Woody Guthrie
Folk singer, song writer, poet, novelist, columnist, agitator for social justice, and voice of the disenfranchised, Woody Guthrie sang for peace, for workers’ rights, and for America. Born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma, Guthrie’s family was torn apart by his father’s departure for Texas and his mother’s Huntington’s disease for which she was institutionalized. By the time he was fifteen years old, with a guitar and harmonica Guthrie was traveling the country by freight train. He joined his father in Texas in 1929, a time of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. He moved to Los Angeles in the 30’s to make a living as a singer and songwriter, where he began to gain attention for his radio broadcasts and small concerts. He then made his way to New York, where he met Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax. Guthrie and Seeger sang together as the Almanac Singers. The 1940 Lomax interviews for the Library of Congress feature Guthrie singing and talking about what he had seen on his journeys through America. Guthrie’s songs became popular from other artists' recordings, including Seeger’s The Weavers, as well as his own performances, including RCA’s Dust Bowl Ballads. Guthrie wrote over 1,000 songs, many of which have become integral to the American musical songbook: "So Long (It’s Been Good to Know Yuh)", "Hard Traveling", "Union Maid", "Tom Joad" (inspired by Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath), "Pretty Boy Floyd", "I Ain’t Got No Home", and of course, "This Land is Your Land." After Guthrie served in the Merchant Marines in World War II, the folk music movement began to take off throughout the country, but was stalled by black listing and suspicions of the influence of communism in folk music’s leftist ideals. For the last fifteen years of his life Guthrie was hospitalized with the same neurological disease as his mother. However, his writings and songs became the inspiration for a new generation of political activists and folk musicians in the sixties, including Bob Dylan who made a pilgrimage to Guthrie’s bedside. A member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory (1943) was filmed in 1976. He died in 1967, as his son Arlo was taking up the mantle of a new voice for America.
