Woody Guthrie
Best known for
Songwriter
Guitar
Lead Vocals
Woody Guthrie was one of the most consequential figures in American folk music—a Dust Bowl balladeer whose plainspoken songs of migration, labor, and hard times gave the Depression a voice and set the template for the topical folk revival that followed. Author of “This Land Is Your Land” and hundreds of other songs, he is the acknowledged fountainhead for Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and generations of protest singers.
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- Born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, and named for the presidential candidate of that year. His childhood was marked by catastrophe—a family home lost to fire, the death of his sister Clara, and his mother Nora’s descent into what was later understood to be Huntington’s disease, for which she was institutionalized when Woody was a teenager.
- After the family broke apart, he drifted to Pampa, Texas, in the late 1920s, married Mary Jennings, and taught himself guitar and harmonica while the Dust Bowl storms drove tenant farmers off the southern plains. He joined the westward exodus to California in 1937, an experience that would supply the raw material for nearly all his early work.
- In Los Angeles he landed a radio slot on KFVD, performing as “Woody and Lefty Lou” with Maxine Crissman, and began writing the topical songs that made his name—“Do Re Mi,” “Talking Dust Bowl Blues,” and “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.”
- Arriving in New York in 1940, he was embraced by folklorist Alan Lomax, who recorded him for the Library of Congress in a landmark series of interviews and performances that March.
- Later that year Victor Records issued Dust Bowl Ballads, his first commercial album and the record most associated with him—a song cycle often cited among the first concept albums, mirroring the migrant journey of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
- He wrote “This Land Is Your Land” in February 1940 as a pointed answer to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” though he did not record it until 1944 for Moses Asch. It became an American standard and, in its restored verses, an enduring anthem of populist dissent.
- In May 1941 the Bonneville Power Administration hired him to write songs promoting public hydroelectric power on the Columbia River; in roughly a month he produced some two dozen numbers, including “Roll On Columbia,” “Grand Coulee Dam,” and “Pastures of Plenty.”
- That same year he joined the Almanac Singers alongside Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell, a topical group that championed labor unions and antifascism and helped seed the postwar folk movement.
- He famously scrawled “This Machine Kills Fascists” across his guitar, a slogan that came to symbolize the idea of the folk song as a weapon of conscience.
- His autobiography, Bound for Glory, was published by E.P. Dutton in 1943 to wide acclaim and was later adapted into the 1976 film of the same name starring David Carradine.
- During World War II he served in the Merchant Marine and later the Army, often shipping out with his friend and frequent recording partner Cisco Houston; his boats were twice torpedoed.
- Beginning in the mid-1940s he recorded prolifically for Moses Asch’s labels—material that became the backbone of the Folkways catalog—including children’s records such as Songs to Grow On and the migrant-worker elegy “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).”
- Huntington’s disease, inherited from his mother, slowly disabled him through the 1950s. Diagnosed with the disorder in 1952, he spent his last years largely confined to hospitals, including Greystone Park in New Jersey and Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens.
- A teenage Bob Dylan sought him out at his bedside in 1961, a pilgrimage that became folklore in its own right; Dylan’s early “Song to Woody” paid the debt directly.
- Guthrie died on October 3, 1967, at Creedmoor. His son Arlo Guthrie became a noted folk singer in his own right, and his daughter Nora Guthrie has stewarded his archive, opening thousands of unrecorded lyrics to later artists.
- His legacy has been continually renewed: Billy Bragg and Wilco set his unpublished words to new music on Mermaid Avenue (1998), and his honors include induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an Early Influence (1988), a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (2000), and Grammy Hall of Fame recognition for “This Land Is Your Land” and Dust Bowl Ballads.
