This from the Pampa News, the newspaper 12 miles from where we live. Those who know me know I'm quite possibly one of the biggest Woody Guthrie fans on the planet.
Guthrie's granddaughter gives deeper insight into folksinger
Posted: Saturday, Oct 02, 2004 - 11:37:05 am CDT
By David Bowser
Staff writer
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| (Pampa News photo by David Bowser) Anna Laura Batson, left, with Anna Canoni, Woody Guthrie's granddaughter, in Amarillo Thursday afternoon. Batson knew Woody Guthrie when she was growing up in Pampa. | |
AMARILLO - Woody Guthrie's granddaughter gave her premier performance of "A Granddaughter's Legacy" here Thursday afternoon, sharing family photos and home movies with residents of Park Place Towers Retirement Community.Anna Canoni is in Pampa today and Saturday for the 2004 Tribute to Woody Guthrie, along with the Vanaver Caravan.
Canoni, 25, never met her grandfather, legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie. He died in 1967, of complications from Huntington's Chorea, a progressive nervous system disease.
The child of Woody Guthrie's daughter Nora Guthrie, Anna Canoni grew up in the family of music, dance and art.
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She will share those experiences in Pampa tonight at the Stokes Barn, three miles east of Pampa on U.S. Highway 60 (officially the Woody Guthrie Memorial Highway) and again Saturday at M.K. Brown Auditorium.
Her program includes film clips from the Woody Guthrie Archives and home movies that have rarely been seen outside the Guthrie family.
"As great as he was," said Anna Laura Batson, a resident of Park Place Towers, "it's a shame we didn't know more about him."
Batson grew up in Pampa and knew Guthrie during his days in Gray County.
"I didn't know him well," she said, "but I had a friend that did."
Her best friend, Mary McKinney, died in the 1960s, Batson said.
"She thought he was headed for something," Batson said. "She thought he was going to be famous."
Canoni's program documents that rise to fame from his birthplace of Okemah, Okla., through Pampa, where he learned to play the guitar, to his days in California and New York.
Anna Canoni is a product of Guthrie's second marriage. After marrying Mary Jennings in Pampa and having three children, Guthrie married Marjorie Mazia in New York and had four more. One died in childhood. The other three, Canoni said, are Arlo, Joady and Canoni's mother Nora.
"Woody had a big family," Canoni said.
Canoni will join the Vanaver Caravan, a troupe of musicians, singers and dancers who have their own program based on Guthrie's music, at Pampa Junior High School this afternoon and again tonight at Stokes Barn and Saturday night at M.K. Brown Auditorium.
The Vanaver Caravan has been working with students at Lamar, Wilson, Austin Elementary Schools.
Loralee Cooley, president of Pampa's Tribute to Woody Guthrie, said Cynthia Hauck, music teacher at Lamar, had done an outstanding job in preparing for the Vanavers.
"It was amazing," said Livia Vanaver. "They were really prepared."
Cooley said that after one song, Los Deportees, which deals with a plane load of Mexican immigrants who died in a plane crash while being flown back to Mexico, one Hispanic girl asked Hauk if she could take a copy of the material home so she could read it to her father in Spanish.
"It's not just entertainment," Cooley said of the Vanavers production. "It's about who we are as people."
Livia Vanaver and Nora Guthrie were college roommates and close friends.
Vanaver said she has a son that is about two months younger than Canoni. She said people used to think they were twins when Vanaver and Nora Guthrie would put the two infants in a stroller and go for walks.
"She's my mother," Canoni said of Vanaver, "along with my mother. They were both mothers for all of us."