Woody Guthrie

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, a small farm town in Okfuskee County, and was named after the Democratic presidential nominee of that year ^[1]. His father, Charles Guthrie, traded land, dabbled in local politics, and for a time gave the family a comfortable footing. That footing collapsed in stages. Fires, failed investments, and the slow decline of Okemah's oil boom pushed the Guthries toward poverty during Woody's boyhood ^[2].

Tragedy shadowed the household. His older sister Clara died after a coal oil fire in 1919, and his mother, Nora Belle Guthrie, began showing erratic behavior that the family could not explain. She was eventually committed to the state hospital in Norman, where she died in 1930. Decades later it became clear she had suffered from Huntington's disease, the inherited neurological disorder that would eventually claim her son as well ^[1][2].

By his mid teens Guthrie was largely fending for himself. He slept in the homes of friends, worked odd jobs, and absorbed the hymns, fiddle tunes, and ballads that circulated through rural Oklahoma. In 1929 he moved to Pampa, in the Texas Panhandle, to join his father. There he learned guitar from an uncle, played at dances, and in 1933 married Mary Jennings, with whom he had three children ^[2].

The event that shaped Guthrie's career arrived on April 14, 1935, when a massive dust storm rolled over Pampa and turned the afternoon black. The Dust Bowl was destroying the farm economy of the southern plains, and like hundreds of thousands of others, Guthrie went west. He hitchhiked and rode freight trains to California in 1937, leaving his family behind until he could send for them ^[1][3].

Los Angeles gave him his first audience. On radio station KFVD he and his singing partner Maxine Crissman, billed as Lefty Lou, performed old songs and new ones Guthrie wrote about the migrants pouring into California. Those listeners, many of them displaced Oklahomans scorned as Okies, heard their own troubles set to familiar melodies. The songs from this period, later gathered as the Dust Bowl Ballads, include Do Re Mi, Talking Dust Bowl Blues, and Tom Joad, a ballad he wrote after seeing the film of The Grapes of Wrath ^[3][4].

Guthrie's politics sharpened in California. He wrote a column called Woody Sez for the People's World, a communist newspaper, though he never formally joined the party and remained too unruly for any organization to hold ^[1]. In 1940 he moved to New York City, where the folklorist Alan Lomax recorded hours of his songs and reminiscences for the Library of Congress, sessions that preserved his repertoire and his talk in his own voice ^[5]. That same year, Victor Records released Dust Bowl Ballads, his first commercial album ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Woody Guthrie usually starts with one song. In February 1940, irritated by the constant radio play of Irving Berlin's God Bless America, Guthrie wrote This Land Is Your Land in a New York boarding house. He set his lyrics to a melody adapted from a Carter Family recording and originally included verses questioning private property and hunger lines at relief offices ^[1][6]. The song circulated slowly, entered schoolbooks in the 1950s, and became something close to an alternative national anthem.

In 1941 the Bonneville Power Administration hired Guthrie for one month to write songs promoting public power projects on the Columbia River. He produced 26 songs in roughly 30 days, among them Roll On, Columbia and Pastures of Plenty, a body of work now considered one of the most concentrated bursts of songwriting in American music ^[3][6]. He also performed with the Almanac Singers alongside Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell, singing union songs in halls and on picket lines.

During the Second World War Guthrie served in the Merchant Marine with his friend Cisco Houston, surviving two torpedoed ships, and was later drafted into the Army ^[2]. He painted the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists on his guitar. His 1943 autobiographical novel Bound for Glory won critical praise for its loose, vivid prose and brought his story to readers who had never heard his records ^[1]. Counting up Woody Guthrie achievements means counting songs above all: he wrote lyrics for well over a thousand, including children's songs, war ballads, outlaw ballads like Pretty Boy Floyd, and Deportee, his 1948 response to a plane crash that killed 28 Mexican farm workers whom news reports left nameless ^[6].

Guthrie's restlessness ran through his marriages as much as his travels. His first marriage, to Mary Jennings, ended in divorce after years of long absences. In 1945 he married Marjorie Mazia, a dancer with the Martha Graham company, and settled with her in Coney Island, Brooklyn. They had four children, including Arlo Guthrie, born in 1947, who became a well known folk singer in his own right ^[1][2].

Grief kept returning in the same cruel form it had taken in his childhood. His daughter Cathy Ann, for whom he had written many of his children's songs, died after a fire in the family apartment in 1947 at age four ^[2]. A brief third marriage to Anneke Van Kirk in the early 1950s produced another daughter and ended quickly as his health failed.

Friends knew Guthrie as funny, generous, prolific, and impossible to pin down. He drew cartoons, filled notebooks with lyrics and sketches, and typed long rambling letters. He could vanish for weeks, then reappear with a stack of new songs. Marjorie remained devoted to him even after their divorce, managing his affairs during his long illness and later founding the organization that became the Huntington's Disease Society of America ^[2].

By the late 1940s Guthrie's behavior had grown erratic: stumbling, slurred speech, flashes of temper. Doctors first blamed alcoholism, then schizophrenia. In 1952 he was finally diagnosed with Huntington's disease, the same inherited condition that had killed his mother ^[1][2]. There was no treatment. The disease steadily destroyed his coordination and speech, and from 1956 onward he lived mostly in hospitals, including Greystone Park in New Jersey and Brooklyn State Hospital.

Even as his body failed, his reputation grew. The folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s treated him as its founding figure. Young performers made pilgrimages to his bedside, most famously Bob Dylan, who arrived in New York in 1961 largely to meet Guthrie and played for him at Greystone Park. Dylan's early Song to Woody paid open tribute to the debt ^[3][6].

Guthrie died on October 3, 1967, at Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, New York City, at age 55 ^[1]. His ashes were scattered off Coney Island. Within months, memorial concerts at Carnegie Hall featuring Dylan, Seeger, and others confirmed that his songs had outlived the man.

Guthrie's influence on American songwriting is hard to overstate. Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Billy Bragg, and countless others learned from his example that a song could be built from plain talk, local detail, and moral anger. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 as an early influence ^[7]. In 1998 and 2000 Billy Bragg and the band Wilco set unrecorded Guthrie lyrics to new music on the Mermaid Avenue albums, drawing from the vast archive of manuscripts he left behind ^[6].

That archive now anchors the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, opened in 2013, which holds his notebooks, artwork, and correspondence and mounts exhibits on his life and the Dust Bowl era ^[8]. His Library of Congress recordings, Smithsonian Folkways releases, and the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah keep the music in circulation.

The basic Woody Guthrie facts, a thousand songs, one battered guitar, and a life spent among migrants and working people, only partly explain his hold on later generations. What endures is the voice: dry, direct, sympathetic to the losers of American history, and confident that the country described in This Land Is Your Land belonged to them too ^[1][3].