GUTHRIE

Woody Guthrie is commonly hailed as the most influential American folk singer-songwriter of the 20th century. In an impressive career cut tragically short by Huntington’s chorea, the inherited degenerative disease of the nervous system, Guthrie wrote more than a thousand songs, including “This Land Is Your Land,” “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” “Reuben James,” “This Train Is Bound for Glory,” and “Pastures of Plenty.” With his love of folk tradition and sharp political conscience, he was to become the king of the protest song.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, deep in America’s heartland. His happy and well-to-do family had become beset by tragedy by the time Guthrie was in his teens. Guthrie’s sister died when she caught fire from a coal oil stove, his father’s land-trading company went bankrupt, and his mother was committed to an asylum after she set her husband ablaze. Although it was undiagnosed at the time, she was actually suffering from, and eventually died of, Huntington’s chorea, which would later stalk both Guthrie and his children.

HITTING THE ROAD

Guthrie hit the road when he was just 17. He soon found himself in Pampa, Texas, where he learned to play the guitar, began the first of two families, and made a living as a sign-painter. After the great dust storm of 1935, he criss-crossed the country by rail and became a popular figure in the boxcars (enclosed goods wagons), playing familiar folk songs to tramps he met along the way. His 1943 autobiography, entitled Bound for Glory, opens and closes with scenes of Guthrie singing to and with tramps.

Guthrie moved to California in 1937, where he presented his own radio show, wrote songbooks, met friend and political ally Will Geer and longtime singing buddy Cisco Houston, and began to get involved in politics. By the time he reached New York, in 1940, he was in full command of his art. Among the many influences now showing in his work were those of the CARTER FAMILY—often dubbed the first family of American country music—and “hillbilly” singer Jimmie RODGERS. Guthrie borrowed tunes from everywhere, forging a very personal style of writing and singing political songs in a traditional way. As for his singing style, the celebrated American author John Steinbeck described this, accurately enough, as “harsh-voiced and nasal.” The novelist also wrote, “He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people.”

Guthrie was a populist, mixing with all kinds of people during his frequent travels, entertaining migrant workers, and playing at union meetings and political rallies. He also wrote for the Communist papers Daily Worker and People’s World, and later contributed a column called “Ear Music” to the magazine Common Ground. Victor Records released his Dust Bowl Ballads in 1940, and in 1941 Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell started their own folk “supergroup,” the Almanac Singers. In 1944, Guthrie and Houston joined the Merchant Marines and performed together, entertaining the troops in World War II.

After the war, Guthrie recorded hundreds of songs for the Folkways label before Huntington’s chorea began to debilitate him in the early 1950s. At first he simply acted erratically, but eventually lost his ability to speak or to keep parts of his body from shaking violently. Aspiring young folk musicians made pilgrimages to visit him, sitting at his feet and playing his own songs to him. One such visitor during the early 1960s was Bob DYLAN. By the time Guthrie died, on October 3, 1967, another folk revival had begun—and he was one of its major inspirations.

Stan Hieronymus

WOODY

GUTHRIE

HITTING THE ROAD