Woody Guthrie

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (; July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) was an American singer-songwriter, one of the most significant figures in American folk music. His work focused on themes of American socialism and anti-fascism. He has inspired several generations both politically and musically with songs such as "This Land Is Your Land", written in response to the American exceptionalist".

Guthrie wrote hundreds of country, folk, and children's songs, along with ballads and improvised works. ''Dust Bowl Ballads'', Guthrie's album of songs about the Dust Bowl period, was included on '' Mojo'' magazine's list of 100 Records That Changed The World, and many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress. Songwriters who have acknowledged Guthrie as a major influence on their work include Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, Robert Hunter, Harry Chapin, John Mellencamp, Pete Seeger, Andy Irvine, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Jeff Tweedy, Tom Paxton, Sean Bonnette, and Sixto Rodríguez . He frequently performed with the message "This machine kills fascists" displayed on his guitar.

Guthrie was brought up by middle-class parents in Okemah, Oklahoma. He married at 19, but with the advent of the dust storms that marked the Dust Bowl period, he left his wife and three children to join the thousands of Okies who were migrating to California looking for employment. He worked at Los Angeles radio station KFVD, achieving some fame from playing hillbilly music, made friends with Will Geer and John Steinbeck, and wrote a column for the communist newspaper ''People's World'' from May 1939 to January 1940.

Throughout his life, Guthrie was associated with United States communist groups, although he apparently did not belong to any. With the outbreak of World War II and the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact the Soviet Union had signed with Germany in 1939, the anti-Stalin owners of KFVD radio were not comfortable with Guthrie's political leanings after he wrote a song praising the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet invasion of Poland. He left the station, ending up in New York, where he wrote and recorded his 1940 album ''Dust Bowl Ballads'', based on his experiences during the 1930s, which earned him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Troubadour". In February 1940, he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land". He said it was a response to what he felt was the overplaying of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" on the radio.

Guthrie was married three times and fathered eight children. His son Arlo Guthrie became nationally known as a musician. Woody died in 1967 from complications of Huntington's disease. His first two daughters also died of the disease.

Biography

Early life: 1912–31

Guthrie was born July 14, 1912, in Okemah, a small town in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, the son of Nora Belle (née Sherman) and Charles Edward Guthrie.Reitwiesner, William Addams
Ancestry of Arlo Guthrie.
Retrieved on November 7, 2007. His parents named him after Woodrow Wilson, then Governor of New Jersey and the Democratic candidate who was elected as President of the United States in fall 1912. Charles Guthrie was an industrious businessman, owning at one time up to of land in Okfuskee County. He was actively involved in Oklahoma politics and was a conservative Democratic candidate for office in the county. Charles Guthrie was reportedly involved in the 1911 lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson. (Woody Guthrie wrote three songs about the event in the 1960s. He said that his father, Charles, became a member of the Ku Klux Klan during its revival beginning in 1915.)

Three significant fires occurred during Guthrie's early life. In 1909, one fire caused the loss of his family's home in Okemah a month after it was completed. When Guthrie was seven, his sister Clara died after setting her clothes on fire during an argument with her mother, and, later, in 1927, their father was severely burned in a fire at home. Guthrie's mother, Nora, was afflicted with Huntington's disease, although the family did not know this at the time. What they could see was dementia and muscular degeneration.

When Woody was 14, Nora was committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane. At the time his father Charley was living and working in Pampa, Texas, to repay debts from unsuccessful real estate deals. Woody and his siblings were on their own in Oklahoma; they relied on their eldest brother Roy for support. The 14-year-old Woody Guthrie worked odd jobs around Okemah, begging meals and sometimes sleeping at the homes of family friends.

Guthrie had a natural affinity for music, learning old ballads and traditional English and Scottish songs from the parents of friends. Guthrie befriended an African-American shoeshine boy named George, who played blues on his harmonica. After listening to George play, Guthrie bought his own harmonica and began playing along with him. He used to busk for money and food. Although Guthrie did not do well as a student and dropped out of high school in his senior year before graduation, his teachers described him as bright. He was an avid reader on a wide range of topics.

In 1929, Guthrie's father sent for Woody to join him in Texas, but little changed for the aspiring musician. Guthrie, then 18, was reluctant to attend high school classes in Pampa; he spent most of his time learning songs by busking on the streets and reading in the library at Pampa's city hall. He regularly played at dances with his father's half-brother Jeff Guthrie, a fiddle player. His mother died in 1930 of complications of Huntington's disease while still in the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane.

1930s

Marriage and family

At age 19, Guthrie met and married his first wife, Mary Jennings, in Texas in 1931. They had three children together: Gwendolyn, Sue, and Bill. Bill died at age 23 as the result of an automobile accident. Each daughter died of Huntington's disease at the age of 41, in the 1970s, evidently passed on from their father, although Guthrie himself was not diagnosed with the condition until much later in life.

Guthrie and Mary divorced in 1940. He married twice more, to Marjorie Greenblatt (1945–53), and Anneke Van Kirk (1953–56), having a total of eight children.

California

During the Dust Bowl period, Guthrie joined the thousands of Okies and others who migrated to California to look for work, leaving his wife and children in Texas. Many of his songs are concerned with the conditions faced by working-class people.

During the latter part of that decade, he achieved fame with radio partner Maxine "Lefty Lou" Crissman as a broadcast performer of commercial hillbilly music and traditional folk music. Guthrie was making enough money to send for his family to join him from Texas. While appearing on the radio station KFVD, owned by a populist-minded New Deal Democrat, Frank W. Burke, Guthrie began to write and perform some of the protest songs that he eventually released on his album ''Dust Bowl Ballads''.

While at KFVD, Guthrie met newscaster Ed Robbin. Robbin was impressed with a song Guthrie wrote about political activist Thomas Mooney, wrongly convicted in a case that was a cause célèbre of the time. Robbin, who became Guthrie's political mentor, introduced Guthrie to socialists and Communists in Southern California, including Will Geer. (He introduced Guthrie to writer John Steinbeck.) Robbin remained Guthrie's lifelong friend, and helped Guthrie book benefit performances in the communist circles in Southern California.

Notwithstanding Guthrie's later claim that "the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party", he was never a member of the party. He was noted as a fellow traveler—an outsider who agreed with the platform of the party while avoiding party discipline. Guthrie wrote a column for the communist newspaper, ''People's World''. The column, titled "Woody Sez", appeared a total of 174 times from May 1939 to January 1940. "Woody Sez" was not explicitly political, but was about current events as observed by Guthrie. He wrote the columns in an exaggerated hillbilly dialect and usually included a small comic. These columns were published posthumously as a collection after Guthrie's death. Steve Earle said of Guthrie, "I don't think of Woody Guthrie as a political writer. He was a writer who lived in very political times."

With the outbreak of World War II and publicity about the non-aggression pact the Soviet Union had signed with Germany in 1939, the owners of KFVD radio did not want its staff "spinning apologia" for the Soviet Union. It fired both Robbin and Guthrie. Without the daily radio show, Guthrie's employment chances declined, and he returned with his family to Pampa, Texas. Although Mary was happy to return to Texas, Guthrie preferred to accept Will Geer's invitation to New York City and headed east.

1940s: Building a legacy

New York City

Arriving in New York, Guthrie, known as "the Oklahoma cowboy", was embraced by its folk music community. For a time, he slept on a couch in Will Geer's apartment. Guthrie made his first recordings—several hours of conversation and songs recorded by the folklorist Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress—as well as an album, ''Dust Bowl Ballads,'' for Victor Records in Camden, New Jersey.

In February 1940, he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land", as a response to what he felt was an overplaying of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" on the radio. Guthrie thought the lyrics were unrealistic and complacent. He adapted the melody from an old gospel song, "Oh My Loving Brother", which had been adapted by the country group the Carter Family for their song "Little Darling Pal Of Mine". Guthrie signed the manuscript with the comment, "All you can write is what you see." Although the song was written in 1940, it was four years before he recorded it for Moses Asch in April 1944. Sheet music was produced and given to schools by Howie Richmond sometime later.

In March 1940, Guthrie was invited to play at a benefit hosted by the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Farm Workers, to raise money for migrant workers. There he met the folksinger Pete Seeger, and the two men became good friends. Seeger accompanied Guthrie back to Texas to meet other members of the Guthrie family. He recalled an awkward conversation with Mary Guthrie's mother, in which she asked for Seeger's help to persuade Guthrie to treat her daughter better.

From April 1940, Guthrie and Seeger lived together in the Greenwich Village loft of sculptor Harold Ambellan and his fiancée. Guthrie had some success in New York at this time as a guest on CBS's radio program ''Back Where I Come From'' and used his influence to get a spot on the show for his friend Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter. Ledbetter's Tenth Street apartment was a gathering spot for the musician circle in New York at the time, and Guthrie and Ledbetter were good friends, as they had busked together at bars in Harlem.

In November 1941, Seeger introduced Guthrie to his friend the poet Charles Olson, then a junior editor at the fledgling magazine ''Common Ground''. The meeting led to Guthrie writing the article "Ear Players" in the Spring 1942 issue of the magazine. The article marked Guthrie's debut as a published writer in the mainstream media.

In September 1940, Guthrie was invited by the Model Tobacco Company to host their radio program ''Pipe Smoking Time''. Guthrie was paid $180 a week, an impressive salary in 1940. He was finally making enough money to send regular payments back to Mary. He also brought her and the children to New York, where the family lived briefly in an apartment on Central Park West. The reunion represented Woody's desire to be a better father and husband. He said, "I have to set real hard to think of being a dad." Guthrie quit after the seventh broadcast, claiming he had begun to feel the show was too restrictive when he was told what to sing. Disgruntled with New York, Guthrie packed up Mary and his children in a new car and headed west to California.

Choreographer Sophie Maslow developed '' Folksay'' as an elaborate mix of modern dance and ballet, which combined folk songs by Woody Guthrie with text from Carl Sandburg's 1936 book-length poem ''The People, Yes''. The premiere took place in March 1942 at the Humphrey-Weidman Studio Theatre in New York City. Guthrie provided live music for the performance, which featured Maslow and her New Dance Group. Two-and-a-half years later, Maslow brought '' Folksay'' to early television under the direction of Leo Hurwitz. The same group performed the ballet live in front of CBS TV cameras. The 30-minute broadcast aired on WCBW, the pioneer CBS television station in New York City (now WCBS-TV), from 8:15–8:45 pm ET on November 24, 1944. Featured were Maslow and the New Dance Group, which included among others Jane Dudley, Pearl Primus, and William Bales. Woody Guthrie and fellow folksinger Tony Kraber played guitar, sang songs, and read text from ''The People, Yes''. The program received positive reviews and was performed on television over WCBW a second time in early 1945.

Pacific Northwest

In May 1941, after a brief stay in Los Angeles, Guthrie moved to Portland, Oregon, in the neighborhood of Lents, on the promise of a job. Gunther von Fritsch was directing a documentary about the Bonneville Power Administration's construction of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, and needed a narrator. Alan Lomax had recommended Guthrie to narrate the film and sing songs onscreen. The original project was expected to take 12 months, but as filmmakers became worried about casting such a political figure, they minimized Guthrie's role. The Department of the Interior hired him for one month to write songs about the Columbia River and the construction of the federal dams for the documentary's soundtrack. Guthrie toured the Columbia River and the Pacific Northwest. Guthrie said he "couldn't believe it, it's a paradise", which appeared to inspire him creatively. In one month Guthrie wrote 26 songs, including three of his most famous: "Roll On, Columbia, Roll On", " Pastures of Plenty", and "Grand Coulee Dam". The surviving songs were released as '' Columbia River Songs''. The film "Columbia" was not completed until 1949 (see below). At the conclusion of the month in Oregon and Washington, Guthrie wanted to return to New York. Tired of the continual uprooting, Mary Guthrie told him to go without her and the children. Although Guthrie would see Mary again, once on a tour through Los Angeles with the Almanac Singers, it was essentially the end of their marriage. Divorce was difficult, since Mary was a Catholic, but she reluctantly agreed in December 1943.

Almanac Singers

Following the conclusion of his work in the Northwest, Guthrie corresponded with Pete Seeger about Seeger's newly formed folk-protest group, the Almanac Singers. Guthrie returned to New York with plans to tour the country as a member of the group. The singers originally worked out of a loft in New York City hosting regular concerts called " hootenannies", a word Pete and Woody had picked up in their cross-country travels. The singers eventually outgrew the space and moved into the cooperative Almanac House in Greenwich Village.

Initially, Guthrie helped write and sing what the Almanac Singers termed "peace" songs while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, the group wrote anti-fascist songs. The members of the Almanac Singers and residents of the Almanac House were a loosely defined group of musicians, though the core members included Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell and Lee Hays. In keeping with common utopian ideals, meals, chores and rent at the Almanac House were shared. The Sunday hootenannies were good opportunities to collect donation money for rent. Songs written in the Almanac House had shared songwriting credits among all the members, although in the case of " Union Maid", members would later state that Guthrie wrote the song, ensuring that his children would receive residuals.

In the Almanac House, Guthrie added authenticity to their work, since he was a "real" working class Oklahoman. "There was the heart of America personified in Woody ... And for a New York Left that was primarily Jewish, first or second generation American, and was desperately trying to get Americanized, I think a figure like Woody was of great, great importance," a friend of the group, Irwin Silber, would say. Woody routinely emphasized his working-class image, rejected songs he felt were not in the country blues vein he was familiar with, and rarely contributed to household chores. House member Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, another Okie, would later recall that Woody "loved people to think of him as a real working class person and not an intellectual". Guthrie contributed songwriting and authenticity in much the same capacity for Pete Seeger's post-Almanac Singers project ''People's Songs'', a newsletter and booking organization for labor singers, founded in 1945.People's Songs Inc. ''People's Songs Newsletter, Vol 1. No 1.''. 1945. Old Town School of Folk Music resource center collection.

''Bound for Glory''

Guthrie was a prolific writer, penning thousands of pages of unpublished poems and prose, many written while living in New York City. After a recording session with Alan Lomax, Lomax suggested Guthrie write an autobiography. Lomax thought Guthrie's descriptions of growing up were some of the best accounts he had read of American childhood. During this time, Guthrie met Marjorie Mazia (the professional name of Marjorie Greenblatt), a dancer in New York who would become his second wife. Mazia was an instructor at the Martha Graham Dance School, where she was assisting Sophie Maslow with her piece ''Folksay''. Based on the folklore and poetry collected by Carl Sandburg, ''Folksay'' included the adaptation of some of Guthrie's ''Dust Bowl Ballads'' for the dance. Guthrie continued to write songs and began work on his autobiography. The end product, ''Bound for Glory'', was completed with editing assistance by Mazia and was first published by E.P. Dutton in 1943. It is told in the artist's down-home dialect. The ''Library Journal'' complained about the "too careful reproduction of illiterate speech". However, Clifton Fadiman, reviewing the book in ''The New Yorker'', remarked that "Someday people are going to wake up to the fact that Woody Guthrie and the ten thousand songs that leap and tumble off the strings of his music box are a national possession, like Yellowstone and Yosemite, and part of the best stuff this country has to show the world."

This book was the inspiration for the movie '' Bound for Glory'', starring David Carradine, which won the 1976 Academy Award for Original Music Score for Original Song Score and Its Adaptation or Adaptation Score, and the National Board of Review Award for Best Actor, among other accolades.

In 1944, Guthrie met Moses "Moe" Asch of Folkways Records, for whom he first recorded "This Land Is Your Land". Over the next few years, he recorded "Worried Man Blues", along with hundreds of other songs. These recordings would later be released by Folkways and Stinson Records, which had joint distribution rights. The Folkways recordings are available (through the Smithsonian Institution online shop); the most complete series of these sessions, culled from dates with Asch, is titled ''The Asch Recordings''.

World War II years

Guthrie believed performing his anti-fascist songs and poems in the United States was the best use of his talents.

Labor for Victory: In April 1942, ''Time'' magazine reported that the AFL (American Federation of Labor) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had agreed to a joint radio production, called ''Labor for Victory''. NBC agreed to run the weekly segment as a "public service". The AFL and CIO presidents William Green and Philip Murray agreed to let their press chiefs, Philip Pearl and Len De Caux, narrate on alternate weeks. The show ran on NBC radio on Saturdays 10:15–10:30 pm, starting on April 25, 1942. ''Time'' wrote, "De Caux and Pearl hope to make the Labor for Victory program popular enough for an indefinite run, using labor news, name speakers and interviews with workmen. Labor partisanship, they promise, is out."
Writers for ''Labor for Victory'' included: Peter Lyon, a progressive journalist; Millard Lampell (born Allan Sloane), later an American movie and television screenwriter; and Morton Wishengrad, who worked for the AFL.

For entertainment on CIO episodes, De Caux asked singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie to contribute to the show. "Personally, I would like to see a phonograph record made of your 'Girl in the Red, White, and Blue.
The title appears in at least one collection of Guthrie records. Guthrie consented and performed solo two or three times on this program (among several other WWII radio shows, including ''Answering You'', ''Labor for Victory'', ''Jazz in America'', and ''We the People''). On August 29, 1942, he performed "The Farmer-Labor Train", with lyrics he had written to the tune of "Wabash Cannonball". (In 1948, he reworked the "Wabash Cannonball" melody as "The Wallace-Taylor Train" for the 1948 Progressive National Convention, which nominated former U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace for president.) The Almanac Singers (of which Guthrie and Lampell were co-founders) appeared on ''The Treasury Hour'' and CBS Radio's ''We the People''. The latter was later produced as a television series. (Also, Marc Blitzstein's papers show that Guthrie made some contributions to four CIO episodes (dated June 20, June 27, August 1, August 15, 1948) of ''Labor for Victory.'') While ''Labor for Victory'' was a milestone in theory as a national platform, in practice it proved less so. Only 35 of 104 NBC affiliates carried the show. Episodes included the announcement that the show represented "twelve million organized men and women, united in the high resolve to rid the world of Fascism in 1942". Speakers included Donald E. Montgomery, then "consumer's counselor" at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Merchant Marine: Guthrie lobbied the United States Army to accept him as a USO performer instead of conscripting him as a soldier in the draft. When Guthrie's attempts failed, his friends Cisco Houston and Jim Longhi persuaded the singer to join the U.S. Merchant Marine in June 1943. He made several voyages aboard merchant ships SS ''William B. Travis'', SS ''William Floyd'', and SS ''Sea Porpoise'', while they traveled in convoys during the Battle of the Atlantic. He served as a mess man and dishwasher, and frequently sang for the crew and troops to buoy their spirits on transatlantic voyages. His first ship, ''William B. Travis'', hit a mine in the Mediterranean Sea, which killed one person aboard, but the ship sailed to Bizerte, Tunisia under her own power.

His last ship, ''Sea Porpoise'', took troops from the United States to England and France for the D-Day invasion. Guthrie was aboard when the ship was torpedoed off Utah Beach by the German submarine U-390 on July 5, 1944, injuring 12 of the crew. Guthrie was unhurt and the ship stayed afloat; it returned to England, where it was repaired at Newcastle. In July 1944, it returned to the United States.

Guthrie was an active supporter of the National Maritime Union, one of many unions for wartime American merchant sailors. Guthrie wrote songs about his experience in the Merchant Marine but was never satisfied with them. Longhi later wrote about Guthrie's marine experiences in his book ''Woody, Cisco and Me''. The book offers a rare first-hand account of Guthrie during his Merchant Marine service. In 1945, the government decided that Guthrie's association with communism excluded him from further service in the Merchant Marine; he was drafted into the U.S. Army.

While he was on furlough from the Army, Guthrie married Marjorie. After his discharge, they moved into a house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island and over time had four children: daughters Cathy and Nora; and sons Arlo and Joady. Cathy died as a result of a fire at the age of four, and Guthrie suffered a serious depression from his grief. Arlo and Joady followed in their father's footsteps as singer-songwriters.

When his family was young, 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. During 1947, he wrote ''House of Earth'', an historical novel containing explicit sexual material, about a couple who build a house made of clay and earth to withstand the Dust Bowl's brutal weather. He could not get it published. It was published posthumously in 2013, by Harper, under actor Johnny Depp's publishing imprint, Infinitum Nihil.

Guthrie was also a prolific sketcher and painter, his images ranging from simple, impressionistic images to free and characterful drawings, typically of the people in his songs.

In 1949, Guthrie's music was used in the documentary film ''Columbia River'', which explored government dams and hydroelectric projects on the river. Guthrie had been commissioned by the US Bonneville Power Administration in 1941 to write songs for the project, but it had been postponed by World War II.

Post-war: Mermaid Avenue

The years immediately after the war when he lived on Mermaid Avenue were among Guthrie's most productive as a writer. His extensive writings from this time were archived and maintained by Marjorie and later his estate, mostly handled by his daughter Nora. Several of the manuscripts also contain writing by a young Arlo and the other Guthrie children.

During this time Ramblin' Jack Elliott studied extensively under Guthrie, visiting his home and observing how he wrote and performed. Elliott, like Bob Dylan later, idolized Guthrie. He was inspired by the singer's idiomatic performance style and repertoire. Because of the decline caused by Guthrie's progressive Huntington's disease, Arlo Guthrie and Bob Dylan both later said that they had learned much of Guthrie's performance style from Elliott. When asked about this, Elliott said, "I was flattered. Dylan learned from me the same way I learned from Woody. Woody didn't teach me. He just said, If you want to learn something, just steal it—that's the way I learned from Lead Belly."

1950s and 1960s

Deteriorating health due to Huntington's

By the late 1940s, Guthrie's health was declining, and his behavior was becoming extremely erratic. He received various diagnoses (including alcoholism and schizophrenia). In 1952, it was finally determined that he was suffering from Huntington's disease, a genetic disorder inherited from his mother. Believing him to be a danger to their children because of his behavior, Marjorie suggested he return to California without her. They eventually divorced