Woody Guthrie

• 1. Introduction

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  Woody Guthrie often played a guitar that carried a blunt message: "This machine kills fascists." He was an American singer, songwriter and composer who wrote hundreds of country, folk and children's songs, along with ballads and improvised pieces. Mojo placed his album Dust Bowl Ballads on its list of 100 Records That Changed the World. Many of his recorded songs are now archived in the Library of Congress. He is widely considered one of the most significant figures in American folk music. His own life, though, was anything but tidy. How did a poor, restless young man from Oklahoma end up writing songs that later generations treated as a national inheritance? Why did friends, scholars and the FBI argue for decades over his ties to communism? And what happened when the illness that struck his mother came for him as well?

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• 2. Fires of Okemah

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  In 1909, a fire destroyed the Guthrie family home in Okemah, Oklahoma, a month after it was finished. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born three years later, on the 14th of July 1912, in that small town in Okfuskee County. His parents, Nora Belle and Charles Edward Guthrie, named him for Woodrow Wilson, then Governor of New Jersey, who won the presidency that fall.

  Charles Guthrie was an industrious businessman who at one time owned as many as 30 plots of land in the county. He was active in Oklahoma politics and ran for county office as a Democrat. Charles was also reportedly involved in the 1911 lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson. Woody wrote three songs about the event in the 1960s. He also said his father joined the Ku Klux Klan after its revival began in 1915.

  Fire returned twice more. When Woody was seven, his sister Clara died after setting her clothes alight during an argument with her mother. In 1927, his father was severely burned in a fire at home.

  Nora Guthrie, meanwhile, was showing dementia and muscular degeneration that nobody could explain. The family did not yet know it was Huntington's disease. When Woody was 14, she was committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane. Charles was working in Pampa, Texas, trying to repay debts from failed real estate deals. The children were left to manage on their own and leaned on their eldest brother, Roy. Woody took odd jobs, begged for meals and sometimes slept at the homes of family friends.

  Music reached him through the people around him. The parents of his friends taught him old ballads and traditional English and Scottish songs. A shoeshine boy named George, who was African American, played blues on the harmonica. Woody bought his own harmonica, played along, and began to busk for money and food. He dropped out of high school in his senior year, though his teachers called him bright. He read widely on all sorts of subjects.

  In 1929, Charles sent for his son to join him in Pampa, where he was running a flophouse. Woody spent little time in class there. He busked, read in the library at the city hall, and played dances with his father's half-brother Jeff Guthrie, a fiddler. His mother died in 1930, still a patient at the hospital. In 1931 he met Mary Jennings, the younger sister of his musician friend Matt Jennings, and the two would marry in Pampa.

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• 3. Dust Bowl Troubadour

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  When the dust storms arrived, thousands of Texans and Okies set out for California in search of work, and Guthrie went with them. He left his wife Mary and their three children in Texas. In Los Angeles, he found a place on radio station KFVD, owned by Frank W. Burke, a populist-minded New Deal Democrat. With radio partner Maxine "Lefty Lou" Crissman, he performed commercial hillbilly music and traditional folk music. The pay was good enough that he sent for his family. At KFVD he also began writing the protest songs that would fill Dust Bowl Ballads.

  Ed Robbin, a newscaster at the station, loved a song Guthrie wrote about Thomas Mooney, a political activist wrongly convicted in a famous case of the day. Robbin became Guthrie's political mentor. He introduced him to socialists and communists in Southern California, including Will Geer, and to the writer John Steinbeck. He also helped book benefit performances.

  The arrangement ended once World War II began and publicity grew around the pact the Soviet Union had signed with Germany in 1939. The station's owners did not want their staff "spinning apologia" for the Soviet Union, so they fired Robbin and Guthrie. Guthrie went back to Pampa with his family. Will Geer had invited him to New York City, and Guthrie chose to head east.

  In New York, Guthrie was known as "the Oklahoma cowboy," and the folk music community embraced him. He slept for a time on a couch in Geer's apartment. The folklorist Alan Lomax recorded several hours of his conversation and songs for the Library of Congress. Victor Records in Camden, New Jersey, recorded Dust Bowl Ballads, which earned him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Troubadour."

  In February 1940, Guthrie wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land." He was irritated by how often Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" played on the radio. He thought its lyrics unrealistic and complacent. For the tune, he borrowed from an old gospel song, "Oh My Loving Brother." The country group the Carter Family had already reworked that song as "Little Darling Pal of Mine." Guthrie signed the manuscript with a note: "All you can write is what you see."

  He did not record it until April 1944, four years after writing it, for Moses Asch. Howie Richmond later produced sheet music and gave it to schools. Asch would go on to record "Worried Man Blues" and hundreds of other Guthrie songs over the next few years.

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• 4. The Party Question

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  Will Kaufman titled his book Woody Guthrie an American Radical. Its introduction says Guthrie lived "on the warpath-against poverty, political oppression, censorship, capitalism, fascism, racism, and, ultimately, war itself." Socialism shaped his work, and he turned against capitalism in his lyrics at the height of the Depression.

  Guthrie once claimed, "the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party." Yet the usual account says he never joined. He was labeled a fellow traveler, someone who agreed with the party's platform but stayed clear of its discipline. He never declared himself a communist in public. He did say, "If you call me a Communist, I am very proud because it takes a wise and hard-working person to be a Communist." In later years he put it another way: "I'm not a Communist, but I've been in the red all my life." Kaufman cites the writer Klein for a further claim, that Guthrie applied to join and was turned down.

  His newspaper writing shows the same ambiguity. For the communist paper People's World, he wrote a column called "Woody Sez." It ran 174 times between May 1939 and January 1940. It was not openly political, but it commented on current events as Guthrie saw them. He wrote it in an exaggerated hillbilly dialect and usually added a small comic. The columns were published as a collection after his death.

  The membership question remains disputed. Ronald Radosh reported that Gordon Friesen and Sis Cunningham, founders of Broadside in the 1960s, told him in a 1970s interview that Woody belonged to their party club. They said he was handed a stack of The Daily Worker to sell on the street each day. Pete Seeger gave a similar account. He said Cunningham, a far more disciplined person than he or Woody, "got Woody in," and that Woody "was briefly in the Communist Party."

  Guthrie's loyalty to Moscow's line twisted with events. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he swung toward antiwar songs. One described the Soviet invasion of Poland as a favor to Polish farmers. Another attacked President Roosevelt's loans to Finland, which was defending itself in the 1939 Winter War. His position flipped again in 1941, after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Unlike Seeger, he never expressed regret for his Stalinism. He admired Stalin openly and took delight in hoping for a communist victory in the Korean War.

  The FBI settled the matter for itself. Aaron J. Leonard documents that the agency treated Guthrie as a member and kept him on its Security Index well into the early 1960s.

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• 5. Rivers and Rooming Houses

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  In March 1940, a benefit run by the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Farm Workers brought Guthrie together with the folk singer Pete Seeger. They became good friends. Seeger went with him to Texas to meet the Guthrie family and later remembered an awkward talk with Mary's mother. She asked him to help persuade Woody to treat her daughter better. From April 1940 the two men shared the Greenwich Village loft of the sculptor Harold Ambellan and his fiancée.

  Guthrie guested on the CBS radio program Back Where I Come From. He used his pull to get a spot for his friend Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, with whom he had busked in Harlem bars. In September 1940, the Model Tobacco Company hired him to host its radio show Pipe Smoking Time at $180 a week, a strong salary for 1940. He brought Mary and the children to New York to live on Central Park West. He admitted, "I have to set real hard to think of being a dad." After seven broadcasts he quit, complaining that he was being told what to sing. He loaded the family into a new car and drove west.

  In May 1941, Guthrie moved to the Lents neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, on the promise of a job. The director Gunther von Fritsch was making a documentary about the Bonneville Power Administration and the building of the Grand Coulee Dam. Alan Lomax had recommended Guthrie as narrator and onscreen singer. Filmmakers grew nervous about casting such a political figure, so they shrank his role. The Department of the Interior hired him for a single month to write songs about the Columbia River and the benefits of the federal dams.

  Guthrie toured the river and the Pacific Northwest and said he "couldn't believe it, it's a paradise." In that one month he wrote 26 songs. They included "Roll On, Columbia, Roll On," "Pastures of Plenty" and "Grand Coulee Dam." The surviving songs came out as Columbia River Songs, and the film, Columbia, was not finished until 1949. Washington later named "Roll on Columbia" its official state folk song in 1987. On the 6th of April 1966, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall gave the hospitalized Guthrie the department's Conservation Service Award in absentia and announced that a Bonneville electrical substation would carry his name.

  Tired of constant moving, Mary told him to go back to New York without her and the children. It was essentially the end of the marriage, and she reluctantly agreed to a divorce in December 1943.

  Back in New York, Guthrie joined Seeger's new folk-protest group, the Almanac Singers. They began in a loft, hosting regular concerts called "hootenannies," a word Pete and Woody had picked up on their travels. When the loft became too small, the group moved into the cooperative Almanac House in Greenwich Village. Its core was Guthrie, Seeger, Millard Lampell and Lee Hays. Meals, chores and rent were shared, and Sunday hootenannies passed the hat to cover the rent.

  While the Nazi-Soviet Pact held, the group wrote what it called "peace" songs. After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, it turned to anti-fascist songs. Songwriting credits were shared, but members later said Guthrie wrote "Union Maid," so that his children would receive the residuals. Irwin Silber, a friend of the group, said Woody was "the heart of America personified" to a New York left that was mostly Jewish and eager to become American. Woody worked at the image. He rejected songs outside the country blues he knew and rarely did chores. Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, another Okie in the house, recalled that he wanted people to think of him as truly working class and not an intellectual.

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• 6. Convoys and Manuscripts

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  "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." So wrote Clifton Fadiman in The New Yorker, reviewing Guthrie's autobiography Bound for Glory. Alan Lomax had urged him to write it after a recording session. Lomax thought Guthrie's accounts of growing up were among the best he had read of an American childhood.

  E.P. Dutton first published the book in 1943, with editing help from the dancer Marjorie Mazia, born Marjorie Greenblatt. She taught at the Martha Graham Dance School and assisted Sophie Maslow on Folksay, a dance piece that mixed folk songs with Carl Sandburg's poem The People, Yes. Guthrie played live at its premiere in March 1942. The Library Journal complained that the book reproduced illiterate speech too carefully. The book later inspired a film, Bound for Glory, starring David Carradine, which won the 1976 Academy Award for its adapted score.

  In June 1943, Guthrie joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, persuaded by his friends Cisco Houston and Jim Longhi after the Army refused to take him as a USO performer. He sailed on SS William B. Travis, SS William Floyd and SS Sea Porpoise in convoys during the Battle of the Atlantic. He worked as a mess man and dishwasher and sang for crews and troops. His first ship hit a mine in the Mediterranean, killing one person, but still reached Bizerte, Tunisia under its own power.

  The Sea Porpoise carried troops from the United States to England and France for D-Day. On the 5th of July 1944, the German submarine U-390 torpedoed her off Utah Beach and injured 12 crew members. Guthrie was unhurt, and the ship was repaired at Newcastle. Longhi later wrote about this voyage in Woody, Cisco and Me. He recalled that Guthrie called his guitar a "Hoping Machine." Aboard the troop ship, Guthrie then built a real one from cloth, whirligigs and scrap metal on a railing at the stern, to lift the soldiers' spirits. In 1945, the government decided his link to communism barred him from further service, and he was drafted into the Army.

  On furlough, Guthrie married Marjorie on the 13th of November 1945. After his discharge they settled in a house on Mermaid Avenue in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn. They had four children: Cathy, Nora, Arlo and Joady. Cathy died in a fire at the age of four, and Guthrie sank into a serious depression. Arlo and Joady became singer-songwriters.

  These Mermaid Avenue years were among his most productive as a writer. He wrote Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child for the children, including "Goodnight Little Arlo (Goodnight Little Darlin')," written when Arlo was about nine. In 1947 he wrote House of Earth, a historical novel with explicit sexual material about a couple building a clay house to withstand Dust Bowl weather. No one would publish it then, and it appeared in 2013 under Johnny Depp's imprint, Infinitum Nihil. He also sketched and painted, usually portraits of the people in his songs.

  Ramblin' Jack Elliott studied under him there, watching how he wrote and performed. Arlo Guthrie and Bob Dylan both later said they learned much of Guthrie's style through Elliott, because Guthrie's health had declined. Elliott recalled Guthrie's advice: "If you want to learn something, just steal it."

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• 7. The Long Goodbye

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  By the late 1940s, Guthrie's behavior had become wildly erratic, and doctors offered various diagnoses, including alcoholism and schizophrenia. In 1952, it was finally determined that he had Huntington's disease, a genetic disorder inherited from his mother. He was 43. Doctors advised Marjorie to divorce him and keep the children safe from his paranoia and occasional violence. They divorced in 1953, though she remained close and supervised his complex medical needs for the rest of his life.

  He returned to California and lived at the Theatricum Botanicum, the summer-stock theater founded and owned by Will Geer. There he sat out the anti-communist climate alongside singers and actors blacklisted by HUAC. In 1953 he married Anneke van Kirk, and they had a daughter, Lorina Lynn. For a short time they lived in a bus on land called Beluthahatchee, owned by his friend Stetson Kennedy, in Fruit Cove, Florida. There, gasoline used to start a campfire exploded and hurt his arm. He regained movement but could never play guitar again.

  In 1954 the couple moved to the Beach Haven apartment complex in Gravesend, Brooklyn, owned by Fred Trump. Guthrie wrote the song "Old Man Trump" there. Soon afterward Anneke filed for divorce, worn down by the strain of caring for him. She arranged for friends to adopt Lorina Lynn, who never had contact with her birth parents again and died in a car crash in California in 1973, aged 19.

  Guthrie's body grew harder to control. He was hospitalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris County, New Jersey, from 1956 to 1961. Then he moved to Brooklyn State Hospital until 1966 and finally to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens Village, New York. Marjorie and the children visited Greystone every Sunday, answered fan mail, and played on the grounds. A longtime fan eventually invited them to his nearby home for the visits. By 1965 Guthrie could no longer speak and communicated by moving his arms or rolling his eyes.

  One of his visitors at Greystone was a 19-year-old Bob Dylan, who idolized him and came regularly once he learned where Guthrie was. Dylan wrote of the repertoire: "The songs themselves were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them." A new generation was discovering folk music through the civil rights and Free Speech movements, and Guthrie's name came with it.

  Woody Guthrie died at Creedmoor on the 3rd of October 1967 of complications of Huntington's disease. According to family legend, he had been listening to a recording of his son Arlo's "Alice's Restaurant" at his bedside. His remains were cremated and scattered at sea.

  The disease took more of his family. His daughters Gwendolyn and Sue from his first marriage both died of it at 41 in the 1970s, and his son Bill died in a car accident at 23. Marjorie helped found the Committee to Combat Huntington's Disease, which became the Huntington's Disease Society of America. None of his three surviving children with Marjorie has developed symptoms.

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• 8. Afterlife of Songs

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  Songwriters who have named Woody Guthrie as an influence include Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer, Jerry Garcia and Steve Earle. Springsteen introduced "This Land Is Your Land" on his live album as "just about one of the most beautiful songs ever written." Dylan wrote a poem, Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, and a song, "Song to Woody."

  On the 20th of January 1968, three months after Guthrie died, Harold Leventhal produced A Tribute to Woody Guthrie at New York's Carnegie Hall. Performers included Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and The Band, Judy Collins and Arlo Guthrie. Leventhal repeated it on the 12th of September 1970 at the Hollywood Bowl with Joan Baez and others. In 1978, Seeger launched the sloop Woody Guthrie for his Hudson River Sloop Clearwater organization.

  Since 1998, the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, or WoodyFest, has been held every July in his hometown of Okemah. That inaugural year, a bronze statue of him with his guitar and its famous slogan, made by the sculptor Dan Brook, was unveiled on the main street. That same year, on the 26th of June 1998, the U.S. Postal Service issued 45 million 32-cent stamps honoring Guthrie, Huddie Ledbetter, Sonny Terry and Josh White.

  The Woody Guthrie Archives hold the largest collection of Guthrie material in the world. In 2013 they moved from New York City to the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after the George Kaiser Foundation purchased them. The center opened on the 27th of April 2013. Its thousands of items include artwork, lyrics, manuscripts, notebooks and photographs. Researchers can use the archives by appointment.

  Unrecorded lyrics there became new records. Guthrie's daughter Nora invited Wilco and Billy Bragg to set some of them to music in 1998 sessions, producing Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II. For his 100th birthday, Jay Farrar, Will Johnson, Anders Parker and Yim Yames recorded New Multitudes. In 2022 the Dropkick Murphys released This Machine Still Kills Fascists, ten songs built on unused Guthrie lyrics from his archives, after Nora gave the band exclusive access.

  A quieter body of lyrics came from his friendship with Aliza Greenblatt, a well-known Yiddish poet and Marjorie's mother. She lived near the Guthries in Brooklyn in the 1940s, and the two critiqued each other's work. Guthrie wrote numerous Jewish lyrics that linked the troubles of Jews with those of his fellow Oklahomans. Nora rediscovered them, and the Klezmatics set them to music on Happy Joyous Hanukkah and Wonder Wheel. Wonder Wheel won a Grammy for Best Contemporary World Music Album.

  Honors piled up. Guthrie entered the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 1997 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000 and joined the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 2006. In 2001, "Oklahoma Hills" became that state's official folk song.

  On the 3rd of December 1944, Guthrie wrote and read a script on the radio to explain why he sang what he sang. "I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good," he said. He promised to fight such songs to his "very last breath of air" and to sing instead the songs that make you "take pride in yourself and in your work."

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