Arlo Guthrie

• Born: July 10, 1947
• Place of Birth: Coney Island, New York

American folksinger, guitarist, and songwriter

Although identified with the counterculture of the 1960s, Guthrie composed, recorded, and performed into the twenty-first century, increasingly using his popularity as a musician to attract attention to his work on behalf of various charitable social causes.

Member of Shenandoah

The Life

Arlo Davy Guthrie (GUH-three) was born into an artistic family. His mother, Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, was a former professional dancer with the Martha Graham Company and taught dance throughout his childhood. His father, Woody Guthrie, was one of America’s most prolific and best-known protest song and folk music singers and the composer of innumerable songs, including “This Land Is Your Land.”

Arlo Guthrie made an indelible mark in 1967 with “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” an eighteen-minute ballad that told a shaggy-dog story loosely patterned after his father’s talking-blues style. An instant counterculture favorite, the real-life events described in the song served as the basis for the 1969 film Alice’s Restaurant, in which Guthrie starred as himself. Although he continued to record major-label albums through 1981, his only other radio hit was his 1972 recording of Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans.” After 1991, Guthrie occupied himself increasingly with the Guthrie Center, a nonprofit interfaith church foundation dedicated to various forms of social activism, such as caring for AIDS patients and raising awareness about Huntington’s disease, the degenerative disorder from which his father died.

Guthrie formed his own record label, Rising Son Records (RSR), in 1983. A pioneering independent label, it would go on to release many works. Guthrie also continued to tour steadily through the first decades of the twenty-first century.

In 1969, Guthrie married Jackie Hyde, whom he would remain with until her death in 2012. They had four children together: Abe, Cathy, Annie, and Sarah Lee. Each of their children became musicians as well, and the extended Guthrie family often performed together. A practicing Catholic during much of the 1970s, Guthrie eventually became a follower of the Kali Natha Yoga master Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati. In 2021, Guthrie married Marti Ladd.

In 2020, Guthrie announced that he would give up performing on tour, as his health had been impacted by a series of strokes. He briefly returned to touring in 2023, opting to perform at venues close to his Massachusetts home. However, the tour proved too difficult, and he once again announced an end to touring.

The Music

Given his status as the eldest son of Woody Guthrie, Arlo Guthrie could have carved out a comfortable musical niche simply by covering his father’s songs or by composing in his father’s well-known folk-protest style. Instead—with his instantly recognizable nasal voice, his charming and quirky sense of humor, his ear for catchy melodies, and his intimate familiarity with folk songs from many traditions—he established himself from the outset as a singer-songwriter. Besides covering Woody’s “Oklahoma Hills” on Running Down the Road, “1913 Massacre” on Hobo’s Lullaby, and “Ramblin’ Round” on The Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys, Guthrie also wrote protest songs that, similar in spirit to his father’s Dust Bowl classics, were clearly a response to the specific sociopolitical crises of the 1960s and 1970s.

Alice’s Restaurant. With “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” comprising all of side one, this 1967 album made Guthrie an instant counterculture celebrity. Its length aside, what distinguished Guthrie’s eighteen-minute story-song from the rest of the antiwar-music pack was his comic timing.

The Best of Arlo Guthrie. Released ten years after Guthrie’s debut, this compilation suffered from the restrictions of the twelve-inch vinyl long-playing record. That “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” would make the cut was obvious, as was the inclusion of “The Motorcycle Song” (in its six-minute version) and Guthrie’s 1972 hit “City of New Orleans.” The challenge was to condense the best of the rest of Guthrie’s first eight albums into the remaining twenty minutes. Predictably, the result was spotty, with two songs from The Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys and one apiece from Running Down the Road, Washington County, Arlo Guthrie, and Amigo.

Outlasting the Blues. When this album appeared in the fall of 1979, it was frequently discussed in conjunction with Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming (1979) and Van Morrison’s Into the Music (1979), albums that, like this album’s first side, drew on biblical imagery. The specific reason for Guthrie’s religious focus was that he was on the verge of learning whether he, like his father, would succumb to Huntington’s disease. (The eventual diagnosis was that he would not.) Understandably, his own mortality was on his mind, and rather than indulging in morbid self-pity, he composed a suite of songs that examined his life and its significance and included references to his 1960s status as a protest hero, his Jewish roots, his conversion to Catholicism, and his marriage. Side two, although less thematically coherent, consisted of songs of equally high quality, making the album one of Guthrie’s strongest.

Power of Love. Compared to the serious tone of Outlasting the Blues, this 1981 follow-up, Guthrie’s last album for Warner Bros., struck many as especially lightweight. At least one song, however, the T-Bone Burnett-composed title cut, continued Guthrie’s recording of music with Christian themes.

Someday. This was, in many ways, a typical Arlo Guthrie album, replete with humor, political protest, and catchy melodies. By 1986, however, the Guthrie formula was considered passé, and Warner Bros. refused to release the album, leaving it to Guthrie to release it himself on his own Rising Son label in the early 1990s.

All Over the World. In 1991, ten years after his last Warner Bros. album, Guthrie had finally acquired the rights to enough of his catalog to assemble this thirteen-song compilation, which, except for its reinclusion of “City of New Orleans,” made an ideal complement to The Best of Arlo Guthrie.

In Times Like These. This 2007 live album, featuring performances by the University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra, demonstrates Guthrie's late-career tendency to feature an orchestral background for his signature folk style.

Musical Legacy

Since Guthrie emerged as a solo performer in 1967, two phrases have always appeared in discussions of his music: “Woody Guthrie’s son” and “Alice’s Restaurant.” The former has given even the slightest of Guthrie’s recordings an aura of folkloric authenticity, of being connected to the centuries-old troubadour tradition in which Woody Guthrie himself was a link. The latter serves as a reminder of the role that storytelling, wit, and cheering for society’s underdogs have played in Guthrie’s most enduring music. The album Alice's Restaurant has been remastered, reissued, re-recorded, and celebrated with special anniversary editions, a testament to its lasting influence and classic status.

Whether that music will live on in the repertoires of subsequent folksingers remains to be seen. Even the perennially popular “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” and “The Motorcycle Song” are so autobiographical that it is difficult to imagine anyone besides Guthrie performing them. As long as there are pretensions, however, there will be songwriters who want to puncture them so effectively that they never reinflate, inspired by the example of Guthrie’s preference for the satirical slice over the sledgehammer blow.

Principal Recordings

Albums: Alice’s Restaurant, 1967; Running down the Road, 1969; Washington County, 1970; Hobo’s Lullaby, 1972; The Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys, 1973; Arlo Guthrie, 1974; Amigo, 1976; A Tribute to Leadbelly, 1977; Arlo Guthrie with Shenandoah, 1978; One Night, 1978; Outlasting the Blues, 1979; Power of Love, 1981; Precious Friend, 1981 (with Pete Seeger); Hard Travelin’, 1986 (with Woody Guthrie and others); Someday, 1986; Baby’s Storytime, 1990; All over the World, 1991; Son of the Wind, 1992; Woody’s Twenty Grow Big Songs, 1992 (with Woody Guthrie and the Guthrie Family); Mystic Journey, 1996; BanjoMan: A Tribute to Derroll Adams, 2002; In Times Like These, 2007; 32¢ Postage Due, 2008; Tales of '69, 2009; Alice’s Restaurant 50th Anniversary Massacree, 2016.

Bibliography

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Daley, Lauren. “Just in Time for Thanksgiving, Arlo Guthrie Tells It Like It Is." Boston Globe, 22 Nov. 2023, www.boston.com/culture/music/2023/11/22/just-in-time-for-thanksgiving-arlo-guthrie-tells-it-like-it-is/?s‗campaign=bcom:socialflow:twitter.  Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.

Guthrie, Arlo. This Is the Arlo Guthrie Book. Amsco, 1969.

Lee, Laura. Arlo, Alice, and Anglicans: The Lives of a New England Church. The Countryman Press, 2000.

Orteza, Arsenio. “Arlo and Ma.” The Christian Century, May 5, 1993, p. A

Ruhlmann, William. "Arlo Guthrie." AllMusic, 2024, www.allmusic.com/artist/arlo-guthrie-mn0000927736/biography. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.

Simon, John. “The Youth Film.” In Movies into Film: Film Criticism, 1967-1970. Delta, 1971.

Unterberger, Richie. Turn! Turn! Turn! The Sixties Folk-Rock Revolution. Backbeat Books, 2002.