I can still remember the first time I heard Woody Guthrie. There was a power outage in the neighborhood and the only thing I could do was read Hemingway by candlelight and listen to my battery-powered radio. I turned it on and Tom Joad was playing. I put Hemingway down almost immediately. I had read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath so I was familiar with the story but something in the way Woody sang it made my hair stand up and my skin get goose pimples. I bought his Dust Bowl Ballads album the following day and listening to it made me feel like I was someplace else. His songs are impeccably simple and poignant, archaic but everlasting. Nothing in his collection of work can be tied to the candied pandemonium of most contemporary music; pitch-shifted musclemen and midriff-bearing demi-divas.
Everyone always asks me why I always write about the past or set my stories in the past. Truth is, I can’t relate to anything today: computers, television, even the wars we’re fighting. It’s like I always say: "Out with the new, in with the old." That’s not to say I’m oblivious, I’m just not finished with the past and I’m in no hurry to catch up. I’m wandering along dormant railroads strangled by tall weeds in the time of cowboys and Indians. I’m lost somewhere along the Wakarusa River, but instead of a rifle in my hands, I got a ’63 Gibson guitar and aside from a few cuts and scrapes, I still have most of my skin to speak of.
-Ben Rogers
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