Woody Guthrie

During the opening decades of the twentieth century Woody Guthrie emerged as the preeminent figure in American folk music, partly on account of the extensive influence he would exert upon popular music throughout the closing half of that century, an era in which his own activity had been sharply curtailed by circumstance. The core of his importance rests upon his songwriting, which produced the enduring standard “This Land Is Your Land” along with numerous other widely interpreted compositions such as “Deportee,” “Do Re Mi,” “Grand Coulee Dam,” “Hard, Ain’t It Hard,” “Hard Travelin’,” “I Ain’t Got No Home,” “1913 Massacre,” “Oklahoma Hills,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Philadelphia Lawyer,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Ramblin’ Round,” “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh,” “Talking Dust Bowl,” and “Vigilante Man.” These pieces, together with additional songs, have been interpreted and preserved on record by an extensive roster of performers encompassing leading folksingers that include Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, the Brothers Four, Judy Collins, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Richie Havens, Cisco Houston, the Kingston Trio, the Limeliters, Lindisfarne, Don McLean, the Chad Mitchell Trio, Holly Near, the New Christy Minstrels, Odetta, Tom Paxton, Peter, Paul & Mary, Utah Phillips, Tom Rush, Tom Russell, Pete Seeger, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Dave van Ronk, the Weavers, and Kate Wolf; country artists such as Eddy Arnold, Chet Atkins, Gene Autry, Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, Flatt & Scruggs, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Lee Greenwood, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Alison Krauss, the Maddox Brothers & Rose, Anne Murray, Dolly Parton, Johnny Paycheck, Jim Reeves, Tex Ritter, Red Smiley, Ernest Tubb, and Bob Wills; and rock and pop musicians ranging from the Alarm, Paul Anka, the Band, Billy Bragg, the Byrds, Concrete Blonde, Ry Cooder, Ani DiFranco, Dion, Lonnie Donegan, Donovan, Bob Dylan, Nanci Griffith, Arlo Guthrie, Hot Tuna, Indigo Girls, Little Feat, Lone Justice, Trini Lopez, Country Joe McDonald, John Mellencamp, Natalie Merchant, Van Morrison, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Linda Ronstadt, Doug Sahm, the Seekers, Michelle Shocked, Bruce Springsteen, the Waterboys, Wilco, and Jesse Colin Young. (In most instances Guthrie fashioned his songs by fitting fresh lyrics to pre-existing folk melodies.)

The bulk of those interpretations and recordings occurred after Guthrie’s forced withdrawal from performing because of illness in the early 1950s. At the height of his visibility during the 1940s he functioned as a major-label recording artist, a published author, and a nationally aired radio personality. Yet the portrait of a multimedia celebrity that such achievements might suggest is contradicted by his temperament and political outlook. Endlessly inventive and productive, he wrote, sketched, sang, and performed without pause, yet that same restlessness manifested itself in a reluctance to maintain steady commitment to any single project, especially when it required conventional collaboration. Equally, he resisted remaining in any fixed location for extended periods. This singular independence was matched by his uncompromising left-wing political convictions. Throughout his lifetime considerable scrutiny in the United States centered on whether individuals of progressive inclination belonged or had belonged to the Communist Party. Although no credible documentation has surfaced confirming that Guthrie himself was a member, his sympathies were unmistakable; for years he contributed a regular column to Communist newspapers. Those same convictions also account for the uneasy fit he experienced with the commercial and media apparatus he encountered briefly during the 1940s.

Paradoxically, just as Guthrie’s physical condition deteriorated toward permanent institutionalization in the 1950s, his reputation expanded through the circulation of his songs and the example he set, which fueled the broader folk revival and, specifically in the early 1960s, provided a decisive model for Bob Dylan. By the mid-1960s Guthrie’s compositions were appearing on numerous releases, his own earlier recordings were being reissued or, in certain cases, issued for the first time, and his extensive writings were being assembled into published volumes. The momentum of this rediscovery was in no way diminished by his passing in 1967; instead it persisted for decades, with additional books appearing and the Guthrie estate enlisting artists such as Billy Bragg and Wilco to compose music for his extensive archive of unrecorded lyrics, thereby generating fresh songs for release.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie entered the world in Okemah, Oklahoma, on July 14, 1912, twelve days after his namesake, Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, received the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Consistent with this early political association, Guthrie’s father, Charley Edward Guthrie, was himself active in politics and at that moment held the elected position of District Court Clerk while also working as a real estate agent. Guthrie’s mother, Nora Belle (Tanner) Guthrie, had already borne his sister Clara and brother Lee Roy; another brother, George, arrived in 1918, and a final sister, Mary Josephine Guthrie, followed in 1922. As a young child Guthrie learned folk songs from his mother. In May 1919, when he was six, his sister Clara perished in an accidental fire. This was the first in an extraordinary sequence of fire-related injuries that would affect Guthrie and those around him throughout his life. The event precipitated a decline in the family’s circumstances and may have been connected to the still-undiagnosed but progressively evident condition afflicting his mother. Without her knowledge, Nora Guthrie was entering the mental and physical stages of the uncommon, hereditary, and incurable disorder known as Huntington’s disease, whose typical onset occurs in middle age and produces a gradual loss of mental and muscular control that ultimately proves fatal.

By the mid-1920s Guthrie had begun to show musical interest, taking up the harmonica. On June 25, 1927, a second fire-related accident left his father severely burned by a kerosene lamp. Two days afterward his mother was committed to the Central State Hospital for the Insane in Norman, Oklahoma. (She died there in 1930.) His father was transported to Pampa, Texas, to recuperate with relatives. Guthrie, still under fifteen, remained with his older brother or family acquaintances yet received little supervision. Before turning sixteen, in June 1928, he embarked on his first extended journey, hitchhiking through the Gulf Coast states and taking temporary employment before returning to Okemah. Although he attended high school during this interval he never advanced past the tenth grade. In the spring of 1929 he relocated to Pampa at his father’s invitation. There he worked in a drugstore and subsequently became a sign painter. He also received guitar instruction from his uncle Jeff Guthrie and soon began performing professionally, forming the Corncob Trio with harmonica and fiddle player Matt Jennings and guitarist Cluster Baker. On October 28, 1933, Guthrie married Jennings’s sister, Mary Esta Jennings.

Guthrie had started composing original songs as early as 1932. On April 14, 1935, he drew inspiration from a natural catastrophe when a major dust storm struck Pampa, the result of drought conditions and subsistence farming across the Great Plains that stripped away tons of topsoil and carried it into the wind, compounding the economic devastation already endured by farmers during the Great Depression. He wrote “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” (also known as “Dusty Old Dust”), which contained sharply satirical observations about the hardships endured by those caught in the storm. That same month he self-published the first in a series of songbooks he would produce throughout his career, Alonzo M. Zilch’s Own Collection of Original Songs and Ballads.

The Guthries’ first child, Gwendolyn Gail Guthrie, was born in November 1935, yet this event did not indicate that Guthrie intended to settle permanently with his family. On the contrary, in 1936 he resumed hitchhiking and riding freight trains to travel the country as a hobo. In the late winter or early spring of 1937 he departed permanently, heading for California. His wife was again pregnant and gave birth to a second daughter, Sue Guthrie, in July. After encountering his cousin Leon Jerry “Oklahoma Jack” Guthrie in Los Angeles, Guthrie began performing with him; the pair secured employment on the local station KFVD, inaugurating the daily fifteen-minute program The Oklahoma and Woody Show on July 19, 1937. In September Jack Guthrie withdrew, and Guthrie replaced him with singer Maxine Crissman, whom he nicknamed “Lefty Lou,” renaming the program The Woody and Lefty Lou Show. The duo found favor among other expatriates from the region by then known as the Dust Bowl, and Guthrie began writing additional songs aimed at that audience, among them “Do Re Mi,” which cautioned prospective migrants that California might prove inhospitable without sufficient funds; the nostalgic “Oklahoma Hills”; and “Philadelphia Lawyer.” Earnings from the radio broadcast and songbook sales enabled him to send for his wife and children, who joined him in Los Angeles in November 1937.

The Woody and Lefty Lou Show continued until June 18, 1938, when Guthrie resumed traveling. He returned to KFVD alone in November. Possibly influenced by his observations of migrant workers’ struggles, he began to articulate his views in more explicitly political language, composing songs such as “Pretty Boy Floyd” (which portrayed the bank robber born Charles Arthur Floyd as a contemporary counterpart to Robin Hood) and “Vigilante Man,” a critique of police and private security forces that targeted homeless laborers. In May 1939 he also launched a column titled “Woody Sez” for the Communist newspaper People’s World. His third child, a son named Will Guthrie, was born in October. In November he left the radio program and returned to Texas, although he did not remain long. In the opening months of 1940 he set out once more, this time traveling to New York City to visit his friend the actor Will Geer, then appearing on Broadway in Tobacco Road. During the cross-country journey Guthrie repeatedly heard Kate Smith’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s patriotic song “God Bless America,” which Berlin had written during World War I but first published in 1939 as World War II approached. Finding the song jingoistic, Guthrie was moved upon reaching New York to compose his own response, initially titled “God Blessed America for Me.” Although the song, later revised as “This Land Is Your Land,” eventually came to be viewed as a patriotic anthem, Guthrie’s intended message constituted an attack on private property as a foundation of capitalism. His first draft is dated February 23, 1940, yet he did not perform it until considerably later.

By the time Guthrie reached New York the difficulties faced by the Okies—the Midwestern farmers who had lost their land and migrated westward as migrant laborers—had become a national concern, in part because of the success of John Steinbeck’s best-selling novel The Grapes of Wrath, published in April 1939 and quickly adapted into a motion picture that premiered in New York on January 24, 1940. Guthrie had already met Steinbeck in California, and in March 1940 he was invited to perform at a benefit for migrant workers sponsored by Steinbeck and emceed by Geer at the Forrest Theater, where Tobacco Road was then running. His appearance created a strong impression; his manner and accent made him appear the living embodiment of the Okies, while his songs and dry wit evoked a fusion of country singer Jimmie Rodgers and homespun monologuist Will Rogers. At the event Guthrie encountered several prominent folksingers, among them Leadbelly and Aunt Molly Jackson, as well as the twenty-year-old aspiring folksinger Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, assistant in charge of the Archive of Folk-Song at the Library of Congress. Lomax in particular proved instrumental to Guthrie’s career. He promptly invited Guthrie to Washington, D.C., for an interview to be preserved in the archive. The sessions took place on March 21, 22, and 27, 1940, in a Department of the Interior studio and were recorded. At this, his first recording session, Guthrie recounted his life and performed numerous songs, including “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh,” “Do Re Mi,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “I Ain’t Got No Home,” “Worried Man Blues,” “Goin’ Down That Road Feeling Bad,” and several others explicitly addressing Dust Bowl conditions. The recordings remained in the archives for nearly a quarter century before being issued commercially as the three-LP set Library of Congress Recordings by Elektra Records in 1964.

Lomax possessed additional media connections that afforded Guthrie wider exposure. On April 2, 1940, he presented Guthrie on his nationally broadcast CBS program Columbia School of the Air, and later that month Guthrie made the first of several appearances on another CBS broadcast, The Pursuit of Happiness. Lomax also recommended Guthrie to RCA Victor Records, which signed him to a contract resulting in two albums, each comprising three 78 rpm discs, released in July 1940 under the titles Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 1 and Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 2. The selections included many of the same songs Guthrie had performed for the Library of Congress, together with the newly composed “Tom Joad,” a musical adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath that required two parts because of its length. After completing the recordings in early May, Guthrie traveled back to the Southwest accompanied by Seeger, yet he had returned to New York by August, when he began appearing on another Lomax-produced CBS program, Back Where I Come From, as a regular. He also began performing in nightclubs, frequently alongside his friend Cisco Houston. He discontinued his newspaper column, which had been appearing in another Communist publication, the Daily Worker, apparently because his positions were judged insufficiently orthodox by the party. After agreeing to appear on yet another radio program, Pipe Smoking Time, he sent for his family, which relocated to New York in late 1940. This degree of professional stability and, more significantly, conformity did not suit him for long, however, and in early January 1941 he abruptly abandoned his radio commitments and left New York, returning to Los Angeles with his family.

Guthrie briefly resumed his KFVD program, but his next significant undertaking originated with a letter from the Bonneville Power Administration, a division of the Department of the Interior in Portland, Oregon, requesting his services to narrate and perform songs for a documentary film about the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River along the Oregon-Washington border. He drove to Portland with his family and was engaged for one month as an “information consultant” to write songs. Over the ensuing weeks he wrote or adapted twenty-six songs, among them “Roll on Columbia” (later designated the official folk song of Washington state), “Grand Coulee Dam,” and “Pastures of Plenty.” Many were recorded, yet the film project was temporarily shelved (it was ultimately completed in 1949), and when the month concluded on June 11, 1941, Guthrie returned to New York, leaving his family in Portland. Seeger had meanwhile assembled a politically oriented folk ensemble, the Almanac Singers, with Lee Hays and Millard Lampell, and Guthrie joined them. In early July they recorded two albums, Deep Sea Chanteys and Sodbuster Ballads, for General Records before embarking on a national tour of union gatherings. The tour traversed the country, concluding in August in Los Angeles. There Guthrie was briefly reunited with his family, which had returned from Portland, but Mary Guthrie soon moved with the children to El Paso, Texas, effectively separating from her husband, who returned to New York after performing with Seeger in the Northwest.

In New York, Guthrie resided at the communal Almanac House, headquarters for the expanding Almanac Singers. As usual he wrote prolifically, producing compositions including “Sinking of the Reuben James,” concerning a U.S. destroyer torpedoed by a German U-boat, and he began receiving magazine assignments, beginning with “Ear Players,” published in Common Ground in the spring of 1942. During this period the Almanac Singers, who had been fiercely anti-war until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, became equally fervent in support of the war effort, a stance that aligned with American sentiment following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. Consequently they began receiving offers from network radio programs, attaining their commercial peak on February 14, 1942, when they appeared on the program This Is War, broadcast simultaneously on all four national networks. Their political associations nevertheless rendered them unappealing to the mainstream entertainment industry, just as Guthrie was individually. They declined an invitation to perform at the prestigious Rainbow Room, and their growing visibility prompted newspaper reports of their connections to left-wing organizations including the Communist Party, which in turn caused the cancellation of further nightclub engagements and a proposed Decca Records contract.

Around the same time Guthrie met Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, a dancer with the Martha Graham troupe, with whom he began a romantic relationship despite both being married to others. He was also signed by E.P. Dutton to write his autobiography. While working on the book he gradually reduced his participation with the Almanac Singers. By autumn he was appearing in a short-lived ensemble he called the Headline Singers alongside Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee. Guthrie’s fourth child, Cathy Ann Guthrie, was born to Marjorie Mazia on February 6, 1943. In March his book Bound for Glory was published to favorable reviews. That same month Mary Guthrie signed divorce papers, rendering Guthrie eligible for the draft. Upon receiving his draft notice he enlisted in the merchant marine rather than the army, signing on with Cisco Houston aboard a vessel carrying supplies for the invasion of Italy. The four-month voyage began in June 1943; on September 13 the ship was torpedoed yet reached port in Tunisia. Guthrie returned to New York in October but could remain only thirty days before undertaking another merchant marine voyage if he wished to continue avoiding army service. A trip along the Eastern seaboard followed a month later, and in January 1944 a second transatlantic voyage lasted until March.

Upon his return Guthrie visited the offices of the small Asch Record Company and introduced himself to owner Moses Asch, who consented to record him on an informal basis. Beginning April 16, 1944, Guthrie, sometimes accompanied by associates including Houston, Sonny Terry, Leadbelly, and former Almanac Singers member Bess Hawes, began producing what eventually amounted to hundreds of recordings for Asch, among them the first documented performance of “This Land Is Your Land.” The initial Asch sessions extended at least through late April and encompassed upward of 150 songs, both original Guthrie compositions and traditional material. At the time Asch lacked the capacity to release such a volume of material.

In May 1944 Guthrie shipped out once more on a merchant marine vessel transporting troops for the D-Day invasion of Europe. After the soldiers were landed on Omaha Beach in early July the ship struck a mine yet returned safely to England, where Guthrie appeared on the BBC before heading back to the United States in August. In September Asch released the first of his Guthrie recordings on the various-artists album Folksay: American Ballads and Dances, followed by another various-artists collection titled Blues, and then, at the turn of the year, the solo album Woody Guthrie, comprising three 78 rpm discs and featuring songs such as “Grand Coulee Dam” and “Jesus Christ.” Guthrie also returned to radio work during this period, hosting a program on the local New