Woody Guthrie: Encyclopedia - Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (July 14, 1912–October 3, 1967), known as Woody Guthrie was a American folk musician noted for his many protest songs and left-wing political views. He is best known for "This Land is Your Land."

Woody Guthrie - Life and career

Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, on July 14, 1912. His parents named him after Woodrow Wilson, who was in the same year elected president in the 1912 election.

At age 19, he left home for Texas, where he met and married his first wife, Mary Jennings, with whom he had three children. He left Texas and his family with the Dust Bowl, following the Okies to California. The poverty he saw on these early trips affected him greatly, and many of his songs are concerned with the conditions faced by the working class. A lifelong socialist and trade unionist, he also contributed a regular column, "Woody Sez," to the Daily Worker and People's World newspapers.

In the mid-1930s, Guthrie achieved fame in California as a radio performer of his traditional folk music and protest songs. In 1939 or 1940, Guthrie moved to New York City and was embraced by its leftist and folk music community. He also made perhaps his first real recordings: several hours of conversation and songs, recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress, as well as an album, Dust Bowl Ballads, for Victor Records in Camden, New Jersey. He began writing his autobiography, Bound for Glory, which was completed and published in 1943.

In 1940, Guthrie wrote his most famous song, "This Land is Your Land," which was inspired in part by his experiences during a cross-country trip, and in part by his distaste for the Irving Berlin song "God Bless America", which he considered unrealistic and complacent (he was tired of hearing Kate Smith sing it on the radio). The melody was based on the gospel song "When the World's on Fire," best known as sung by the country/bluegrass group The Carter Family around 1930. Guthrie protested class inequality in the final verse:

These verses were sometimes omitted in subsequent recordings, sometimes by Guthrie himself.

In May 1941, Guthrie was commissioned by the Department of the Interior and its Bonneville Power Administration to write songs about the Columbia River and the building of the federal dams; the best known of these are "Roll On, Columbia" and "Grand Coulee Dam." Around the same time, he met Pete Seeger and joined the legendary Almanac Singers, with whom he toured the country and moved into the cooperative Almanac House in Greenwich Village.

Guthrie originally wrote and sang anti-war songs with the Almanac Singers, but eventually he and they, along with the Communist milieu with which they were associated, joined the anti-fascist cause. Guthrie famously wrote the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists" on his guitar. He joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, where he served with fellow folk singer Cisco Houston, and then the U.S. Army.

In 1944, Guthrie met Moses "Moe" Asch of Folkways Records, for whom he first recorded "This Land is Your Land," along with hundreds of others over the next few years.

He began courting Marjorie Mazia in 1942 and married her in 1945 while on furlough from the army. They moved into a house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, and together had four children—including Cathy, his daughter who died at age four in a fire, sending him into a serious depression. Guthrie's son Arlo became a famous singer-songwriter in his own right. During this period, Guthrie wrote and recorded Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child, a collection of children's music, which includes the song "Goodnight Little Arlo (Goodnight Little Darlin')," written when Arlo was about nine years old.

At the same time Guthrie was still writing topical songs. The 1948 plane crash of a plane carrying 28 Mexican farm workers from Oakland, California to be deported back to Mexico inspired the poem "Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)." The poem was set to music a decade later by Martin Hoffman, and the song has since been covered by performers such as Pete Seeger, The Byrds, Dolly Parton, and Woody's son Arlo Guthrie. "Pastures of Plenty," written around the same time, also sympathized with the struggle of migrant workers.

By the late 1940s, Guthrie's health was worsening and his behavior becoming extremely erratic, showing signs of chorea. He left his family, traveling with Ramblin' Jack Elliott to California, where he married for a third time and had another child, before eventually returning to New York. He received various diagnoses (including alcoholism and schizophrenia), before he was finally discovered to be suffering from the Huntington's disease, the genetic disorder that had caused the death of his mother.

Guthrie was hospitalized at Creedmoor Mental Institution in Queens until his death on October 3, 1967.

Woody Guthrie - Legacy

By the time of Guthrie's death, his work had been discovered by a new audience, introduced to them in part through Bob Dylan, who visited Guthrie in the last years of his life and described him as "my last hero." Dylan later went on to write Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, a five-page tribute, and included "Song to Woody" on his first, eponymous album (1962).

In 1964, Phil Ochs's debut album, All the News That's Fit to Sing, included the song "Bound for Glory," a tribute to Guthrie and a criticism of revisionism and ignorance among modern audiences who preferred to forget some of Guthrie's more controversial (especially socialist) lyrics.

In 1995, Woody's daughter Nora approached the British singer Billy Bragg about recording lyrics her father had composed in the later years of his life. After researching the lyrics at the Woody Guthrie Archive in New York City, Bragg worked with the band Wilco to record 40 tracks, a number of which were released on the albums Mermaid Avenue in 1998, and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II in 2000. These albums derived their names from a lesser known song "Mermaid's Avenue." She also approached Janis Ian about writing a song using the lyrics of one of Guthrie's unfinished songs, "I Hear You Sing Again." Ian wrote music in his style for the song, changing some of his lyrics and incorporated some of her own. The song was released on her 2004 album Billie's Bones.

Although initially the subject of much controversy, a statue honoring Guthrie stands in Memorial Park on Main Street in his hometown of Okemah. Also in Okemah, the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival celebrates his legacy each summer. It's produced by the Woody Guthrie Coalition, founded by his sister, Mary Jo Edgmon.

See also

• Bound for Glory, 1976 film based on Guthrie's autobiography

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Woody Guthrie", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki