Guthrie, Woody (1912-1967)

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Guthrie, Woody (1912-1967)

Folk singer, composer, writer and homegrown radical, Woody Guthrie became the self-appointed folk spokesman for the Dust Bowl migrants and agricultural workers during the Great Depression. His pro-labor/anti-capitalist stance attracted many radical and left-leaning liberals during the 1930s and 1940s, but his lasting fame came from his influence on the folk revival of the 1960s, especially on Bob Dylan. Best known for ballads such as "This Land is Your Land,"

"This Train is Bound for Glory," and "Union Maid," Guthrie's music extended beyond the bounds of radical protest to become American folk classics.

Born in Okemah, Oklahoma, and named in honor of the presidential nominee, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie spent his childhood in several different households in various parts of Oklahoma and Texas. His mother suffered from Huntington's Chorea (the same disease that Guthrie himself later struggled with for 15 years before finally succumbing to it in 1967), and he was often left to his own devices. In 1933, at the age of 21, he married his best friend's sister, but a necessary search for work, coupled with a restless nature, took him on the road, traveling along with many other "Okies" and "Arkies"—displaced farmers and others—who headed to California in search of work. In Los Angeles, Guthrie found work with his cousin Jack "Oklahoma" Guthrie, the singing cowboy, and together they presented the Oklahoma and Woody Show on KFVD. Woody's popularity grew as he attracted an audience of transplanted southwesterners who enjoyed his traditional songs and "cornpone philosophy." He also became politically educated at KFVD, encouraged by station owner Frank Burke, who also produced the radical newspaper The Light, for which Guthrie occasionally wrote.

Guthrie's national notoriety developed when he wrote and performed songs about the influx of Dust Bowl migrants into California, and contributed to the communist newspaper People's World. In 1940, he released his first album, Dust Bowl Ballads. The album included "I Ain't Got No Home in This World Anymore," a parody of a traditional Baptist hymn; "Vigilante Man," describing the vigilante tactics of farm labor employers; "Pretty Boy Floyd," about the exploits of the Oklahoma outlaw; "Goin' Down This Road Feelin' Bad," a song used in the film version of The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and "Tom Joad," a song about that film's hero figure that Guthrie wrote after seeing it.

His reputation as a spokesman for the down and out was reinforced through his association with folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress and singer Pete Seeger. With Lomax, Guthrie recorded songs and stories for the Library of Congress and, with Seeger, he joined the Almanac Singers, a folk-oriented protest group. Lomax, Guthrie and Seeger collaborated on a collection of folk songs published as Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People (1967). Guthrie also appeared on numerous radio programs, including Pipe Smoking Time and Cavalcade of America. Hired for one month by the Bonneville Power Administration in 1941, he composed 26 songs about the hydro-electric construction projects of the Pacific northwest, including "Roll On Columbia," "The Grand Coulee Dam," and "Pastures of Plenty." In 1943, he published the autobiographical Bound for Glory (made into a 1976 film by Hal Ashby, starring David Carradine as Guthrie). Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, he continued to write protest songs such as "1913 Massacre" about a strike in Calumet, Michigan, and "Deportee" (a.k.a. "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos") about a plane crash of Mexican deportees. He also began writing songs for children, such as "Take Me for a Ride in the Car-Car," and "Put Your Finger in the Air." Guthrie's People's World columns were collected in Woody Sez (1975), and a second literary work, Seeds of Man, appeared in 1976. A volume of previously unpublished writings, Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait, was published in 1990.

Throughout his writings, Guthrie expressed his belief in justice and his faith that it could be brought to prevail through action. For him personally, action took the form of singing and writing, best exempli-fied by the slogan proudly displayed on his guitar: "This Machine Kills Fascists." His sense of the role of a folksinger as crusader for the less fortunate and as a critic of society's oppressors and manipulators had greater influence on the course of American popular music than his style of singing or any one composition. His philosophy—that "a folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it"—permeates the protest music of the late twentieth century, from anti-Vietnam War songs of the 1960s to songs of victimization in the 1990s.

From the late 1950s onwards, Woody Guthrie's influence on a successive crop of folksingers was evident. It began with "Ramblin" Jack Elliot (who often claimed to be his son), The Weavers, who had a national hit with the Guthrie song "So Long, It's been Good to Know Ya," and Bob Dylan, who arrived at his fascination for Guthrie through Elliot. Dylan visited the dying Guthrie in New York in 1961 and composed "Song for Woody," a tribute using the melody of Guthrie's "1913 Massacre." Guthrie's influence on Dylan is most readily seen in Dylan's early albums such as Bob Dylan (1962), The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) and The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964), and even in the style of the monochrome cover photograph of The Times They Are A-Changin'. Protest music of the 1960s owed much to this remarkable individual, whose compositions were revived by new folk groups such as Peter, Paul and Mary, while Phil Ochs and Barry McGuire adopted his style in their own original songs. Woody's son, Arlo Guthrie, began performing in the 1960s, presenting his father's work, as well as his own songs such as "Alice's Restaurant Massacre" (1967).

Reverence for Guthrie continued into the late 1980s and 1990s, with performers such as Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp attributing their own development to his influence in a documentary tribute recording titled A Vision Shared: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly (1988). Springsteen credited Guthrie with the development of his own social consciousness: "To me, Woody Guthrie was that sense of idealism along with a sense of realism that said maybe you can't save the world, but you can change the world." Guthrie's influence on Springsteen is best demonstrated in Nebraska (1982), and the Dust Bowl-inspired The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995). Mellencamp, believing that later contributions to protest music pale in comparison to Guthrie's, said, "None of us are ever going to make the impact that Woody made." Mellencamp's pro-family farmer songs on Scarecrow (1987) illustrate Guthrie's impact, and Mellencamp even sports a Guthriesque anti-fascist statement on his guitar in the music video, "Your Life is Now" (1998). A Vision Shared also features, among others, Emmylou Harris, Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the Irish rock band U2, whose lead singer Bono states that "the thing Woody Guthrie left behind to me was a sense of the poetry of ordinary lives … I see Woody Guthrie as a poet."

In 1998 a new collection of Guthrie songs, Mermaid Avenue, unveiled lyrics written in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with music composed by British singer/songwriter Billy Bragg and American neo-country rock band Wilco. Augmented with performances by Natalie Merchant, the album is the result of a collaboration between the musicians and Woody's daughter, Nora, who initiated the project and opened up the Guthrie archives to them. The result introduced his music to yet another generation of listeners.

—Charles J. Shindo