Woody Guthrie

Singer-Songwriter

• Born: July 14, 1912
• Birthplace: Okemah, Oklahoma
• Died: October 3, 1967
• Place of death: Queens, New York

American folksinger, guitarist, and songwriter

The composer of “This Land Is Your Land,” Guthrie is perhaps the most influential of modern folk musicians. He wrote thousands of songs, popularized folk music as a medium of populism and protest, and inspired such musicians as Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan.

Member of The Almanac Singers

Principal Recordings

albums (solo): Bound for Glory, 1958; Nursery Days, 1958; Woody Guthrie Sings Folk Songs, Vol. 1, 1962; Dust Bowl Ballads, 1964; One of a Kind, 1964; Woody Guthrie Sings Folk Songs, Vol. 2, 1964; This Land Is Your Land, 1967; Struggle, 1976; Poor Boy, 1981; Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child, 1991; Worried Man Blues, 1991; Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1996.

albums (with the Almanac Singers): Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads, 1941; Sod Buster Ballads, 1941; Songs for John Doe, 1941; Talking Union, 1941; Dear Mr. President, 1942.

writings of interest:Bound for Glory, 1943 (autobiography).

The Life

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (GUH-three) was born in 1912 in Oklahoma hill country; he was named for the Democratic presidential candidate, Woodrow Wilson. His father, Charles Guthrie, was a town official and businessman; his mother, Nora Belle Tanner, was musically inclined and sang ballads to Woody and his siblings Clara, Roy, George, and Mary Josephine. When Woody was thirteen he heard an African American boy, George, playing blues music on his harmonica. Woody saved up to buy his own harmonica and was soon playing with George. When Woody was sixteen his mother was committed to an insane asylum for suspicion of setting her husband on fire. (Clara had also died from a fire.) Shortly afterward, the family moved to Texas. Already accomplished on the harmonica, Guthrie spent hours practicing the guitar.

At eighteen, Guthrie abandoned high school. With the nation falling into the Great Depression, Guthrie began a life of wandering, hitchhiking, working at odd jobs, playing in bands, and singing on radio shows. On October 28, 1933, Guthrie married seventeen-year-old Mary Jennings. Their daughter Gwendolyn was born two years later, followed by Sue in 1937, and Will in 1939. In 1937 Guthrie joined the scores of Dust Bowl migrants moving to California to find work.

Guthrie launched the Oklahoma and Woody Show radio program with his cousin Jack Guthrie on the Los Angeles’s station KFVD. Soon Jack was replaced by Maxine Crissman, nicknamed “Lefty Lou” by Guthrie. After a popular two-year run of the Woody and Lefty Lou Show, Guthrie resumed his rambling. Dismayed by the impoverished conditions he witnessed in migrant workers’ camps, he began attending meetings of the Communist Party of America, which touted a pro-labor platform. Traveling to New York City in 1940, Guthrie was inspired to write his most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land.” He also recorded his first commercial songs in 1940 before setting off on a cross-country ramble with young folksinger Pete Seeger.

In 1942 Guthrie returned to New York City to settle, adored as an authentic Oklahoma singer by the city’s progressive folk community. He lived a bohemian lifestyle in concert with the Almanac Singers folk collective. Guthrie was sexually unrestrained; in 1943 he and Mary were divorced. He published his autobiography, Bound for Glory, befriended blues musician Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, and toured with the duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

During World War II, Guthrie served in the U.S. Merchant Marine and U.S. Army. After the war he moved with his new wife, Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, to Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. They had four children, Cathy in 1943, Arlo in 1947, Joady in 1948, and Nora in 1950. (In 1947, Cathy would die in a house fire.) Guthrie wrote and performed hundreds of songs and ballads, many of which have become classics, as well as writing a stream of columns, poems, essays, and incipient novels. Folk musicians from throughout the country visited Guthrie to learn from him and pay him homage. However, Guthrie’s behavior became increasingly erratic and uncontrollable; he drank and philandered. In 1952, he was diagnosed with the hereditary disorder Huntington’s chorea, which was almost certainly the cause of his mother’s insanity. He and Marjorie divorced in 1953. He married Anneke Van Kirk the same year; they had a child, Lorina, in 1954. A campfire accident burned Guthrie’s arm, making it impossible for him to play the guitar, and shortly thereafter he and Anneke were divorced.

Guthrie’s second wife, Marjorie, became his caregiver during his later years, as his disease began to render him increasingly unable to control his movements. He spent the last decade of his life in various hospitals, including Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital (1956-1961), Brooklyn State Hospital (1966), and Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, where he died in 1967. Marjorie would go on to found the Committee to Combat Huntington’s Disease, which became the Huntington’s Disease Society of America.

The Music

Guthrie’s music and lyrics were rooted in the ballads he heard from his mother, African American blues, Oklahoma migrant songs, the Texan yodeler Jimmie Rodgers, and the many hours he spent reading in the library. He was especially influenced by the superb gospel and country recordings of the Carter Family: A. P. Carter, his wife Sara, and her cousin Maybelle. Although elfin and scrawny in person, with a droning voice, Guthrie on stage had a charismatic presence that gripped the attention of his audience. Dressed in work clothes, with a weather-beaten hat, thin and wiry, he seemed hardly removed from his days hitchhiking across the Dust Bowl. His voice was nasal, with a strong Oklahoma twang. His lyrics were wily, rambling, comic, and always in favor of the workingman; his simple guitar playing accented his performance.

Dust Bowl Ballads.Over the course of three days in March, 1940, the American folklorist Alan Lomax recorded Guthrie talking, singing, and playing guitar for his Library of Congress archives. The following month, Lomax arranged for Guthrie to make his first commercial releases for the RCA label. Titled Dust Bowl Ballads, eleven songs were issued in July on two 78-rpm records. Although the records sold only a few thousand copies, they include such hard-hitting songs about the plight of farmworkers as “Talking Dust Bowl” and “Do Re Mi.” “This Land Is Your Land.”The two twentieth century songs that can be characterized as America’s unofficial anthems are linked in origin. Kate Smith popularized Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” in a 1938 recording. Guthrie was annoyed by its patriotic fervor and overheated pitch. On February 23, 1940, in Time Square’s Hanover House hotel, he composed six stanzas of “God Blessed America for Me” in response. He set the verses to a melody that may have been derived from the Carter family tune “Little Darling, Pal of Mine,” which in turn had been adopted from the gospel hymn “Oh, My Loving Brother.” By the time Guthrie recorded the song, he had changed the title and refrain to reflect his attachment to the land he had wandered. The lyrics celebrated the natural wonders of the American landscape and proclaimed, “This land is your land, this land is my land…This land was made for you and me.” “This Land Is Your Land” was one of the first of Guthrie’s hundreds of songs recorded with Folkways Records under the supervision of Moses Asch in April, 1944. The melody stays within one octave and is easy to sing. Guthrie’s guitar accompaniment consists of simple chords, and he sings with an engaging midwestern twang (for example, singing “waters” with a pinched trill).

“Car Song.”Also from the first Asch/Folkway recording session is the delightful “Car Song,” also known as “Riding in My Car.” Free of political content, “Car Song” illustrates Guthrie’s talent for children’s music. He paints a charming portrait of a family on an automobile outing, playfully singing the “brrrm brm” of the engine, the “click clack” of the door, and the “oorah oogah” of the horn.

“Springfield Mountain.”Guthrie’s Folkway recording of the traditional American folk ballad “Springfield Mountain” is arresting. He is accompanied by his best friend, Gilbert “Cisco” Houston, on guitar, Sonny Terry on harmonica and Betty Hawes. (Leadbelly accompanies him on other recordings from these sessions.) Guthrie sputters and stutters the tale of a snake-bitten young man.

“Pass Away.”Guthrie wrote prolifically throughout his life—his “Woody Sez” columns for the People’s World, essays, novels, poems, and thousands of songs. He considered his lyrics as important as his music, which he often derived from existing tunes. Many of his verses remained unrecorded, to be mined by later generations of musicians. One example is his 1955 lyric for “Pass Away,” which reflects Guthrie’s simple religious faith. “Pass Away” was scored and recorded in a moving 2006 version by the band the Klezmatics.

“Talking Subway Blues.”“Talking Subway Blues” is a ballad composed by Guthrie upon first arriving in New York City. It illustrates his distinctive form of “talking blues,” with its mix of spoken lyric and singing guitar, irregular meters and rhymes, and free commentary. If Guthrie did not invent the style of “talking blues,” he certainly popularized it. In homespun language, Guthrie humorously relates his first encounter with the subway and of the mass of New Yorkers “all a-runnin’ down that hole in the ground.” Although the song remains lighthearted, Guthrie suggests the subway as a metaphor for the plight of workers, too oppressed to emerge from their holes in the ground. He concludes with a plea to join the union, fight fascists, and contribute to victory in World War II. “Talking Subway Blues” is the direct inspiration for Bob Dylan’s brilliantly comedic “Talking New York,” recorded in 1962.

Musical Legacy

Woody Guthrie’s music combined simple, traditional folk tunes with stirring populist and political lyrics. Folk music refers to the spontaneous, informal musical traditions of local communities. In twentieth century America, what had been local or regional folk music was rendered accessible for the first time on a national level. Nineteenth century composers such as Stephen Foster had made famous their own folk-derived songs and melodies; however, it was only with the rise of the recording industry, mass mobility, and national movements that the United States can be said to have attained an “American” folk music.

If Guthrie was not the creator of this national folk music, he was its embodiment. “This Land Is Your Land” is sung by schoolchildren throughout the United States and can be described as America’s national folk anthem.

Guthrie was received by folk audiences as if he had sprung directly from the dust bowls of Oklahoma, but he shaped his music not only from the folk ballads his mother had sung to him as a child and from tunes he had picked up around campfires but also from diverse cultures, including blues performers, the gospel music of the Carter family, country songs, his incessant reading, and the anguished protests of the dispossessed.

Guthrie presaged the youth culture of the 1960’s both in his life and music, and for that generation he became an icon. His identification with Oklahoma migrants, his wandering life in Texas and California, and his bohemian life in New York City represented a restless searching that was romanticized in the 1960’s. His childlike perspectives, his flirtations with left-wing radicalism, and his casual attitude toward marriage and sex were equally mythologized and celebrated. Most of all, Guthrie’s unique form of folk music—autobiographical, tuneful, comedic, working-class, with biting social commentary—was the precursor to both the folk revival and the protest songs of the Vietnam generation. Guthrie believed that popular music could be a powerful force against oppression. “This Machine Kills Fascists” was emblazoned on his guitar. While claiming the role of a down-home country singer, he was also a brilliant innovator whose novel forms were developed by such modern folksingers as Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Guthrie’s own son, Arlo. There may be no more succinct tribute to Guthrie’s personal and musical legacy than Dylan’s celebrated 1962 recording, “Song to Woody.”

Further Reading

Crawford, Richard. America’s Musical Life: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. An engaging, lively survey of America’s musical history, situating Guthrie in the context of the folk revival of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Cray, Ed. Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. Foreword by Studs Terkel. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. With a foreword of personal reminiscences by journalist and social commentator Terkel, this is a complete, absorbing biography.

Guthrie, Woody. Bound for Glory. 1943. Reprint. Foreword by Pete Seeger. New York: Plume, 1983. Guthrie’s acclaimed autobiography is novelistic in tone, with a title taken from a gospel song Guthrie popularized, “This Train Is Bound for Glory.” A 1976 movie of the same name was based on this book. Includes illustrations by Guthrie.

Hampton, Wade. Guerrilla Minstrels. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. An academic study of the culture of protest and radicalism surrounding singer-songwriters Guthrie, John Lennon, Joe Hill, and Bob Dylan. Notes Dylan’s enormous debt to Guthrie.

Jackson, Mark. Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. A volume in the American Made Music series that examines Guthrie’s lyrics for social content and populist protests.

Klein, Joe. Woody Guthrie: A Life. New York: Delta, 1999. A sympathetic biography with striking photographs and illustrations.

Longhi, Jim. Woody, Cisco, and Me: Seamen Three in the Merchant Marine. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Part of the series Music in American Life, a firsthand account by a shipmate of Guthrie and his friend Cisco Houston in the Merchant Marine. The insightful anecdotes about Guthrie include an inspiring story of Guthrie racially integrating his concert in the ship’s hold.

Marsh, Davie, and Harold Leventhal, eds. Pastures of Plenty: A Self Portrait. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. Named for one of Guthrie’s most famous Dust Bowl songs, a chronological sampling of his unpublished writings. Edited with a foreword by the executor of Guthrie’s estate.

Santelli, Robert, and Emily Davidson. Hard Travelin’: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999. Commemorating the American Music Masters’ salute to Guthrie, a collection of essays on Guthrie by scholars and critics.