He charts the flowering of Guthrie's proletarian consciousness which eventually enabled the songwriter to engage with industrial relations beyond those of the migrant farmers: cowboys and ranchers, lumber workers, construction workers, oil workers, transport workers, miners. Jackson analyzes Guthrie's early Dust Bowl Ballads in relation to other aspects of 1930s cultural production, such as documentary photography and film, and in the context of contested scholarly studies of the Dust Bowl migration.
The book proceeds to establish the contexts of the textual analysis: "documenting the stories of America's agricultural workers" (48), "documenting the troubles of other American workers" (93), "documenting race and redemption" (127), "class consciousness in Guthrie's outlaw songs" (166), and trade unionism.
The introductory chapter explores the political changes in successive versions of Guthrie's best-known song, "This Land Is Your Land," which began as an angry, Marx-inflected retort to the jingoism of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," but which, through stages of lyrical evisceration, eventually became the unofficial national anthem (a process about which radical music editor Irwin Silber complained: "They're taking a revolutionary, and turning him into a conservationist").
His major aim is to provide a textual analysis of Guthrie's lyrics and prose (Jackson is by training a literary scholar) so there is less attention to Guthrie's music than, as Jackson says, "the music of the words" (8). Jackson is up front about his advocacy of Guthrie as one of America's greatest proletarian spokesmen, and fortunately he maintains enough critical distance to remain this side of hagiography (the title comes not from Jackson, but rather from a tongue-in-cheek letter from Guthrie to President Harry Truman). Consequently, one of this book's greatest strengths is its substantial engagement with previously unstudied material. 1 Jackson has delved into the three major repositories of Guthrie's unpublished writings-the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York, the Alan Lomax collection at the Library of Congress, and the Ralph Rinzler Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. Up to now, the most significant studies (not directed at juveniles) have been the two biographies by Joe Klein (1980) and Ed Cray (2004), a collection of essays edited by Robert Santelli and Emily Davidson (1999), and a number of chapters in general works devoted to the folk protest movement. Prophet Singer is a valuable contribution to Woody Guthrie scholarship, the first book-length analysis of Guthrie's writings in their social and historical contexts.
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