Woody and Bob

I’m a child of the 50s and 60s. So, when the biopic, A Complete Unknown, about Bob Dylan was released, I was anxious to see the movie. In my opinion, it was excellent, and Timothee Chalamet was a great Dylan, although I thought his singing voice was much better than Dylan's.

The characters were fascinating because they were some of the most influential voices from the 50s and 60s: Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Woody Guthrie, and many others from the time. However, by the time Bob Dylan meets Woody Guthrie, he's bedridden in a psychiatric hospital in New York. The cause of his hospitalization is never explained in the movie, but Dylan visits him several times and plays and sings for him. Guthrie is the character who caught my attention. I'd never thought about him and assumed he might have been a contemporary of my parents.

I was wrong. Guthrie was a contemporary of my grandparents. He was born in 1912 and lived in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. He was an inspiration for those political protests of the 60s, a prolific poet, writer, and songwriter. The words of his most famous lyrics in This Land is Your Land, were controversial because "This land was made for you and me," meant everyone, like in the Constitution, and according to Guthrie and the government that made him a communist.

There is so much detail about Guthrie's life that is fascinating. I would love for the next major biopic to be dedicated to Woody Guthrie. But, I wanted to know what lead him to be hospitalized for so many years at the end of his life. He died in 1967 at the age of fifty-five. At first, doctors didn't know what the cause of Guthrie's mental and muscular deterioration was. They attributed the condition to continuous and excessive use of alcohol and/or diagnosed him as schizophrenic. Eventually, Guthrie was diagnosed with Huntington's Disease. Although the cause of his mother, Nora's, death had been noted as dementia, at the time, she also had Huntington's. The disease is genetic and some of Woody Guthrie's children also died from the same disease.

Woody Guthrie's wife, Marjorie, established the Committee to Combat Huntington's Disease (CCHD) by reaching out through the newspapers in New York to other families dealing with the debilitating illness. This genetic disorder devastates families because if a parent has the disease, their offspring have a 50/50 chance of also having it.

During my social work career, I knew a family dealing with Huntington's. They were a very special family, four females in the same household and three with advanced symptoms of this terminal disease. I researched the disease and wrote a fictional story based on my interactions with this family. They are all deceased now, one from old age, the other three from the disease. The book is entitled The Ember Months.

I have never encountered, in my four decades in the social work field, the feeling of hopelessness that this disease causes. Death comes slowly and the patient knows exactly what will happen. However, Bessie, I called her, the head of this family, managed what seemed to be an unmanageable situation. My agency closed the case because it had nothing to do with the care of the child involved and everything to do with the inadequacy of medical resources for the family. However, I tried to keep informed about how Bessie was doing. I eventually lost touch with her, so I don’t know the outcome. In the novel I constructed the only ending that gave me hope, and I based that on what commonly happens to victims and families with Huntington’s Disease.

Now, the only flaw I can find with this Bob Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown, is that we didn’t learn about why Woody Guthrie was hospitalized, because along with the protests and activism of the time, this ailment in society still exists.

For more information on Woody Guthrie and Huntington’s Disease visit these sites:

https://huntingtonsdiseasenews.com/columns/woody-guthrie-impact-family-history-huntingtons-disease/

https://hdsa.org/about-hdsa/hdsa-history/

https://hdsa.org/news/huntingtons-disease-society-of-americas-50th-anniversary-to-celebrate-the-life-legacy-of-its-founder-marjorie-guthrie/