I’m Out Here a Thousand Miles From My Home
October 6, 2023 – Day 8
Tulsa OK is home to the Woody Guthrie Center which opened in 2013 and the brand new Bob Dylan Center that opened in 2022.
I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
Bob Dylan – Song to Woody
Walking a road other men have gone down
I’m seeing your world of people and things
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings
The two are in the same block and essentially next to each other. Visit both and you get a discount by buying a pair of tickets, $22 vs $30. Interestingly when you choose a time online we found out at the venue it’s not that relevant, within reason. We were a half hour early but able to get in. After you’ve been checked in you can come and go as you please, from one to the other and back, leave for lunch or whatever. It’s an all access pass until they close.
Bob Dylan Center
The Bob Dylan Center opened in May 2023. In 2016 the George Kaiser Family Foundation purchased much of Dylan’s “secret archive.” Following those links is really fascinating, take your time, but come back here. Like and Subscribe!
When you enter the venue you can sit or stand to watch a 20 minute immersive exhibit. There are screens and objects all around you.
This is really worth seeing, you can learn so much and it’s an enveloping visual and auditory experience. You never know where to look. You find yourself turning in your seat or spinning while standing struggling, happily, to take it all in.
After the immersive exhibit we entered the main hall. At check-in you’re issued an iPod with headphones which provides a deeply interactive experience. There’s a gizmo that you hold the iPod to for a second and automagically audio relating to the kiosk starts playing enhancing the exhibit that you’re viewing. Want to hear Chimes of Freedom again while reading about it and seeing items from when it was recorded? Just get the iPod near that gizmo. It was an incredibly clever way to deliver music and an immersive experience.
The first floor main exhibit has outer wall arranged in a chronological timeline of Dylan’s career. Each of the center pillars are devoted to a single song.
You can see the Like a Rolling Stone and Chimes of Freedom pillars above. See that black leather jacket? Dylan wore this at his third Newport Folk Festival, the one where he went electric (and caught a lot of flack for that). Next to it? Pete Seeger’s postcard to Dylan explaining why he (Pete) tried to get the sound board to turn it down. It wasn’t because it was too loud. It was because distortion made Dylan impossible to understand. Every pillar is full of gems like that.
There are other interactive exhibits. Did you know that Elvis Costello was the initial curator? Or that his playlist of 162 songs are available at an old style but digital juke box? You can also “mix” two of his songs.
We were both surprised to learn that Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. The award was for his songs, but his words were all over the gallery.
On the second floor we had an exhibit of early photographs of Dylan. It was hard to capture this. Next was an exhibit of contemporary items. We were both baffled and wondered why various items from the 60s and 70s were prominently displayed. There was no mention of their purpose or relevance to Dylan.
Then we got to The Wall.
This is only about a third of the wall. See that mailbag? That’s the bag of unopened fan mail that Dylan received after his motorcycle accident that you read about in the NY Times article above. (You did read that, right? There’ll be test, you know…) The computer screens let you tap on an icon and you could read descriptions or watch videos about the item. Where did all these items come from? Remember 2016? That second NY Times article?
In 2016, the George Kaiser Family Foundation acquired the previously unknown personal archive of Nobel Prize -winning musician and cultural icon Bob Dylan, a natural complement to the Woody Guthrie Archive®, purchased five years earlier.
Spanning Dylan’s life and work, The Bob Dylan Archive® is one of the largest and most historically significant collections devoted to a single artist in any medium.
Containing thousands of pages of manuscripts, notebooks, and letters, as well as countless hours of audio recordings and film footage, the collection illuminates Dylan’s creative process, from his idiosyncratic working methods to his tireless pursuit of perfecting his songwriting craft.
Showcasing but a fraction of the breadth and depth of the collection, this display offers new portals and perspectives through which to explore the story of Bob Dylan’s life and career.
EARL MINNIS GALLERY
THE BOB DYLAN ARCHIVE
You might wonder how do you access the collection? You have to be a credentialed researcher to enter that section. Being a Dylan fan that wants to read about Tangled Up in Blue isn’t enough.
There is also a 45 minute video of about a dozen songs. We didn’t have time to watch it. Ok, we did for a couple minutes but it was 2pm and we hadn’t had lunch yet. Gotta have priorities, right!? We asked where to go at the front desk and were told that The Chow House was really, really good. It had some of the best food we’ve had on this trip, well, actually ever had. Who know that chicken marinated in sweet could be so good!
So, uhh, why is the Dylan center in Tulsa? It is because Dylan and Guthrie are connected. Dylan revered Guthrie, even spent time with Guthrie in his final days, sometimes acting as his nurse, or sometimes as “Guthrie jukebox,” singing his songs to the man dying too early.
The Woody Guthrie Center
The Woody Guthrie Center opened in 2013 after the archives were acquired by, betcha you can’t guess… the George Kaiser Family Foundation! Of course it was! We should be less flip but we’re both really grateful that the GKFF was able to conserve both artists creations. There’s such a contrast between these two incredible centers versus the obvious and off-putting money grab that is Graceland.
I AM OUT TO SING SONGS THAT WILL PROVE TO YOU THAT THIS IS YOUR WORLD
AND THAT IF IT HAS HIT YOU PRETTY HARD AND KNOCKED YOU FOR A DOZEN LOOPS, NO MATTER WANT COLOR WHAT SIZE YOU ARE, HOW YOU ARE BUILT, I AM OUT TO SING THE SONGS THAT MAKE YOU TAKE BRIDE IN YOURSELF AND IN YOUR WORK AND THE SONGS THAT I SING ARE MADE UP
FOR THE MOST PART BY ALL SORTS OF FOLKS JUST ABOUT LIKE YOU
Woody Guthrie
The very first exhibit is one of his guitars. (That’s a Pete Seeger banjo in the background.)
Woody Guthrie played many guitars throughout his lifetime, but few known Guthrie-owned or -played guitars remain today. This May-Bell guitar was found in a thrift store in Seattle and later proven to be a Guthrie original.
Curiously, it doesn’t have the the “This Machine Kills Fascists” text on it. (Which reminds Paul, he needs to wood burn something into his mid 60s Shinano classical guitar.)
You turn the corner and enter the exhibit proper.
Way off to the right is an interactive exhibit about Guthrie and various traveling musicians, Harry Belafonte comes to mind. This was the first of too many interactive exhibits. Later on you realized you spent all your time putting on headphones then watching a video from a choice you’d make in a picture menu. It was a very different experience from the Dylan Center where you had your own personal iPod but your experience wasn’t diminished if you chose to not listen to the iPod. For this center if you didn’t don the headphones the experience wasn’t complete. There were viewing stations each with 5 or 6 choices. It was an cumbersome way to present information that could have been made easier for the viewer.
See that painting just to the right? That’s by John “Cougar” Mellancamp. We know what you’re thinking, “He’s a pop singer not a painter!” Like Bush II he discovered that he loves to paint. So in addition to being a pop star he’s also a respected painter. That’s his painting of Dylan and Guthrie along with his guitar and a platinum record behind the guitar.
Moving around we came to an Oklahoma porch. You could sit on the porch, put on a Virtual Reality headset and experience Black Sunday when the dust storms came in. It was extremely realistic, disturbingly so. We didn’t know that it was such an overwhelming, enveloping, lethal event.
Paul now wants to buy a VR headset even though he knows he’ll look like a dork, that’s ok, Paul is very comfortable with his dorkiness, his dorkdom, his dorkification, whatever… Hey look, Susan can look like a dork also!
There was an entire exhibit on the dustbowl years. Sadly, the dust blender was broken.
The amount of original paper work was stunning. Curiously, Dylan had more items to look at but the Guthrie exhibits left more of an impression. Sure they were reproductions of the lyrics to This Land Is Your Land but it’s an image of Guthries actual handwriting made to look like it was lifted from his notebook. You couldn’t help but be drawn in.
That circular glare on the “This Land…” photo above? It’s because there’s a cool chandelier above it!
There was a lot of artwork and drawings by Guthrie. Most all of it was, as suspected, wonderfully progressive.
At the rear of the hall was an exhibit of instruments from other musicians who had some connection to Woody.
There are 13 instruments on display at the Center. A banjo from the Dropkick Murphys who hail from Quincy, MA. A guitar from a project that Billy Bragg started to bring guitars to prisoners. In a direct nod to Woody there is a “This machine kills time.” stenciled on it. There are others but we forget what they were and who they belonged to.
Lastly was the climate controlled room with the Woody Guthrie archives. We still couldn’t access it, but it was possible, just maybe. You needed to be a credentialed researcher to access the Dylan archives, but anybody can access the Guthrie archives. You only need to explain your purpose, in writing, and if accepted you would be accompanied by an archivist. However, you didn’t need to be credentialed to look in via the giant glass window! We could see a few of Woody’s paintings that aren’t currently on exhibit.
It was time to leave and we walked across to Guthrie Green that had been cordoned-off for First Friday and. They were setting up an extravaganza. We got to walk under this colorful canopy.
Tulsa Ballet! They were refining one of their dances. It was interesting to watch them figure the most minute of details, such as how to clasp the hand of the other dancer.
Daily: 0
Total: 1,632
Moving Miles/Day: 326
Overall Miles/Day: 233