Woody Guthrie (1912–1967)

In folk music circles, what exactly constitutes a folk song has long been a topic of debate. Some say it’s a question of subject matter: Folk songs are about the real lives of real people, sung in language that everyone understands. Ethnomusicologists insist that folk songs can’t be written or composed, but that they evolve, maybe over hundreds of years, out of a heritage that slowly adapts as the world changes—as John Lomax (1867–1948), the folk musicologist said, “The old songs adapt and abide.” Woody Guthrie said folk songs were “music of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and called his songs “People’s Songs.” He adapted old songs, he wrote new words to old tunes, and a lot of the time he wrote new words to new tunes. To Woody Guthrie it was all one—he regarded his songs, like the American folk tradition they sprung from and enriched, as common property. The original copyright notice attached to This LandIs Your Land reads as follows: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in the frontier town of Okemah, Oklahoma on July 14, 1912—the year Woodrow Wilson was elected President. His father was a cowboy, a local politician, and a land speculator whose fortunes rose and fell with the oil booms and busts. During his childhood, Guthrie’s family suffered a series of hardships that fomented his sympathies with the poor and downtrodden. His family lost several homes and fortunes to fires, one of which killed his older sister, Clara. Another one severely injured his father and put him out of work. His mother suffered a number of breakdowns before the family was forced to send her to an asylum where she would spend the rest of her life. Guthrie always claimed that his family was responsible for everything he ever became. His mother taught him the songs that he would sing, adapt, and borrow from, and his father never stopped working, fighting, and dreaming.

When Guthrie’s mother was finally and permanently institutionalized in 1923, his father left for Texas, following another oil boom. Guthrie stayed in Oklahoma with his brother, but after two years, he hit the road for the first time and began the long, wandering journey that would continue the rest of his life. He worked as a shoe-shine boy, he cleaned spittoons in bars, and he worked nights in a hotel, meeting guests off the night trains. His account appears in his book, Bound for Glory, “I was a little past sixteen when I first hit the highway and took a trip down around the Gulf of Mexico, hoeing figs, watering strawberries, picking mustang grapes, helping carpenters and well drillers, cleaning yards, chopping weeds, and moving garbage cans." And he took in everything he saw.

In 1931, he joined his father in Texas, and took a job painting signs: in 1933 he married Mary Jennings, with whom he had three children. His uncle gave him his first guitar and taught him to play. Guthrie quickly became a proficient guitar player and singer, and formed his first band, known as “The Corn Cob Trio.” But, as he wrote later, he never got to make up “songs about cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky.”

Beginning in 1931, ill-judged land use and a prolonged drought led to one of the greatest social tragedies in American history. The land of the flat plains turned to dust, making refugees of farming families from states including Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. An estimated 400,000 people packed up their belongings and made their way to California in search of work. Woody Guthrie and his family traveled with them, and he wrote the songs that became the anthems of the time. Guthrie became “The Dust Bowl Balladeer.”

In California, he found work on the radio as a raconteur and singer, mixing traditional songs with his own songs of protest. He became a journalist too, and contributed a weekly column, ‘Woody Sez,’ to the Daily Worker. He espoused the cause of organized labor and pledged his lifelong support for the trade union movement.

In 1939, Guthrie relocated to New York City, where his music and his political views were embraced by the city’s liberal, literary, and musical circles. Alan Lomax (1915–2002) put him on his Folk Music on the Air radio show and recorded several hours of Guthrie’s songs and conversation for the Folk Song Archive of the Library of Congress. In 1940, Guthrie made his first album, Dust Bowl Ballads, which included “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Ya”, “I Ain’t Got No Home”, and “Tom Joad.” The same year he started his autobiography, Bound for Glory, and wrote perhaps his most famous song: “This Land Is Your Land.” Originally written as a reply to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” Guthrie’s words are set to the tune of an old gospel song, “When the World’s On Fire.” “This Land Is Your Land” is an eloquent plea for social equality, and a patriotic celebration of the beauty of the country, which Guthrie saw as the physical embodiment of liberty and justice for all.

In 1941, Guthrie was commissioned by the Department of the Interior to write music to celebrate the building of the new Colombia River Dam, and produced “Roll On, Colombia” and “Grand Coolee Dam.” The same year, he met Pete Seeger (b. 1919), and together they formed the legendary folk group, the Almanac Singers. He wrote songs about the war in Europe, and famously wrote “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his guitar. When the United States joined the war, Guthrie served first in the Merchant Marine, and then the Army.

After the war and the break up of his first marriage, Guthrie married Marjorie Mazia, a dancer with the Martha Graham Company. They took a house in Coney Island and had four children—one of whom, Cathy, died in a tragic re-enactment of his sister’s death, when the house caught fire. One of their other children, Arlo, has become a famous singer-songwriter in his own right. It was during this period, the most stable family life Guthrie ever knew, that he wrote his massively popular Songs to Grow On for Mother and Child.

But Guthrie’s domestic stability did not last. Towards the end of the 1940s, his behavior became increasingly erratic. He took off in his car for California, where he married for a third time and had another child. Variously diagnosed as a schizophrenic and an alcoholic, Guthrie was neither. When his marriage fell apart, he returned to New York City in the mid-Fifties, where it was discovered that he was suffering from Huntington’s chorea, the degenerative nervous disorder that killed his mother. After a long illness, during which he was comforted by old friends like Pete Seeger and new ones like Bob Dylan (b. 1941), Woody Guthrie died on October 3, 1967.

Woody Guthrie lived through and experienced first hand some of the momentous events of the American twentieth century: the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the creation of trade unions, the Second World War, and the beginning of the Cold War. He absorbed it all, and became the voice of the marginalized, the disenfranchised, and the oppressed. He could be harshly realistic, romantic, satirical, tender, humorous and lyrical. He made heroes out of outlaws like Jesse James and Pretty Boy Floyd (“You won’t never see an outlaw / Drive a family from their home”), and he made villains of politicians and bureaucrats, who robbed the poor not with a six-gun but “with a fountain-pen.”

Woody Guthrie celebrated family, he loved children, and he had an undying respect for the working men and women who were the heart and soul of the United States he cherished. He sang what he saw, and he was always honest. His is one of the most moving, eloquent, and influential American voices of the twentieth century. As John Steinbeck (1902–1968) wrote: “He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of the people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.”

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