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First Reading: First Impressions
Read the text of the letter silently. Your focus for the first reading is on understanding the meaning of the passage. As you read, practice diffusing by replacing unfamiliar words with synonyms or definitions for the underlined words. Use the definitions and synonyms in the margins to help your understanding.
Letter to the Library of Congress
By Woody Guthrie
Dear Library of Congress
I just got the copy of my song book that you printed up. I got a carbon copy, and about a third carbon at that, but it is pretty fair, so I guess that’s all right. I just sort of wanted to write and say that it is about the neatest thing that ever had my name on it.
I want to sort of thank you and Alan Lomax for copying it. But you kept the original.
I would like to kiss it good bye while I’m at it. Is it handy there for congressmen and senators to come in and sing? I hope they bring their fiddles and guitars around and
hit off a few of the most radical tunes. They are awful easy to sing, and you can sing them drunk or sober, it dont matter, just a matter of personal choice. I tried them both ways. The senators, too. You can elect just about as good a one one way or the other. I’d like for them to specialy learn to sing #56, Looking for that New Deal Now, which is a good one for the boys to recollect once in a while between poker games and, #134, That Gal Of Mine Made a Horse Collar outta Me .. only you leave out the gal and put in a representative. 158 is the Capitol City Cyclone which shows where a big high wind got a loose and tore up jack, it cut down everything in the country, this song aint a prophecy, inasmuch as it is just something that goes on all of the time. They can sing this one
sort of in unison, if they aint union men, they can get around in some alley and hum
it to their self while nobody aint a looking. This is a sure nuff classy job of printing up this book, and it was done by the PWA, I dont guess the senators knew what was going on, or the president either, or they would of left off the copying of these books, and cut my original book down by about half. Thank goodness we got it through. True as the average. Woody
carbon: a duplicate that
is made by using carbon paper. (Stacking several sheets with carbon paper between each pair can make more than one copy. Guthrie’s reference to a “third carbon” means that his copy appears to be less clear than the first or second copy.)
radical: advocating extreme political reform
New Deal: a set of programs and policies introduced
by President Franklin
D. Roosevelt during the 1930s, designed to promote economic recovery and social reform
union men: members of a labor union, an organized association of workers formed to protect and promote their rights and interests
PWA: the Public Works Administration, a large- scale government project— part of the New Deal—that provided jobs ranging from large construction projects to running the printing business that published Guthrie’s songbook
Close Reading Workshop 5 • Close Reading of Informational Texts in Social Studies/History 13
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