Woody Guthrie

He was born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie on 14 July 1912 in Okemah and named after Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate for president that year. His father, Charley, a cowboy turned land speculator and local politician, taught him Western songs, Indian songs and Scottish folk songs, and his mother, Nora, played the piano and sang old ballads. A run of family misfortunes left him supporting himself in his mid-teens with odd jobs around Okemah. He picked up the harmonica from a shoeshine boy named George who played the blues, and in high school he sang in the choir and entertained classmates with his harmonica and jig dancing.

In 1929 he joined his father in Pampa, in the Texas Panhandle, and it was there, not in Oklahoma, that he lived through the dust storms of the 1930s. In Pampa he learned guitar, fiddle, banjo and mandolin and mostly played dances, some with his father’s half-brother Jeff Guthrie, a fiddler. With Matt Jennings and Cluster Baker he formed the Corn Cob Trio and later the Pampa Junior Chamber of Commerce Band, and he took up drawing and painting, which he kept at for the rest of his life.

In 1937 he headed for California hoping to make a living as a country-western entertainer, hitchhiking and riding freight trains and paying his way by painting signs and singing in saloons. In August 1937 he and his cousin Jack Guthrie got a radio show on KFVD in Hollywood. When Jack left, Woody teamed with Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman, and the “Woody and Lefty Lou” show drew thousands of letters, many from Oklahoma migrants living in the camps. On the air he sang old-time traditional songs alongside his own, and he began writing the songs of the migrant experience that made his name, among them “I Ain’t Got No Home,” “Talking Dust Bowl Blues,” “Do Re Mi” and “Oklahoma Hills.” He also met Cisco Houston, later his traveling and recording companion, and from May 1939 to January 1940 he wrote a column, “Woody Sez,” for the newspaper People’s World. After KFVD let him go, the actor Will Geer encouraged him to come to New York.

He arrived there early in 1940. In February he wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” as an answer to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which he felt was overplayed on the radio, and in March, at a benefit for migrant farm workers, he met Pete Seeger. That same month Alan Lomax recorded him for the Library of Congress in Washington: hours of songs and talk about Oklahoma, freight trains and the Depression, including “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” “Talking Dust Bowl Blues” and “Do-Re-Mi.” Victor recorded him on 26 April and 3 May 1940, and in July it issued Dust Bowl Ballads, his first commercial records, as two three-disc albums of 78s; the two-part “Tom Joad” retold the story of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. He was a guest on CBS radio’s Back Where I Come From, where he got his friend Lead Belly a spot, and in September 1940 the Model Tobacco Company hired him to host Pipe Smoking Time, a job he quit after seven broadcasts.

In May 1941 he went to Portland, Oregon, where the federal government put him on its payroll for one month to write songs for a Bonneville Power Administration documentary about the Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia River. In that month he wrote 26 songs, including “Roll On, Columbia,” “Pastures of Plenty” and “Grand Coulee Dam”; the war delayed the film, which was finished in 1949.

Back in New York he joined the Almanac Singers, the topical group whose core was Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell. They held “hootenannies” in a loft and later at the Almanac House in Greenwich Village and sang for labor unions and against fascism; Guthrie wrote “Union Maid” in those years. Former Almanacs later formed the Weavers, whose popularity carried his songs to a far wider public. In March 1942 he provided live music for Sophie Maslow’s dance piece Folksay, built partly on his Dust Bowl Ballads, and in 1943 E. P. Dutton published Bound for Glory, the semi-autobiographical novel Lomax had urged him to write, which he finished with editing help from the dancer Marjorie Mazia, later his wife. His Gibson guitar of these years carried the hand-painted sign “This Machine Kills Fascists.”

In June 1943, with Cisco Houston and Jim Longhi, he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine. He worked as a mess man, sang for crews and troops on Atlantic convoys and wrote wartime songs such as “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” and “Talking Merchant Marine.” His first ship, the William B. Travis, struck a mine in the Mediterranean, and his last, the Sea Porpoise, was torpedoed off Utah Beach on 5 July 1944. In 1945 he was drafted into the Army. Meanwhile, in 1944, he had begun recording for Moses Asch, founder of the Asch label and later Folkways Records, and in April 1944 he made his first recording of “This Land Is Your Land.” Over about six years he cut some two hundred sides for Asch, his own songs together with many traditional and country songs he had known since before New York; the surviving masters are now held by the Smithsonian Institution.

From 1946 he lived on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn, and the years just after the war were among his most productive as a writer. He wrote and recorded children’s songs in children’s own language, such as “Riding in My Car” and “Don’t You Push Me Down,” collected on Songs to Grow On for Mother and Child (recorded 1947, issued by Folkways in 1956) and Work Songs to Grow On. Through his mother-in-law, the Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt, he came to know Coney Island’s Jewish community and wrote songs such as “Hanuka Dance.” After a plane carrying Mexican farm workers crashed in Los Gatos Canyon, California, on 28 January 1948, he wrote the words of “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” which the schoolteacher Martin Hoffman set to music about ten years later. In these years the young Ramblin’ Jack Elliott studied his playing and singing closely, and he contributed songs to Pete Seeger’s People’s Songs organization, founded in 1945.

From the late 1940s Huntington’s disease, a hereditary illness, gradually took away his ability to write and perform. During the blacklist years he stayed at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum in California and on Stetson Kennedy’s land in Florida, where he worked on a novel, Seeds of Man, before returning to New York. He spent his last years in hospitals in New Jersey and New York, where young musicians of the folk revival, among them Joan Baez, the Greenbriar Boys, Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, came to play for him. Dylan, who first met him in early 1961 in East Orange, New Jersey, put “Song to Woody” on his first album the next year. On 6 April 1966 Interior Secretary Stewart Udall gave Guthrie the Department of the Interior’s Conservation Service Award for his Columbia River songs and named a Bonneville Power substation after him. He died on 3 October 1967 at Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens. A month later his son Arlo Guthrie released his first record, “Alice’s Restaurant.”

On 20 January 1968 Harold Leventhal produced A Tribute to Woody Guthrie at Carnegie Hall, with Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Bob Dylan and the Band, Judy Collins, Odetta and Arlo Guthrie. Hal Ashby’s 1976 film Bound for Glory, adapted from the book, starred David Carradine as Guthrie. Washington made “Roll On, Columbia” its official state folk song in 1987, and Oklahoma did the same for “Oklahoma Hills” in 2001. His unrecorded lyrics have become new records: at the invitation of his daughter Nora Guthrie, Billy Bragg and Wilco set them to music on Mermaid Avenue (Elektra, 1998), and the Klezmatics later recorded his Jewish songs. The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949 won the Grammy for Best Historical Album in February 2008, and in April 2013 the Woody Guthrie Center opened in Tulsa as the permanent home of his archive. His songs have been taken up by bluegrass musicians including the Del McCoury Band, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Peter Rowan, Tim O’Brien, Tony Trischka and Old Crow Medicine Show, and the Del McCoury Band played the centennial tribute concert in Tulsa on 10 March 2012.

• 1966 – U.S. Department of the Interior Conservation Service Award
• 1970 – Songwriters Hall of Fame
• 1977 – Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame
• 1988 – Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a musical influence
• 1989 – Grammy Hall of Fame, “This Land Is Your Land” (1947 Asch recording)
• 1996 – North American Folk Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award
• 1997 – Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame
• 2000 – Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2002 – National Recording Registry, “This Land Is Your Land”
• 2006 – Oklahoma Hall of Fame
• 2012 – Songwriters Hall of Fame Pioneer Award