Woody Guthrie

All Music Guide:

Woody Guthrie was the most important American folk music artist of the first half of the 20th century, in part because he turned out to be such a major influence on the popular music of the second half of the 20th century, a period when he himself was largely inactive. His greatest significance lies in his songwriting, beginning with the standard "This Land Is Your Land" and including such much-covered works as "Deportee," "Do Re Mi," "Grand Coulee Dam," "Hard, Ain't It Hard," "Hard Travelin'," "I Ain't Got No Home," "1913 Massacre," "Oklahoma Hills," "Pastures of Plenty," "Philadelphia Lawyer," "Pretty Boy Floyd," "Ramblin' Round," "So Long It's Been Good to Know Yuh," "Talking Dust Bowl," and "Vigilante Man." These and other songs have been performed and recorded by a wide range of artists, including a who's who of folksingers, among them Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, the Brothers Four, Judy Collins, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Richie Havens, Cisco Houston, the Kingston Trio, the Limeliters, Lindisfarne, Don McLean, the Chad Mitchell Trio, Holly Near, the New Christy Minstrels, Odetta, Tom Paxton, Peter, Paul & Mary, Utah Phillips, Tom Rush, Tom Russell, Pete Seeger, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Dave van Ronk, the Weavers, and Kate Wolf; country performers such as Eddy Arnold, Chet Atkins, Gene Autry, Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, Flatt & Scruggs, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Lee Greenwood, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Alison Krauss, the Maddox Brothers & Rose, Anne Murray, Dolly Parton, Johnny Paycheck, Jim Reeves, Tex Ritter, Red Smiley, Ernest Tubb, and Bob Wills; and rock and pop musicians like the Alarm, Paul Anka, the Band, Billy Bragg, the Byrds, Concrete Blonde, Ry Cooder, Ani DiFranco, Dion, Lonnie Donegan, Donovan, Bob Dylan, Nanci Griffith, Arlo Guthrie, Hot Tuna, Indigo Girls, Little Feat, Lone Justice, Trini Lopez, Country Joe McDonald, John Mellencamp, Natalie Merchant, Van Morrison, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Linda Ronstadt, Doug Sahm, the Seekers, Michelle Shocked, Bruce Springsteen, the Waterboys, Wilco, and Jesse Colin Young. (For the most part, Guthrie created his songs by writing new lyrics to existing folk melodies.)

Most of those performances and recordings came after Guthrie's enforced retirement due to illness in the early '50s. During his heyday, in the 1940s, he was a major-label recording artist, a published author, and a nationally broadcast radio personality. But the impression this creates, that he was a multi-media star, is belied by his personality and his politics. Restlessly creative and prolific, he wrote, drew, sang, and played constantly, but his restlessness also expressed itself in a disinclination to stick consistently to any one endeavor, particularly if it involved a conventional, cooperative approach. Nor did he care to stay in any one place for long. This idiosyncratic individualism was complemented by his rigorously left-wing political views. During his life, much attention was given in the U.S. to whether people of a liberal bent were or had ever been members of the Communist party. No reliable evidence has emerged that Guthrie was, but there is little doubt where his sympathies lay; for many years, he wrote a column published in Communist newspapers. Such views also help explain his uncomfortable relationship with the trappings of media and financial success that he encountered fleetingly in the '40s.

Ironically, as Guthrie's health declined to the point of permanent hospitalization in the '50s, his career took off through his songs and his example, which served as inspiration for the folk revival in general and, in the early '60s, Bob Dylan in particular. By the mid-'60s, Guthrie's songs were appearing on dozens of records, his own recordings were being reissued and, in some cases, released for the first time, and his prolific writings were being edited into books. This career resurgence was in no way slowed by his death in 1967; on the contrary, it continued for decades afterward, as new books were published and the Guthrie estate invited such artists as Billy Bragg and Wilco in to write music for Guthrie's large collection of unpublished lyrics, creating new songs to record.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in Okemah, OK, on July 14, 1912, 12 days after his namesake, Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, was nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention. As this early political connection suggests, Guthrie's father, Charley Edward Guthrie, was himself a politician who, at the time, held the elective post of District Court Clerk as well as being a real estate agent. Guthrie's mother, Nora Belle (Tanner) Guthrie, had earlier given birth to his sister Clara and brother Lee Roy; another brother, George, would follow in 1918, and finally another sister, Mary Josephine Guthrie, in 1922. Guthrie's mother taught him folk songs as a child. In May 1919, when Guthrie was six years old, his sister Clara accidentally burned to death. It was the first of a remarkable number of fire-related injuries suffered by Guthrie and those around him during his life. It marked a decline in fortunes for the family, and it may have been related to the undiagnosed but increasingly apparent illness of his mother. Unbeknown to her, Nora Guthrie was beginning to suffer from the mental and physical effects of the rare, hereditary, and incurable condition known as Huntington's disease, the onset of which tends to come in middle age, with a steady decline thereafter, resulting in a loss of mental control and muscle control, eventually leading to death.

By the mid-'20s, Guthrie had begun to display an interest in music, learning to play the harmonica. On June 25, 1927, another fire incident occurred in which Guthrie's father was severely burned by a kerosene lamp. Two days later, Guthrie's mother was committed to the Central State Hospital for the Insane in Norman, OK. (She died there in 1930.) His father was taken to Pampa, TX, to stay with his aunt and recover. Guthrie, not yet 15 years old, stayed with his older brother or family friends, but went largely unsupervised. Before his 16th birthday, in June 1928, he took his first extended trip, hitchhiking around the Gulf Coast states and working at odd jobs before returning to Okemah. Although he attended high school during this period, he never got beyond the tenth grade. In the spring of 1929, he moved to Pampa at his father's invitation. There he worked in a drugstore and then became a sign painter. He also took guitar lessons from his uncle Jeff Guthrie and soon began playing professionally, teaming with Matt Jennings, who played harmonica and fiddle, and guitarist Cluster Baker in a group they called the Corncob Trio. On October 28, 1933, Guthrie married Jennings' sister, Mary Esta Jennings.

Guthrie had begun to write his own songs as early as 1932. On April 14, 1935, he found inspiration in a natural disaster, when a major dust storm hit Pampa, as drought conditions and subsistence farming across the Great Plains combined to strip off tons of topsoil and send it flying into the wind, contributing to the financial catastrophe suffered by farmers during the Great Depression. Guthrie wrote "So Long It's Been Good to Know Yuh" (aka "Dusty Old Dust"), which was full of bitingly comic observations about the troubles suffered by people in the storm. The same month, he self-published the first of a series of songbooks he would turn out during his career, Alonzo M. Zilch's Own Collection of Original Songs and Ballads.

The Guthries' first child, Gwendolyn Gail Guthrie, was born in November 1935, but that did not signal that Guthrie was settling down with his family. On the contrary, in 1936, he returned to hitchhiking or jumping freight trains to travel around the country as a hobo. In the late winter or early spring of 1937, he finally took off for good, moving to California. His wife, meanwhile, was pregnant again, and she gave birth to a second daughter, Sue Guthrie, in July. Meeting his cousin Leon Jerry "Oklahoma Jack" Guthrie in Los Angeles, Guthrie began performing with him, and the two were hired to do a radio program on the local station KFVD, launching the daily 15-minute program The Oklahoma and Woody Show on July 19, 1937. In September, Jack Guthrie dropped out, and Guthrie replaced him with singer Maxine Crissman, whom he dubbed "Lefty Lou," with the program rechristened The Woody and Lefty Lou Show. The two were popular with other expatriates from what had become known as the Dust Bowl, and Guthrie began to write more songs directed at them, such as "Do Re Mi," in which he warned potential migrants that California might not be welcoming to them if they didn't arrive with money; the nostalgic "Oklahoma Hills"; and "Philadelphia Lawyer." He also made enough money from the radio show and the sale of songbooks to send for his wife and children, who joined him in Los Angeles in November 1937.

The Woody and Lefty Lou Show continued until June 18, 1938, when Guthrie went back to traveling around the country. He returned to KFVD by himself in November. Perhaps influenced by his observations of struggling migrant workers, he began to express himself in more overtly political terms, writing songs like "Pretty Boy Floyd" (which treated the famed bank robber born Charles Arthur Floyd as if he were a modern version of Robin Hood) and "Vigilante Man," a condemnation of the police and private security forces that harried homeless workers. He also began writing a column, "Woody Sez," for the Communist newspaper People's World in May 1939. His third child, a son named Will Guthrie, was born in October. In November, he left his radio show and moved back to Texas, but he did not stay there long. In the early months of 1940, he took off again, this time to New York City to visit his friend, the actor Will Geer, who was appearing on Broadway in the play Tobacco Road. On his way across the country, Guthrie frequently heard on the radio Kate Smith's rendition of Irving Berlin's patriotic song "God Bless America," which Berlin had written during World War I, but first published in 1939, as World War II loomed. Guthrie found the song jingoistic, and when he arrived in New York he was inspired to write his own answer song, which he initially called "God Blessed America for Me." Although the song, later revised as "This Land Is Your Land," itself came to be regarded as a patriotic anthem, Guthrie's actual intended message was an attack on private property, a cornerstone of the capitalist system. His initial draft of the song is dated February 23, 1940, but he did not perform it until much later.

By the time Guthrie arrived in New York, the plight of the Okies, as the Midwestern farmers who had lost their farms and headed west to become migrant workers were known by now, had become a national cause, in part because of the success of John Steinbeck's best-selling novel The Grapes of Wrath, which had been published in April 1939 and quickly adapted into a motion picture that opened in New York on January 24, 1940. Guthrie had met Steinbeck in California, and in March 1940 he was invited to perform at a benefit for migrant workers sponsored by Steinbeck and emceed by Geer at the Forrest Theater, where Tobacco Road was running. His appearance was a sensation; with his demeanor and accent, he seemed the living embodiment of the Okies, and his songs and wry humor called to mind a combination of the country singer Jimmie Rodgers and the homespun monologuist Will Rogers. At the event, Guthrie met a number of prominent folksingers, among them Leadbelly and Aunt Molly Jackson, as well as the 20-year-old aspiring folksinger Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, the assistant in charge of the Archive of Folk-Song at the Library of Congress. Lomax in particular proved beneficial to Guthrie's career. He quickly invited Guthrie to Washington, D.C., to interview him for the archive. The interviews took place on March 21, 22, and 27, 1940, at a studio at the Department of the Interior, where they were recorded. At this, his first-ever recording session, Guthrie discussed his life and performed many songs, including "So Long It's Been Good to Know Yuh," "Do Re Mi," "Pretty Boy Floyd," "I Ain't Got No Home," "Worried Man Blues," "Goin' Down That Road Feeling Bad," and a number of others explicitly about the conditions in the Dust Bowl. The recordings stayed in the archives for nearly a quarter of a century, until they were released commercially as a three-LP box set, Library of Congress Recordings, by Elektra Records in 1964.

Lomax had other media connections that gave Guthrie greater exposure. On April 2, 1940, he presented Guthrie on his nationally broadcast CBS radio program, Columbia School of the Air, and later in the month Guthrie made the first of several appearances on another CBS show, The Pursuit of Happiness. Lomax also talked Guthrie up to RCA Victor Records, which signed him to a contract that resulted in the release of two albums, each consisting of three 78 RPM discs, in July 1940, Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 1 and Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 2. The selections included many of the same songs Guthrie had just performed for the Library of Congress, plus the newly written "Tom Joad," a musical adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, which had to be broken into two parts due to its length. After completing the recordings in early May, Guthrie took a trip back to the Southwest with Seeger tagging along, but he had returned to New York by August, when he began to appear on another Lomax radio show on CBS, Back Where I Come From, signing to become a regular. He also began performing in nightclubs, often in the company of his friend Cisco Houston. But he discontinued his newspaper column, which had been appearing in another Communist paper, the Daily Worker, apparently because his views were not sufficiently orthodox to suit the party. After signing to appear on another radio show, Pipe Smoking Time, he sent for his family, which moved to New York in late 1940. This level of success and, more important, conformity, did not suit him for long, however, and in early January 1941 he abruptly walked out on his radio commitments and left New York, moving back to Los Angeles with his family.

Guthrie briefly returned to his show on KFVD, but his next important activity began with a letter from the Bonneville Power Administration, part of the Department of the Interior, in Portland, OR, which requested his services to narrate and sing songs for a documentary film to be made about the building of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River running along the border of Oregon and Washington state. He drove to Portland with his family and was hired for one month as an "information consultant" to write songs. He wrote or adapted 26 of them over the next several weeks, including "Roll on Columbia" (later declared the official folk song of the state of Washington), "Grand Coulee Dam," and "Pastures of Plenty." Many of the songs were recorded, but the film project was shelved temporarily (it eventually appeared in 1949), and when the month was up on June 11, 1941, Guthrie returned to New York, leaving his family in Portland. Seeger had formed a politically oriented folk group, the Almanac Singers, with Lee Hays and Millard Lampell, and Guthrie joined them. In early July, they recorded two albums, Deep Sea Chanteys and Sodbuster Ballads, for General Records, before embarking on a national tour of union gatherings. The tour went across the country, concluding in August in Los Angeles. There, Guthrie was reunited briefly with his family, which had returned from Portland, but Mary Guthrie soon moved with the children to El Paso, TX, effectively separating from her husband, who returned to New York after performing in the Northwest with Seeger.

In New York, Guthrie lived at the communal Almanac House, where the expanding lineup of the Almanac Singers maintained its headquarters. As usual, he wrote prolifically, his compositions including "Sinking of the Reuben James," about a U.S. destroyer torpedoed by a German U-boat, and he began to get assignments for articles in magazines, starting with "Ear Players," published in Common Ground in the spring of 1942. During this period, the Almanac Singers, who had been rabidly anti-war until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, became rabidly pro-war, a stance that coincided perfectly with the mood of the U.S. in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. As a result, they began to get offers from network radio shows, reaching their commercial peak on February 14, 1942, when they appeared on a program called This Is War broadcast on all four national radio networks. Their political affiliations, however, made them unsuitable to the conventional entertainment business, just as Guthrie was individually. They turned down an offer to appear at the prestigious Rainbow Room, and their increasing recognition led to newspaper accounts of their ties to left-wing organizations including the Communist Party, which in turn led to the cancellations of other nightclub bookings and a proposed contract with Decca Records.

Guthrie, meanwhile, met Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, a dancer with the Martha Graham dance troupe, with whom he began a romantic relationship, even though both of them were married to other people. Around the same time, he was signed by publishers E.P. Dutton to write his autobiography. While working on this book, he gradually lessened his involvement with the Almanac Singers. By the fall, he was appearing in a short-lived group he called the Headline Singers along with Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee. Guthrie's fourth child, Cathy Ann Guthrie, was born to Marjorie Mazia on February 6, 1943. In March, Guthrie's book Bound for Glory was published to favorable reviews. The same month, Mary Guthrie signed her divorce papers, which had the effect of making Guthrie eligible for the draft. When he received his draft notice, he joined the merchant marine as an alternative to going into the army, signing on with Cisco Houston to a ship that was part of a convoy taking supplies for an invasion of Italy. The four-month trip began in June 1943; on September 13, the ship was torpedoed but managed to make it into port in Tunisia. Guthrie returned to New York in October, but could stay only 30 days before going on another merchant marine journey if he wanted to continue to avoid army service. So, there was a trip along the Eastern seaboard a month later, and then in January 1944 a second journey across the Atlantic that lasted until March.

When he returned, Guthrie showed up at the offices of the small Asch Record Company and introduced himself to its owner, Moses Asch, who agreed to record him on an informal basis. Starting on April 16, 1944, Guthrie, sometimes accompanied by one or more musical associates including Houston, Sonny Terry, Leadbelly, and former Almanac Singers member Bess Hawes, began making what eventually added up to hundreds of recordings for Asch including, for the first time, "This Land Is Your Land." The initial Asch sessions lasted at least into late April, totaling upward of 150 songs, both Guthrie originals and traditional compositions. Asch had no means of releasing such a torrent of material at the time.

In May 1944, Guthrie shipped out again on a merchant marine ship taking troops for the D-Day invasion of Europe. After the soldiers were put ashore on Omaha Beach in early July, the ship hit a mine, but made it back to England, where Guthrie appeared on the BBC before heading back to the U.S. in August. In September, Asch released the first of his Guthrie recordings on the various-artists album Folksay: American Ballads and Dances, followed by another various-artists album called Blues, and then, at the turn of the year, the solo album Woody Guthrie, consisting of three 78 rpm discs and including such songs as "Grand Coulee Dam" and "Jesus Christ." Guthrie also went back on the radio during this period, hosting a show on the local New York station WNEW called Ballad Gazette that used "This Land Is Your Land" as its theme song and working on the NBC program America for Christmas, broadcast December 25, 1944.

Guthrie continued to record extensively for Asch in the early months of 1945. In March, he was again called to the draft and found that the merchant marine's union had tightened its requirements with regard to the political affiliations of its volunteers, such that he was no longer eligible. Thus, he was inducted into the army on May 7, 1945. That was also the day that Germany surrendered, but the war against Japan was still going on. After undergoing basic training, Guthrie was posted to a series of army bases around the country. At one of them, he happened to hear on a jukebox Jack Guthrie's Capitol Records recording of "Oklahoma Hills," which peaked at number one on Billboard magazine's "Most Played Juke Box Folk Records" chart (the precursor to the country singles chart) for the first of six weeks on July 28, 1945. He discovered that Jack Guthrie had credited himself as songwriter. Legal discussions ensued, and eventually "Oklahoma Hills" was co-credited to the two Guthrie cousins, who shared the songwriting royalties. On November 13, 1945, Guthrie married Marjorie Mazie, who had obtained a divorce from her first husband. He was discharged from the army the following month.

In 1946, Guthrie played concerts under the auspices of People's Songs, an organization founded by Seeger and other folksingers as a clearinghouse to promote political folk songs. He also continued to record for Asch, who released a new album, Struggle: Documentary #1, and commissioned him to write a series of songs about Sacco and Vanzetti, the immigrant anarchists who had been convicted of a robbery in which two guards were killed and had been executed in 1927, their case long a cause célèbre of the American left. (The album was not released until 1960.) Inspired by his daughter Cathy, Guthrie also had begun writing children's songs, and he recorded these for Asch as well, starting in February 1946. After being released later in the year on Asch's Disc Records label on the album Songs to Grow On: Nursery Days, these became among Guthrie's most popular recordings, and he made more of them. Work Songs to Grow On followed in 1947. (Tragically, Cathy Ann Guthrie died in another of the bizarre series of accidental fires associated with him on February 10, 1947. He was not present when the incident occurred.)

Although Guthrie himself had faded from national attention, his persona as a rambling folksinger was already beginning to become legendary. This was suggested on January 10, 1947, when the musical Finian's Rainbow opened on Broadway for a run of 725 performances. Sonny Terry had a part in the show, which featured a certain character named Woody, a free-spirited, guitar-playing ex-merchant seaman who helped lead a labor revolt. On July 10, 1947, Guthrie's fifth child, Arlo Davy Guthrie, was born. He would go on to become a singer/songwriter like his father and do much to further Guthrie's legacy. His younger brother Joady Ben Guthrie, who also became a performer, was born on December 25, 1948. Nora Lee Guthrie, Guthrie's seventh child, was born in January 1950. Guthrie, meanwhile, had be re-recording much of the material from the Dust Bowl Ballads albums and the Columbia River songs for Asch, resulting in a Disc album called Ballads from the Dust Bowl released on a new Asch label, Folkways Records, in October 1948. He was also at work on a new book about a trip he and his father had taken in search of a goldmine in the early '30s. The book would not be published until 1976, when it appeared under the title Seeds of Man.

Moses Asch went bankrupt in 1947, an event that would have major implications for Guthrie's discography, since Asch's ex-partner, record store owner Herbert Harris of Stinson Records, held onto some of Guthrie's master recordings, as did a pressing plant that auctioned them to Pickwick Records. As Guthrie's popularity increased in the 1960s, Stinson and Pickwick's Everest label, as well as Folkways, would issue competing Guthrie titles drawn from the recordings he had made in the '40s for Asch.

Since discovering that his mother had suffered from Huntington's disease shortly after her death, Guthrie had feared that he would inherit the illness, as he confided to friends on several occasions in the 1930s and '40s. By the late '40s, he had begun to exhibit symptoms of the disease, although, since his behavior had always been idiosyncratic, they were not recognized as such by him or others, and tended to be ascribed to excessive drinking. His last major composition (for which he wrote only the lyrics with the music later added by Martin Hoffman) came in 1948 with "Deportees" (aka "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos"), an account of an incident in which a plane carrying immigrant workers crashed. Meanwhile, his earlier songs were beginning to become generally popular. The Maddox Brothers & Rose had a successful recording of "Philadelphia Lawyer," and in 1950 the Weavers, a group formed by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays of the Almanac Singers with Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert, recorded "So Long It's Been Good to Know Yuh," which peaked at number four in the pop charts in early 1951.

By late 1951, Guthrie's erratic behavior had led to his separation from his wife. On January 7, 1952, he did a recording session for Decca Records as part of proposed contract with the label, but his performing skills had deteriorated noticeably; the contract was withdrawn, and the recordings have never been released. This was Guthrie's last serious attempt to record, although there was a final session for Asch two years later that also proved fruitless. Guthrie was hospitalized on May 16, 1952, and was in and out of hospitals over the summer until a neurologist finally recognized his symptoms as Huntington's disease in September. Nevertheless, he was released and immediately moved to California, where he took up with a 20-year-old art student, Anneke van Kirk Marshall, who left her new husband for him and traveled with him back to New York and then to Florida. While staying on a friend's property there on June 10, 1953, Guthrie was severely burned in attempting to douse a campfire, crippling his right arm. Nevertheless, the couple took off again, stopping in Mexico in July so that Guthrie could be divorced. They married in December and moved to New York in January 1954. On February 22, 1954, Anneke Guthrie gave birth to Guthrie's eighth and last child, Lorina Lynn Guthrie, who would be put up for adoption after the couple separated and divorced.

On September 16, 1954, no longer able to function, Guthrie checked himself into Brooklyn State Hospital, where he had received his diagnosis two years earlier. This was a voluntary commitment that allowed him to leave the hospital on weekends, which he spent with his ex-wife Marjorie Guthrie. On May 23, 1956, Guthrie checked himself out, intending to hit the road again, but within days he was arrested for vagrancy in New Jersey and involuntarily committed to Greystone Park Hospital, where he remained for five years, until Marjorie Guthrie was able to get him moved back to Brooklyn State, an easier commute from her home in Coney Island.

As Guthrie's physical condition deteriorated, however, his career blossomed. The Weavers, who had been forced to disband due to the Communist witch hunts of the early '50s, reunited in 1955 and began performing "This Land Is Your Land," which gained enormously in popularity. On March 17, 1956, a benefit concert for Guthrie's children was held at the Pythian Hall in New York City. Guthrie himself attended, although he was of course unable to perform. The concert was one of the events that marked the start of the folk revival. By the late '50s, with Folkways releasing albums of previously unheard Guthrie recordings, his songs became necessary to the repertoires of all the emerging folk performers. For example, the Kingston Trio, the most popular folk group of the '50s, put "Hard, Ain't It Hard" on their gold-selling number one album The Kingston Trio, released in the fall of 1958, with "Hard Travelin'" appearing on Make Way in early 1961 and "This Land Is Your Land" and "Pastures of Plenty" on Goin' Places that spring; their version of "Deportee" was on their LP Sing a Song with the Kingston Trio in late 1963. The New Christy Minstrels' recording of "This Land Is Your Land" reached the pop singles chart in December 1962. Dust Bowl Ballads was reissued as an LP in 1964 along with the initial release of Library of Congress Recordings, which was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording. Several Guthrie songbooks were published during the early '60s, and in 1965 Born to Win, a collection of his writings edited by Robert Shelton, folk music critic for The New York Times, was published.

Guthrie was moved to Creedmore State Hospital in Queens, NY, in July 1966 and put under the care of a doctor specifically studying Huntington's disease. He died there on October 3, 1967, at the age of 55. His death did not impede his career renaissance. New albums continued to be released. On January 20, 1968, the first of two all-star tribute concerts was held in New York, with proceeds going to benefit research into Huntington's disease, its participants including Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, Odetta, Pete Seeger, and Tom Paxton. The second concert was held September 12, 1970, at the Hollywood Bowl and featured Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Havens, Odetta, Paxton, Seeger, Joan Baez, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Country Joe McDonald, and Earl Robinson. Albums chronicling the concerts were released in 1972 and reached the charts. Woody Sez, a book collecting his newspaper columns, was published in 1975, followed in 1976 by Seeds of Man and a film adaptation of Bound for Glory starring David Carradine with an accompanying soundtrack album. Guthrie was admitted to the Nashville Songwriters' Hall of Fame in 1977 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. He was the subject of an off-Broadway musical bearing his name in 1979. After the death of Moses Asch, the archives of Folkways Records were donated to the Smithsonian Institution, and to help finance the preservation of the material, an all-star album of songs by Guthrie and Leadbelly, Folkways: A Vision Shared, was released, featuring performances of Guthrie's songs by Bob Dylan, John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, and U2. It reached number 70 in the charts. "This Land Is Your Land" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1989. In 1990, another book of Guthrie's work, this one edited by rock critic Dave Marsh, was published: Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait -- The Unpublished Writings of an American Folk Hero. Another musical based on Guthrie's life and music, Woody Guthrie's American Song, opened regionally in 1991 and produced a cast album. In 1998, Billy Bragg and Wilco combined to investigate the Guthrie files of unpublished lyrics, resulting in the release of Mermaid Avenue, their recordings of the resulting songs. A second volume followed in 2000. Both albums charted in the Top 100.

Meanwhile, Smithsonian Folkways reissued Guthrie's recordings on carefully considered and annotated CDs, and RCA Victor, or its parent company BMG, periodically reissued Dust Bowl Ballads. The Asch recordings that had escaped to Stinson and Pickwick continued to appear, licensed to a variety of labels, a problem that was superseded as of the 1990s by the 50-year copyright limit on recordings in Europe, which eventually put all of Guthrie's recordings into the public domain there, resulting in a flood of unlicensed European reissues. While some of these discs were better than others, the Smithsonian Folkways and RCA Victor releases remained superior renderings of the material.

Decades after Guthrie's death, his ragamuffin image, the blue-jean-wearing Everyman with a guitar on his back, had become an American archetype, and his songs, in some cases benignly reinterpreted, had become a permanent part of the American consciousness, whether it was a parent and child singing "Put Your Finger in the Air" without any idea who wrote it, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir thundering "This Land Is Your Land," ignorant of its original socialist intent. In this sense, he had proved himself a true folk artist, one whose creations had passed into the culture and seemed always to have been there.

In truth, Guthrie defined an era in his Dust Bowl ballads, his outlaw tales, his work and labor songs, anti-war songs, children's songs, political songs, and a host of love songs and songs that touched on philosophy, geography and the hard work of living day to day in an emerging industrial world. He wrote constantly, a bit like a maverick beat reporter, and new poems, writings, drawings and even previously unknown songs kept turning up into the 21st century. In 2012, the centennial year of his birth, several books, anthologies and box sets of his work appeared, and Guthrie was firmly enshrined as a one-of-a-kind American icon and treasure.

Wikipedia:

Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) was an American singer-songwriter and folk musician whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children's songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his guitar. His best-known song is "This Land Is Your Land." Many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress. Such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Pete Seeger, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg, Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy, Bob Childers and Tom Paxton have acknowledged Guthrie as a major influence.

Many of his songs are about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression when Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California and learned their traditional folk and blues songs, earning him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Troubadour." Throughout his life Guthrie was associated with United States Communist groups, though he was seemingly not a member of any.

Guthrie was married three times and fathered eight children, including American folk musician Arlo Guthrie. Guthrie died from complications of Huntington's disease, a progressive genetic neurological disorder. During his later years, in spite of his illness, Guthrie served as a figurehead in the folk movement, providing inspiration to a generation of new folk musicians, including mentor relationships with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan.

Musical legacy [edit]

"I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.

I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. 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 what color, what size you are, how you are built.

I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work."

Foundation, Center and Archives [edit]

The Woody Guthrie Foundation is a non-profit organization that serves as administrator and caretaker of the Woody Guthrie Archives. The archive houses the largest collection of Guthrie material in the world. In 2013 the archives was relocated from New York City to the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after being purchased by the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Foundation. The Center officially opened on April 27, 2013. The Woody Guthrie Center features, in addition to the archives, a museum focused on the life and the influence of Guthrie through his music, writings, art, and political activities. The museum is open to the public; the archives is open only to researchers by appointment. The archives contains thousands of items related to Guthrie, including original artwork, books, correspondence, lyrics, manuscripts, media, notebooks, periodicals, personal papers, photographs, scrapbooks, and other special collections.

Guthrie's unrecorded written lyrics housed at the archives have been the starting point of several albums including the Wilco and Billy Bragg albums Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II, created in 1998 sessions at the invitation of Guthrie's daughter Nora. The Native American (Diné) trio Blackfire also interpreted previously unreleased Guthrie lyrics at Nora's invitation. Jonatha Brooke's 2008 album, The Works includes lyrics from the Woody Guthrie Archives set to music by Jonatha Brooke. The various artists compilation Note of Hope: A Celebration of Woody Guthrie was released in 2011. Nora selected Jay Farrar, Will Johnson, Anders Parker, and Yim Yames to record her father's lyrics for New Multitudes to honor the 100th anniversary of his birth and a box set of the Mermaid Avenue sessions was also released.

Folk Festival [edit]

The Woody Guthrie Folk Festival is held annually in mid-July to commemorate Guthrie's life and music. The festival is held on the weekend closest to Guthrie's birth date (July 14) in Guthrie's hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma. Planned and implemented annually by the Woody Guthrie Coalition, a non-profit corporation, the goal is simply to ensure Guthrie's musical legacy. The Woody Guthrie Coalition commissioned a local Creek Indian sculptor to cast a full-body bronze statue of Guthrie and his guitar, complete with the guitar's well-known inscription: "This machine kills fascists". The statue, sculpted by artist Dan Brook, stands along Okemah's main street in the heart of downtown and was unveiled in 1998, the inaugural year of the festival.

Jewish songs [edit]

Marjorie Mazia was born Marjorie Greenblatt and her mother, Aliza Greenblatt, was a well-known Yiddish poet. With her, Guthrie wrote numerous Jewish lyrics. Guthrie’s Jewish lyrics can be traced to the unusual collaborative relationship he had with his mother-in-law, who lived across from Guthrie and his family in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Guthrie (the Oklahoma troubadour) and Greenblatt (the Jewish wordsmith) often discussed their artistic projects and critiqued each other’s works, finding common ground in their shared love of culture and social justice, despite very different backgrounds. Their collaboration flourished in 1940s Brooklyn, where Jewish culture was interwoven with music, modern dance, poetry and anti-fascist, pro-labor, classic socialist activism. Guthrie was inspired to write songs that came directly out of this unlikely relationship, both personal and political; he identified the problems of Jews with those of his fellow Okies and other oppressed peoples.

These lyrics were rediscovered by Nora Guthrie and were set to music by the Jewish Klezmer group The Klezmatics with the release of Happy Joyous Hanukkah on JMG Records in 2007. The Klezmatics also released Wonder Wheel — Lyrics by Woody Guthrie, an album of spiritual lyrics put to music composed by the band. The album, produced by Danny Blume, was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album.

Tributes [edit]

Since his death, artists have paid tribute to Guthrie by covering his songs or by dedicating songs to him. On January 20, 1968, three months after Guthrie's death, Harold Leventhal produced A Tribute to Woody Guthrie at New York City's Carnegie Hall. Performers included Jack Elliott, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan and The Band, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, Odetta, and others. Leventhal repeated the tribute on September 12, 1970 at the Hollywood Bowl. Recordings of both concerts were eventually released as LPs and later combined into one CD. The Irish folk singer, Christy Moore, was also strongly influenced by Woody in his seminal 1970 album Prosperous, giving renditions of "The Ludlow Massacre" and Bob Dylan's "Song to Woody". Bob Dylan also penned, Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie as a later tribute song to Guthrie. Bruce Springsteen also performed a cover of Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" on his live album Live 1975–1985. In the introduction to the song, Springsteen referred to it as "just about one of the most beautiful songs ever written."

In September 1996 Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Case Western Reserve University cohosted Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, a 10-day conference of panel sessions, lectures, and concerts. The conference became the first in what would become the museum's annual American Music Masters Series conference. Highlights included Arlo Guthrie's keynote address, a Saturday night musical jamboree at Cleveland's Odeon Theater, and a Sunday night concert at Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra. Musicians performing over the course of the conference included Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the Indigo Girls, Ellis Paul, Jimmy LaFave, Ani DiFranco, and others. In 1999, Wesleyan University Press published a collection of essays from the conference and DiFranco's record label, Righteous Babe, released a compilation of the Severance Hall concert, 'Til We Outnumber 'Em, in 2000.

From 1999 to 2002 the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service presented the traveling exhibit, This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie. In collaboration with Nora Guthrie, the Smithsonian exhibition draws from rarely seen objects, illustrations, film footage, and recorded performances to reveal a complex man who was at once poet, musician, protester, idealist, itinerant hobo, and folk legend.

In 2003, Jimmy LaFave produced a Woody Guthrie tribute show called Ribbon of Highway, Endless Skyway. The ensemble show toured around the country and included a rotating cast of singer-songwriters individually performing Guthrie's songs. Interspersed between songs were Guthrie's philosophical writings read by a narrator. In addition to LaFave, members of the rotating cast included Ellis Paul, Slaid Cleaves, Eliza Gilkyson, Joel Rafael, husband-wife duo Sarah Lee Guthrie (Woody Guthrie's granddaughter) and Johnny Irion, Michael Fracasso, and The Burns Sisters. Oklahoma songwriter Bob Childers, sometimes called "the Dylan of the Dust", served as narrator. When word spread about the tour, performers began contacting LaFave, whose only prerequisite was to have an inspirational connection to Guthrie. Each artist chose the Guthrie songs that he or she would perform as part of the tribute. LaFave said, "It works because all the performers are Guthrie enthusiasts in some form". The inaugural performance of the Ribbon of Highway tour took place on February 5, 2003 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The abbreviated show was a featured segment of Nashville Sings Woody, yet another tribute concert to commemorate the music of Woody Guthrie held during the Folk Alliance Conference. The cast of Nashville Sings Woody, a benefit for the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, also included Arlo Guthrie, Marty Stuart, Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Janis Ian, and others.

Woody and Marjorie Guthrie were honored at a musical celebration featuring Billy Bragg and the band Brad on October 17, 2007 at Webster Hall in New York City. Steve Earle also performed. The event was hosted by actor/activist Tim Robbins to benefit the Huntington's Disease Society of America to commemorate the organization's 40th Anniversary.

Copyright controversy [edit]

On the typescript submitted for copyright of "This Land Is Your Land", Guthrie wrote:

“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.” Currently a number of different organizations claim copyright for many of Guthrie's songs.

When JibJab published a parody of Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" to comment on the US 2004 Presidential election, Ludlow Music attempted to have this parody taken down, claiming it breached their copyright. JibJab then sued to affirm their parody was Fair Use, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) acting for them. As part of their research on the case they found that the song had actually been first published by Woody Guthrie in 1945, although the copyright was not registered until 1956. This meant that when Ludlow applied to renew the copyright in 1984 they were 11 years too late, and the song had in fact been in the public domain since 1973 (28 years from first publication). Ludlow agreed that JibJab were free to distribute their parody. In an interview on NPR Arlo Guthrie said that he thought the parody was hilarious and he thought Woody would have loved it too. Ludlow still claims copyright for this song, though the basis for this claim is unclear.

The melody came from a tune that A.P.Carter had found and recorded with Sarah and Maybelle Carter prior to 1934 and was not original to Guthrie.

Posthumous honors [edit]

Pete Seeger had the Sloop Woody Guthrie built for an organization he founded, the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. It was launched in 1978. Now operated by the Beacon Sloop Club, it serves to educate people about sailing and the history and environs of the Hudson River.

Although Guthrie's catalog never brought him many awards while he was alive, in 1988 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 2000 he was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1987 "Roll On Columbia" was chosen as the official Washington State Folk Song, and in 2001 Guthrie's "Oklahoma Hills" was chosen to be the official state folk song of Oklahoma.

On September 26, 1992, The Peace Abbey, a multi-faith retreat center located in Sherborn, Massachusetts, awarded Guthrie its Courage of Conscience Award for his social activism and artistry in song which conveyed the plight of the common person.

Guthrie was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 1997.

On June 26, 1998, as part of its Legends of American Music series, the United States Postal Service issued 45 million 32-cent stamps honoring folk musicians Huddie Ledbetter, Guthrie, Sonny Terry and Josh White. The four musicians were represented on sheets of 20 stamps.

In July 2001, CB's Gallery in New York City began hosting an annual Woody Guthrie Birthday Bash concert featuring multiple performers. This event moved to the Bowery Poetry Club in 2007 after CB's Gallery and CBGB, its parent club, closed. The final concert in the series took place on July 14, 2012, Guthrie's 100th birthday.

In 2005, the Boston-based punk band Dropkick Murphys recorded "I'm Shipping Up to Boston". The song's lyrics are from a poem written by Guthrie, and the music was composed by the band. The song was released in 2005 on the album The Warrior's Code and gained fame when it was used as part of the soundtrack for the 2006 movie The Departed.

In 2006, The Klezmatics set Jewish lyrics written by Guthrie to music. The resulting album, Wonder Wheel, won the Grammy award for best contemporary world music album.

Also in 2006, Guthrie was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.

On April 27, 2007, Guthrie was one of four Okemah natives inducted into Okemah's Hall of Fame during the town's Pioneer Day weekend of festivities.

On February 10, 2008, The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949, a rare live recording released in cooperation with the Woody Guthrie Foundation, was the recipient of a Grammy Award in the category Best Historical Album. Less than two years later, Guthrie was again nominated for a Grammy in the same category with the 2009 release of My Dusty Road on Rounder Records.

In the centennial year of Guthrie's birth another album of newly composed songs on his lyrics has been released: New Multitudes. On March 10, 2012 there was a tribute concert at the Brady Theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma. John Mellencamp, Arlo Guthrie, Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion, the Del McCoury Band and the Flaming Lips performed.

The Grammy Museum was to have a tribute week in April 2012 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame a tribute in June. A four-disc box "Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions" by Billy Bragg and Wilco, with 17 unreleased songs and a documentary, was planned for April release.

On July 10, 2012, Smithsonian Folkways released the Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection, a 150-page large-format book with three CDs containing 57 tracks. The set also contains 21 previously unreleased performances and six never before released original songs, including Woody’s first known—and recently discovered—recordings from 1937. The box set received two nominations for the 55th Annual Grammy Awards, including Best Historical Album and Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package.

On April 27, 2013, The Woody Guthrie Center opened in Tulsa, Oklahoma's Brady District.

Novel [edit]

House of Earth, a long-lost novel written by Guthrie in 1947, was published on February 5, 2013 by Harper under actor Johnny Depp's publishing imprint, Infinitum Nihil. Guthrie apparently was unable to have the novel published during his lifetime. House of Earth is about a couple who build a house made of clay and earth to withstand the dust bowl's brutal weather. The book contains explicit sexual material, which may have contributed to his inability to get it published.

Selected discography [edit]

Many Guthrie tracks have been repeatedly repackaged and reordered. Items here are listed in order of the most recent published date, not original recording date.

Further reading/listening [edit]

Biography [edit]

Early life: 1912–30 [edit]

Guthrie was born in Okemah, a small town in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, the son of Nora Belle (née Sherman) and Charles Edward Guthrie. His parents named him after Woodrow Wilson, then Governor of New Jersey and the Democratic candidate soon to be elected President of the United States.

Charles Guthrie was an industrious businessman, owning at one time up to 30 plots of land in Okfuskee County. He was actively involved in Oklahoma politics and was a Democratic candidate for office in the county. When Charles was making stump speeches, he would often be accompanied by his son. Charles Guthrie was involved in the 1911 lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson. His son wrote three songs about the event and said that his father was later a member of the revived Ku Klux Klan.

Guthrie's early family life was affected by several fires, including one that caused the loss of his family's home in Okemah. His sister Clara later died in a coal-oil (used for heating) fire when Guthrie was seven, and Guthrie's father was severely burned in a subsequent coal-oil fire. The circumstances of these fires, especially that in which Charley was injured, remain unclear. It is unknown whether they were accidents or the result of actions by Guthrie's mother Nora, who was afflicted with Huntington's disease, although the family did not know this at the time. It leads to dementia as well as muscular effects.

Nora Guthrie was eventually committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane, where she died in 1930 from Huntington's disease. Judging from the circumstances of her father's death by drowning, researchers suspect that George Sherman suffered from the same hereditary disease.

When Nora Guthrie was institutionalized, Woody Guthrie was 14. His father Charley was living and working in Pampa, Texas, to repay his debts from unsuccessful real estate deals. Woody and his siblings were on their own in Oklahoma; they relied on their eldest brother Roy for support. The 14-year-old Woody Guthrie worked odd jobs around Okemah, begging meals and sometimes sleeping at the homes of family friends. According to one story, Guthrie made friends with an African-American blues harmonica player named "George", whom he would watch play at the man's shoe shine booth. Before long, Guthrie bought his own harmonica and began playing along with him. In another interview 14 years later, Guthrie claimed he learned how to play harmonica from a boyhood friend, John Woods, and that his earlier story about the shoe-shining player was false.

He seemed to have a natural affinity for music and easily learned to "play by ear." He began to use his musical skills around town, playing a song for a sandwich or coins. Guthrie easily learned old ballads and traditional English & Scots songs from the parents of friends. Although he did not excel as a student (he dropped out of high school in his fourth year and did not graduate), his teachers described him as bright. He was an avid reader on a wide range of topics. Friends recall his reading constantly.

Eventually, Guthrie's father sent for his son to come to Texas, but little changed for the aspiring musician. Guthrie, then 18, was reluctant to attend high school classes in Pampa and spent much time learning songs by busking on the streets and reading in the library at Pampa's city hall. He was growing as a musician, gaining practice by regularly playing at dances with his father's half-brother Jeff Guthrie, a fiddle player. At the library, he wrote a manuscript summarizing everything he had read on the basics of psychology. A librarian in Pampa shelved this manuscript under Guthrie's name, but it was later lost in a library reorganization.

1930s: Traveling [edit]

At age 19, Guthrie met and married his first wife, Mary Jennings, with whom he had three children, Gwendolyn, Sue, and Bill. With the advent of the Dust Bowl era, Guthrie left Texas, leaving Mary behind, and joined the thousands of Okies who were migrating to California looking for work. Many of his songs are concerned with the conditions faced by these working class people.

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

California [edit]

During the late part of that decade, he achieved fame with radio partner Maxine "Lefty Lou" Crissman as a broadcast performer of commercial "hillbilly" music and traditional folk music. Guthrie was making enough money to send for his family, who were still living in Texas. While appearing on the commercial radio station KFVD, owned by a populist-minded New Deal Democrat Frank W. Burke, Guthrie began to write and perform some of the protest songs that would eventually appear on Dust Bowl Ballads.

It was at KFVD that Guthrie met newscaster Ed Robbin. Robbin was impressed with a song Guthrie wrote about Thomas Mooney, believed by many to be a wrongly convicted man who was, at the time, a leftist cause célèbre. Robbin, who became Guthrie's political mentor, introduced Guthrie to socialists and Communists in Southern California, including Will Geer (who, in turn, introduced Guthrie to John Steinbeck). Robbin remained Guthrie's lifelong friend, and helped Guthrie book benefit performances in the Communist circles in Southern California. Notwithstanding Guthrie's later claim that "the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party," he was never a member of the Party. He was noted as a fellow traveler—an outsider who agreed with the platform of the party while not subject to party discipline. Guthrie asked to write a column for the Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker. The column, titled "Woody Sez," appeared a total of 174 times from May 1939 to January 1940. "Woody Sez" was not explicitly political, but was about current events as observed by Guthrie. He wrote the columns in an exaggerated hillbilly dialect and usually included a small comic; they were published as a collection after Guthrie's death. Steve Earle said of Guthrie, "I don't think of Woody Guthrie as a political writer. He was a writer who lived in very political times."

With the outbreak of World War II and the nonaggression pact the Soviet Union had signed with Germany in 1939, the owners of KFVD radio did not want its staff "spinning apologia" for the Soviet Union. Both Robbin and Guthrie left the station. Without the daily radio show, his prospects for employment diminished, and Guthrie and his family returned to Pampa, Texas. Although Mary Guthrie was happy to return to Texas, the wanderlusting Guthrie soon after accepted Will Geer's invitation to New York City and headed east.

1940s: Building a Legacy [edit]

New York City [edit]

Arriving in New York, Guthrie, known as "the Oklahoma cowboy," was embraced by its leftist folk music community. For a time, he slept on a couch in Will Geer's apartment. Guthrie made his first recordings—several hours of conversation and songs recorded by the folklorist Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress—as well as an album, Dust Bowl Ballads, for Victor Records in Camden, New Jersey.

Guthrie was tired of the radio overplaying Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." He thought the lyrics were unrealistic and complacent. Partly inspired by his experiences during a cross-country trip and his distaste for "God Bless America," he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land," in February 1940; it was subtitled "God Blessed America for Me." The melody is adapted from an old gospel song, "Oh My Loving Brother." This was best known as "When The World's On Fire," sung by the country group The Carter Family. Guthrie signed the manuscript with the comment, "All you can write is what you see, Woody G., N.Y., N.Y., N.Y." He protested against class inequality in the fourth and sixth verses:

These verses were often omitted in subsequent recordings, sometimes by Guthrie. Although the song was written in 1940, it was four years before he recorded it for Moses Asch in April 1944. Sheet music was produced and given to schools by Howie Richmond sometime later.

In March 1940, Guthrie was invited to play at a benefit hosted by The John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Farm Workers, to raise money for migrant workers. There he met the folksinger Pete Seeger, and the two men became good friends. Later, Seeger accompanied Guthrie back to Texas to meet other members of the Guthrie family. He recalled an awkward conversation with Mary Guthrie's mother, in which she asked for Seeger's help to persuade Guthrie to treat her daughter better.

Guthrie had some success in New York at this time as a guest on CBS's radio program Back Where I Come From and used his influence to get a spot on the show for his friend Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter. Ledbetter's Tenth Street apartment was a gathering spot for the leftwing musician circle in New York at the time, and Guthrie and Ledbetter were good friends, as they had busked together at bars in Harlem.

In November 1941, Seeger introduced Guthrie to his friend the poet Charles Olson, then a junior editor at the fledgling magazine Common Ground. The meeting led to Guthrie writing the article Ear Players in the Spring 1942 issue of the magazine. The article marked Guthrie's debut as a published writer in the mainstream media.

In September 1940 Guthrie was invited by the Model Tobacco Company to host their radio program, Pipe Smoking Time. Guthrie was paid $180 a week, an impressive salary in 1940. He was finally making enough money to send regular payments back to Mary. He also brought her and the children to New York, where the family lived briefly in an apartment on Central Park West. The reunion represented Woody's desire to be a better father and husband. He said "I have to set ['sic'] real hard to think of being a dad." Guthrie quit after the seventh broadcast, claiming he had begun to feel the show was too restrictive when he was told what to sing. Disgruntled with New York, Guthrie packed up Mary and his children in a new car and headed west to California.

Pacific Northwest [edit]

In May 1941, after a brief stay in Los Angeles, Guthrie moved the family north to Washington state on the promise of a job. Gunther von Fritsch was directing a documentary about the Bonneville Power Administration's construction of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, and needed a narrator. Alan Lomax had recommended Guthrie to narrate the film and sing songs onscreen. The original project was expected to take 12 months, but as filmmakers became worried about casting such a political figure, they minimized Guthrie's role. The Department of the Interior hired him for one month to write songs about the Columbia River and the construction of the federal dams for the documentary's soundtrack. Guthrie toured the Columbia River and the Pacific Northwest. Guthrie said he "couldn't believe it, it's a paradise", which appeared to inspire him creatively. In one month Guthrie wrote 26 songs, including three of his most famous: "Roll On Columbia", "Pastures of Plenty", and "Grand Coulee Dam". The surviving songs were released as Columbia River Songs. The film "Columbia" was not completed until 1949 (see below). At the conclusion of the month in Oregon and Washington, Guthrie wanted to return to New York. Tired of the continual uprooting, Mary Guthrie told him to go without her and the children. Although Guthrie would see Mary again, once on a tour through Los Angeles with the Almanac Singers, it was essentially the end of their marriage. Divorce was difficult, since Mary was a member of the Catholic Church, but she reluctantly agreed in December 1943.

Almanac Singers [edit]

Following the conclusion of his work in Washington State, Guthrie corresponded with Pete Seeger about Seeger's newly formed folk-protest group, the Almanac Singers. Guthrie returned to New York with plans to tour the country as a member of the group. The singers originally worked out of a loft in New York City hosting regular concerts called "hootenannys", a word Pete and Woody had picked up in their cross-country travels. The singers eventually outgrew the space and moved into the cooperative Almanac House in Greenwich Village.

Initially Guthrie helped write and sing what the Almanac Singers termed "peace" songs; while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Communist line was that World War II was a capitalist fraud. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, the group wrote anti-fascist songs. The members of the Almanac Singers and residents of the Almanac House were a loosely defined group of musicians, though the 'core' members included Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell and Lee Hays. In keeping with common socialist ideals, meals, chores and rent at the Almanac House were shared. The Sunday hootenannys were good opportunities to collect donation money for rent. Songs written in the Almanac House had shared songwriting credits among all the members, although in the case of "Union Maid", members would later state that Guthrie wrote the song, ensuring that his children would receive residuals.

In the Almanac House, Guthrie added authenticity to their work, since he was a "real" working-class Oklahoman. "There was the heart of America personified in Woody ... And for a New York Left that was primarily Jewish, first or second generation American, and was desperately trying to get Americanized, I think a figure like Woody was of great, great importance", a friend of the group, Irwin Silber, would say. Woody routinely emphasized his working-class image, rejected songs he felt were not in the country blues vein he was familiar with, and rarely contributed to household chores. House member Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, another Okie, would later recall that Woody, "loved people to think of him as a real working class person and not an intellectual". Guthrie contributed songwriting and authenticity in much the same capacity for Pete Seeger's post-Almanac Singers project People's Songs, a newsletter and booking organization for labor singers, founded in 1945.

Bound for Glory [edit]

Guthrie was a prolific writer, penning thousands of pages of unpublished poems and prose, many written while living in New York City. After a recording session with Alan Lomax, Lomax suggested Guthrie write an autobiography. Lomax thought Guthrie's descriptions of growing up were some of the best accounts he had read of American childhood. During this time Guthrie met Marjorie Mazia, a dancer in New York who would become his second wife. Mazia was an instructor at the prestigious Martha Graham Dance School, where she was assisting Sophie Maslow with her piece Folksay. Based on the folklore and poetry collected by Carl Sandburg, Folksay included the adaptation of some of Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads for the dance. Guthrie continued to write songs and began work on his autobiography. The end product, Bound for Glory, was completed with the patient editing assistance of Mazia and was first published by E.P. Dutton in 1943. It is vividly told in the artist's down-home dialect, with the flair and imagery of a true storyteller. Library Journal complained about the "too careful reproduction of illiterate speech." But Clifton Fadiman, reviewing the book in the New York Times, paid the author a fine tribute: "Someday people are going to wake up to the fact that Woody Guthrie and the ten thousand songs that leap and tumble off the strings of his music box are a national possession, like Yellowstone and Yosemite, and part of the best stuff this country has to show the world." A film adaptation of Bound for Glory was released in 1976.

The Asch recordings [edit]

In 1944, Guthrie met Moses "Moe" Asch of Folkways Records, for whom he first recorded "This Land Is Your Land". Over the next few years, he recorded "Worried Man Blues", along with hundreds of other songs. These recordings would later be released by Folkways and Stinson Records, which had joint distribution rights. The Folkways recordings are available (through the Smithsonian Institute online shop); the most complete series of these sessions, culled from dates with Asch, is titled The Asch Recordings.

World War II years [edit]

Guthrie believed performing his anti-fascist songs and poems at home was the best use of his talents; Guthrie lobbied the United States Army to accept him as a USO performer instead of conscripting him as a soldier in the draft. When Guthrie's attempts failed, his friends Cisco Houston and Jim Longhi pressured Guthrie to join the U.S. Merchant Marine. Guthrie followed their advice: he served as a mess man and dishwasher and frequently sang for the crew and troops to buoy their spirits on transatlantic voyages. Guthrie made attempts to write about his experience in the Merchant Marine but was never satisfied with the results. Longhi later wrote about these experiences in his book Woody, Cisco and Me. The book offers a rare first-hand account of Guthrie during his Merchant Marine service. In 1945, Guthrie's association with Communism made him ineligible for further service in the Merchant Marine, and he was drafted into the U.S. Army.

While he was on furlough from the Army, Guthrie and Marjorie were married. After his discharge, they moved into a house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island and over time had four children. One of their children, Cathy, died as a result of a fire at age four, sending Guthrie into a serious depression. Their other children were Joady, Nora and Arlo. Arlo followed in his father's footsteps as a singer-songwriter. During this period, Guthrie wrote and recorded Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child, a collection of children's music, which includes the song "Goodnight Little Arlo (Goodnight Little Darlin')", written when Arlo was about nine years old.

A 1948 crash of a plane carrying 28 Mexican farm workers from Oakland, California, in deportation back to Mexico inspired Woody to write "Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)".

In 1949 Guthrie's music was featured in the film Columbia River; Guthrie had been commissioned in 1941 to provide songs for the project, but it had been postponed by WWII.

Mermaid Avenue [edit]

The years living on Mermaid Avenue were among Guthrie's most productive periods as a writer. His extensive writings from this time were archived and maintained by Marjorie and later his estate, mostly handled by Guthrie's daughter, Nora. Several of the manuscripts contain scribblings by a young Arlo and the other Guthrie offspring.

During this time Ramblin' Jack Elliott studied extensively under Guthrie, visiting his home and observing how he wrote and performed. Elliott, like Bob Dylan later, idolized Guthrie and was inspired by his idiomatic performance style and repertoire. Because of Guthrie's suffering Huntington's disease, Dylan and Guthrie's son Arlo later claimed they learned much of Guthrie's performance style from Elliott. When asked about Arlo's claim, Elliott said, "I was flattered. Dylan learned from me the same way I learned from Woody. Woody didn't teach me. He just said, If you want to learn something, just steal it—that's the way I learned from Lead Belly."

1950s and 1960s [edit]

Deteriorating health [edit]

By the late 1940s, Guthrie's health was declining, and his behavior was becoming extremely erratic. He received various diagnoses (including alcoholism and schizophrenia), but in 1952, it was finally determined that he was suffering from Huntington's disease, a genetic disorder inherited from his mother. Believing him to be a danger to their children, Marjorie suggested he return to California without her; they eventually divorced.

Upon his return to California, Guthrie lived at the Theatricum Botanicum, a summer-stock type theatre founded and owned by Will Geer; with blacklisted singers and actors, he waited out the anti-communist political climate. As his health worsened, he met and married his third wife, Anneke Van Kirk. They had a child, Lorinna Lynn. The couple moved to Fruit Cove, Florida, briefly. They lived in a bus on land called Beluthahatchee, owned by his friend Stetson Kennedy. Guthrie's arm was hurt in a campfire accident when gasoline used to start the campfire exploded. Although he regained movement in the arm, he was never able to play the guitar again. In 1954, the couple returned to New York. Shortly after, Anneke filed for divorce, a result of the strain of caring for Guthrie. Anneke left New York and allowed friends to adopt Lorinna Lynn. Lorinna had no further contact with her birth parents and died in 1973 at the age of nineteen in a car accident in California. After the divorce, Guthrie's second wife, Marjorie, re-entered his life and cared for him until his death.

Guthrie, increasingly unable to control his muscles, was hospitalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital from 1956 to 1961, at Brooklyn State Hospital until 1966, and finally at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center until his death. Marjorie and the children visited Guthrie at Greystone every Sunday. They answered fan mail and played on the hospital grounds. Eventually a longtime fan of Guthrie invited the family to his nearby home for the Sunday visits. This lasted until Guthrie was moved to the Brooklyn State Hospital, which was closer to where Marjorie lived.

When Bob Dylan, who idolized Guthrie and whose early folk career was largely inspired by him, learned that Guthrie was hospitalized in Brooklyn, he was determined to meet his idol. By this time, Guthrie was said to have his "good days" and "bad days". On the good days, Dylan would sing songs to him, and at the beginning Guthrie seemed to warm to Dylan. When the bad days came, Guthrie would berate Dylan. Reportedly on Dylan's last visit, Guthrie did not recognize him.

At the end of his life, Guthrie was largely alone except for family. Because of the progression of Huntington's, he was difficult to be around. Guthrie's illness was essentially untreated, because of a lack of information about the disease. His death helped raise awareness of the disease and led Marjorie to help found the Committee to Combat Huntington's Disease, which became the Huntington's Disease Society of America. None of Guthrie's three remaining children with Marjorie have developed symptoms of Huntington's. Mary Guthrie's son Bill died in an auto-train accident in Pomona, California, at age 23. Mary's other children, Gwendolyn and Sue, suffered from the disease and both died at 41 years of age.

Folk revival and Guthrie's death [edit]

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new generation of young people were inspired by folk singers including Guthrie. These "folk revivalists" became more politically aware in their music than those of the previous generation. The American Folk Revival was beginning to take place, focused on the issues of the day, such as the civil rights movement and free speech movement. Pockets of folk singers were forming around the country in places such as Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. One of Guthrie's visitors at Greystone Park was the 19-year-old Bob Dylan who idolized Guthrie. Dylan wrote of Guthrie's repertoire: "The songs themselves were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them." After learning of Guthrie's whereabouts, Dylan regularly visited him. Guthrie died of complications of Huntington's disease on October 3, 1967. By the time of his death, his work had been discovered by a new audience, introduced to them in part through Dylan, Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, his ex-wife Marjorie and other new members of the folk revival, and his son Arlo.

Family [edit]