Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (; July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) was an American singer, songwriter, and composer widely considered one of the most significant figures in American folk music. His work focused on themes of American socialism and anti-fascism and has inspired many generations politically and musically with songs such as "This Land Is Your Land" and "Tear the Fascists Down".
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 Mojos 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 an influence include Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Lou Reed, Phil Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, Donovan, Robert Hunter, Harry Chapin, John Mellencamp, Andy Irvine, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg, Dropkick Murphys, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Jeff Tweedy, Tom Paxton, Country Joe McDonald, Brian Fallon, Sean Bonnette, Sixto Rodríguez, Steve Earle and Jesse Welles. Guthrie 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 left Okemah in 1929, after his mother, suffering from Huntington's disease, was institutionalized. Guthrie followed his wayward father to Pampa, Texas, where he was running a flophouse. Though Guthrie lived there for just eight years, the town's influence on him and his music was undeniable. He married at 20, 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 Texans and Okies who were migrating to California looking for employment. He worked at the Los Angeles radio station KFVD, achieving some fame from playing hillbilly music, befriended 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 there is no evidence that he was a member of one. 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 and went to 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", a response to what he felt was the overplaying of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" on the radio.
Guthrie married three times and fathered eight children. His son Arlo Guthrie became nationally known as a musician. Guthrie died in 1967 from complications of Huntington's disease, inherited from his mother. His first two daughters also died of the disease.
Early life
alt=A white map of Oklahoma with a red dot in the center|thumb|Okemah in Oklahoma
thumb|alt=A simple house|Woody Guthrie's [[Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, childhood home in 1979]]
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. 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. (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 impacted Guthrie's early life. In 1909, one fire caused the loss of his family's home in Okemah a month after it was completed. 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 Charles 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. 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.
Career
1930s
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 in Los Angeles, 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.