it did shock people. I sang the song, and it shocked people. I wasn't thinking anything of it. I mean, this is how blindly I did this (laughter). I guess if I'd actually taken some time to think about it, I might never have taken that song there. But in retrospect, I'm really glad I did. Because it opened up a conversation that wasn't being had there about this lynching and other lynchings. And the first reactions were from some of the townspeople, like, why would you come and sing a song like that? They thought it was my song. They didn't know it was Woody's song. And I started that year to look around for where it happened 'cause there was a description in the book I'd read that said it was six miles southeast out of town, or I can't remember exactly what the directions were, but there's like four roads, four directions going out of town. So I headed out on one of the roads about six miles, and we looked here and there and everywhere, and we never did find it. And then the next year I looked again, 'cause I was invited back and have been subsequently invited back every year. So for the next few years, I looked for that location of that hanging and got sent by two or three different people to different places. Oh, yeah, I know where that is. Yeah, you just gotta' go out here and turn right, and there's a dirt road and then you follow that dirt road until it hits the river, and then you go down the river a little ways. And it was like this kind of stuff, you know? And also in the description, it had said that it was a railroad bridge that the lynching had occurred from. And of course, we had the picture of the bridge and in that picture, there's not only the picture of the hanging, but on the bridge, the entire bridge, is people standing on the bridge watching, looking down, watching the hanging. And it said that Woody's father was there. That might've been, he might've been in the lynch mob, and he might've been in the Ku Klux Klan. Now there's no documentation that he was. It's believed he probably was. But you know, some people just say, yeah, Woody's father was in the Ku Klux Klan. I never say that because I don't know that that was true. It might've been true. But I never stated it. And my reason for that was because Mary Jo Guthrie, Woody's baby sister, became a really good friend of mine for over twenty years. And I don't think that she believed that her father was in the Ku Klux Klan. And I just didn't see any reason to keep throwing that at her or throwing that out there when it would be in her presence. It just didn't seem necessary to me since there wasn't any proof. Might have been was good enough for me. And it was good enough for her, too. So I always left it there, but there's still people that say, yeah, he was definitely in the Ku Klux Klan, and he may well have been in the mob that took her out there. So anyways, I sang the song and was a pretty intense reaction. And then the next year, I sang the song again, and it kind of became signature to me, and people became aware that it was something that had happened in their town. The second year I got a note that somebody brought backstage to me from a guy that had a booth out in the festival area, in the audience area. He had a book booth, like a used bookstore. And it said, Come out and visit my bookstore booth. I've got something for you. And so I went out there after I played, I walked out there to where his booth was, and he said, I've got something for you. And he gave me a copy of the 1920 race--it was called the 1920 Tulsa Race Riot Report (Tulsa Race Riot A Report). So, you know, it was a massacre, not a race riot, but that's what they called it in this report, which was the official report that had been made to try to understand why the massacre had happened in Tulsa. And in the context of that, they talked about the history of lynchings in that region of the country, Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, kind of that area. And further in the deep South, as well. And so, that was an eye-opener (laughter) to get that book. So now it was kind of like the whole thing was kind of outed, you know? And then over the next few years, different people would tell me where the location was, and we would go and look for it and we never could find it. And then, I'm gonna' say, what year was that? I don't know exactly what year it was. It was probably like 2015, 2016, somewhere in there. We were at the festival, and my sister-in-law, my wife's sister, who lives in Hawaii and is a anthropology archeology professor with a specialty in, I guess you call it like the South Pacific Islands. But she's just really interested in that, the whole study of that kind of stuff. And she knew we were at the Woody Guthrie Festival. She knew the stories about this lynching and the song I had sung there. I've told all these same stories to her. And she had had a foot injury and was off her feet, couldn't go anywhere. And so she was vicariously following us at the festival, and started to look at some aerial photography of the area. She knew that the lynching had happened six miles out of town. And she started looking on all these, going around on the map, looking at photographs of--I guess on Google Earth or something. And the first thing she told us was, she said, I look at the picture of that lynching, and that's not a railroad bridge. She says that that that bridge would never hold a train. That's what they call a cart bridge because in the time when that bridge was built, they didn't have cars. Everybody traveled by horse cart. But that means that when that bridge was destroyed. It was probably replaced by another bridge on a road, on an existing road. It's not like just a bridge that came from somewhere and went across the river to somewhere else. It was most likely a bridge on a road, because it was a cart bridge, which meant it was a road, and a continuation over the river of a road. And she said, I think it's this location--was six miles out town going I think west outta' town. I get my directions kind of messed up 'cause I'm not there right now. But anyways, there's the one main road that you could take outta' town. It's like the one road up from Broadway, which is the main drag in Okemah, is highway, I think it's 62. And you take that out of town six miles, and you come to a town about four miles out. You come to a town called Boley, which was the first all-Black town in the United States. It was established by a guy named Boley, who owned the railroads. And after the slaves were freed, after the emancipation of the slaves, he was a guy who was of the opinion that that black people could govern themselves. He was a segregationist. So he felt that Blacks and whites should be segregated but that Blacks could have their own towns, kind of crazy idea. But the white town could be over here and Black town could be over here. So they established this area of land that he owned as Boley, and it could be the first Black town. And then they put the word out that freed slaves could come there and establish a life there. And the history of that is pretty brutal 'cause people would come there, like the first year, it's like a couple dozen folks came there and almost all of them were wiped out by the end of the winter either by disease or by wolves. 'Cause there weren't really any dwellings. I mean, they were basically just living in makeshift shelters. Eventually they established the town. The next year more people would come, bunch more people would get wiped out in the wintertime. And progressively, they established a town there, and it's still there. So you drive past this Black town, which is the area where Laura Nelson and her husband's farm was, they were probably sharecroppers, so probably wasn't their farm. And then eventually you come to this bridge over the Canadian River, and we had been to that bridge, and we'd looked, like you stand on the bridge and look up the river. And it looked a lot like the postcard, very similar landscape to the postcard of that lynching. But we couldn't establish that that's where it was. And we couldn't see anything, any evidence of it. And we were looking at this one direction that looked like the background of the picture. If you looked the other way, it didn't really look the same. So we were looking, I think we were looking to the south. Let's see, we were coming this way. Yeah. We were looking to the south. And, our sister-in-law, my sister-in-law, contacted us and said, I think you're looking the wrong way over that bridge. You should go back out to that bridge and look to the north side and look straight down at the bottom of the bridge. She says, I think I see two big footings on each side of the river from an older bridge along, that comes off of a dirt road. It's like just a farm road now. And then the highway with the new bridge. So we went back out and we look, and sure enough, here's these two concrete pilings, what's left of them with a little bit of rebar sticking out of 'em on each side of the river. So we go down to explore, we go down to the river under the bridge, and there's just all kinds of graffiti there. You know, like this is where it happened. Look up Laura Nelson. And then a whole bunch of obscene racist things written on the bridge wall down there. So you--and beer cans everywhere. And you could just tell this has been a off zone party spot for a long time, and this is where it happened. But the old bridge is gone. And that's the reason that the landscape looked the same is because if you had backed up down past where the old bridge was and looked the same direction, there you have that picture. So we did find the location.

01:11:06RAFAEL: And as you said, I played that Festival, I played it 27 times, which has been a great honor. In the 25th year, they gave me an award, a Woody Guthrie Legacy Artist award, which was a real honor. There were about five of us that had been on the Festival for over twenty years. I think I might have been maybe the only one that had been there for the whole twenty-five. You know, a couple others had been there for twenty-four years. Or one guy had been there for twenty-four years and had been in a helicopter accident before the Festival one of the years. But he showed up anyways, even though he couldn't play, it was on crutches. So they credited him with that Festival as well. So since I started playing that Festival, I've met several Woody Guthrie scholars. I've read at least two other biographies of Woody Guthrie that have come out. They're very comprehensive. One by Ed Cray and the one by Joe Klein. And then there's several other smaller books. There's a couple children's books that tell his story. There's so much material now. Like when I started to look for Woody Guthrie, there was hardly anything. And now there's just a ton of material. In fact, they just released some recordings that Woody did at home, on a home recorder, when he couldn't really travel around that much anymore because he was starting to have the symptoms of Huntington's disease. So Woody Guthrie's been close to my heart. And a couple years after the initial song that I wrote that was a co-write, I was given four more sets of lyrics that did not have music. And so, I have two Woody Guthrie albums with Woody Guthrie songs, and the first one has the one original lyric and then the second one has four more. And then there's a, some other Woody Guthrie songs on there. Some of them are familiar, but there's some other ones on there that were never recorded by Woody but did have musical notation. And I found those because a few years into the Festival, one of the guys that came to the Festival on a regular basis in the early days, his name was Jim Pollard. And he was the president of the Huntington's Disease association in Lowell, Massachusetts. But when the Festival started, he started coming down to Oklahoma every year to do a panel on Huntington's disease. And we pulled in some people from the local chapter in Oklahoma City. And then Mary Jo Guthrie was on that panel with us because she never got Huntington's disease, and we don't know, it supposedly skips. It's every other generation. It's genetic. And they've discovered a lot about Huntington's disease just in the last few years. I know that they've been able to isolate the gene that causes it. And so, they can test people when they're young to see if they have that gene that means that they may be likely to get it. And there are some even gene-altering procedures now that are experimental. They think that eventually they'll be able to cure Huntington's disease.

01:14:55RAFAEL: I'm trying to think what else can I cover about Woody Guthrie In my experience with the Woody Guthrie Festival. About half of the way into it, one of the other performers, Jimmy LaFave, who died a few years ago, he and I were two of the first people on the Festival, played it every year. And at a certain point, I think it was probably around 2003 or '04, he put together a review show that was his band and himself, and then about four other songwriters. And those would be like a couple of the songwriters were regulars, song regulars on the show. And then the other two or three songwriters would be people that lived in the areas where we were doing the show. So if we were in the northeast or on the west coast or wherever it would, we would fill in those other two or three songwriter spots with people from that area that had an affinity with the Woody Guthrie Festival or with Woody Guthrie in general. And we had a narrator and we would do these readings of Woody's essays and work from Bound for Glory and other things he'd written. And then that would be followed by a song, a Woody Guthrie song by one of the artists on the show backed up by Jimmy's band, and it was called The Ribbon Highway, Endless Skyway, A Tribute to the Songs and Words of Woody Guthrie. And we did that I guess for about three years, all over the country, at venues all over the country. And I was the--at a certain point, the guy who was our narrator who was from Oklahoma City died. And so, I became the narrator. And we had a show in--before he passed away--we had a show in New York City on Governor's Island, which is, you take the ferry out to Governor's Island. And it was like an eleven o'clock, I think. Eleven o'clock show in the morning. And we all flew in to New York City from various places--from Chicago, Oklahoma, California--whoever was in our cast--just coming from Texas, we're kind of flying all these different places to New York City, and it was a lot of weather issues going on. And so, there were a lot of delays and some plane cancellations. My plane was supposed to get into New York City at like nine o'clock at night and then I would take a taxi to downtown to the hotel we were staying at. And then the next morning at like nine o'clock, I was gonna' meet everybody, take a taxi to Battery Park and meet everybody there at the ferry dock. And then we'd all get on the ferry to Governor's Island. And then they had a stage set up for us there as a big outside venue and whole bunch of people. And we'd do the Ribbon Highway show there. So my plane got delayed. We got to New York City, and they didn't have a place for us to land. So we circled and circled and circled, until finally they said we're getting low on gas and they still don't have a place for us to land, so we're gonna' go to Buffalo, and we're gonna' land in Buffalo until they can clear up all these backed up planes and everything in New York City, and then we'll take you back to New York City. So we get to Buffalo, which is like this little nothing airport up in Buffalo, New York. And we got out of the plane, and we were there for probably three hours waiting. Three, three or four hours. There were no concessions or anything to nothing. You couldn't get anything to eat or anything sitting on terminal waiting. Finally, they said, Okay, we're ready to take you back to New York City. So we got back on the plane, they fly us down to New York City, we land, they deboard us, and by the time we get to the baggage area, it's about three in the morning. And my call is at nine at Battery Park. And so (laughter), we get into the luggage area, and the baggage is just piled up against the walls everywhere. I mean, it's just like stacks of bags everywhere. My bags are just coming in, so I was able to get my bags pretty quickly, but these are all from backed up flights. So I go out to get a taxi, and the taxi queue is literally two-and-a-half or three blocks long. I mean, I can see the end of the line, but it's gonna' be a long time before I get a taxi. And by the time I get my bags and I'm out there, it's a quarter of four. And I'm just going like, oh, man. So I'm in line, way in the back of the line and all of a sudden, this guy comes walking by, Jamaican guy, and he's going, anybody going to Midtown? I give you a ride to Midtown. He says, I got a van. I'll give you a ride to Midtown. Nobody says anything, and it's totally against the law. He's not supposed to be there, scabbing rides. And so I go, I'm going downtown. He goes, not going downtown, going Midtown. So he keeps talking, going to Midtown, going down the line. Standing there going, well, I wish he was going downtown, you know, but he's not. So I'm still standing in line. Pretty soon he comes back, he says, you going downtown? I go, yeah. He says, I'll take you downtown. Says, okay. I grabbed my bags, man. I'm not afraid to go with him. (Laughter.) I jump in his van, and he's this Jamaican guy with a Jamaican accent. And we get talking about--this is kind of a funny anecdote--we're talking about pot. We're talking about marijuana, just like, about how he has a brother that grows marijuana in Jamaica, and we're kind of trading these counterculture marijuana stories. And I said, yeah, you know, the trouble is when you're a musician, if you want to find something to smoke, it's really hard. You know, you go to these different places, and you're a stranger in a strange land, and so you can't find anything. And he says, Just remember this, man, wherever you go, it's already there. And (laughter) that turns out to be true. So I just thought that was just really a funny thing that he said. So I've always remembered that. Anyways, he gives me a ride to my hotel in downtown. I get there. I check in. I've got--it's a nice little room, but you know, by now it's like five in the morning. And I've got four hours to get to sleep and then wake up and meet these people to get a taxi to Battery Park to meet the crew. And so we, I get in the thing and turns out this guy, Bob Childers, who was the narrator, his plane got to Chicago from Oklahoma City, but then his flight was canceled going to New York City. So he's stuck in Chicago, so he's not gonna' get there for the show. And I don't know this yet, but I get to the Battery Park and our producer, who kind of coordinates our whole show and everything, she sees me as I get there, and she comes up to me with the script in her hand, and she just hands me the script, and she says, You could do this, right? (Laughter.) And I look at it and I go, what? And she goes, Bob's not gonna' be here. You know, you need to do the narration, you can do it right? And I go, yeah, I can do it. And then, so I did the narration for that show, and then our next show--I guess Bob made one more show, but he was very fragile. And he died about a month after that. And so I became the narrator of the show for the next, I guess we did it for more than three years. We probably did it for about five or six years. And we ended that show up. And that's about, that's probably about all my information on Woody.

01:23:31FABBI: Thank you so much, Joel, for this third installment of your oral history. And you know, we'll be back together soon at some point.

01:23:39RAFAEL: Yeah. I've got more stories to tell on this.

01:23:41FABBI: Yes, you do.

01:23:42RAFAEL: Thank you so much.

01:23:43FABBI: All Right. Thank you.