| name | Woody Guthrie |
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| background | solo_singer |
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| birth name | Woodrow Wilson Guthrie |
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| born | July 14, 1912Okemah, Oklahoma, United States |
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| died | October 03, 1967New York City, New York, United States |
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| instrument | Guitar, Vocal, Harmonica, Mandolin, Fiddle |
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| genre | Folk, protest song |
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| occupation | Singer-songwriter |
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| years active | 1930–1956 |
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| influences | Joe Hill, Will Rogers, Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, Lead Belly |
|---|
| influenced | Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, Jack Elliott, Phil Ochs, Joe Strummer, Bruce Springsteen |
|---|
| notable instruments | Martin 000-18, Gibson Southern Jumbo, Gibson J-45
}} |
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Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) is best known as an American
singer-songwriter and
folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political,
traditional and children's songs,
ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan ''This Machine Kills Fascists'' displayed on his guitar. His best-known song is "
This Land Is Your Land". Many of his recorded songs are archived in the
Library of Congress. Such songwriters as
Bob Dylan,
Phil Ochs,
Bruce Springsteen,
Pete Seeger,
Joe Strummer and
Tom Paxton have acknowledged their debt to Guthrie as an influence.
Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California and learned traditional folk and blues songs. Many of his songs are about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression, earning him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Troubadour". Throughout his life Guthrie was associated with United States communist groups, though he was seemingly not a member of any.
Guthrie was married three times and fathered eight children, including American folk musician Arlo Guthrie. He is the grandfather of musician Sarah Lee Guthrie. Guthrie died from complications of Huntington's disease, a progressive genetic neurological disorder. During his later years, in spite of his illness, Guthrie served as a figurehead in the folk movement, providing inspiration to a generation of new folk musicians, including mentor relationships with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan.
Woody Guthrie was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 1997.
Biography
Early life: 1912–30
Guthrie was born in
Okemah, a small town in
Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, to Nora Belle Tanner and Charles Edward Guthrie. His parents named him after
Woodrow Wilson, then Governor of New Jersey and the
Democratic candidate soon to be elected
President of the United States.
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 Democratic candidate for office in the county. When Charles was making stump speeches, he would often be accompanied by his son.
Charles Guthrie was involved in the 1911 lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson. His son wrote three songs about the event and said that his father was later a member of the revived Ku Klux Klan.
Guthrie's early family life was affected by several fires, including one that caused the loss of his family's home in Okemah. His sister Clara later died in a coal-oil (used for heating) fire when Guthrie was seven, and Guthrie's father was severely burned in a subsequent coal-oil fire. The circumstances of these fires, especially that in which Charley was injured, remain unclear. It is unknown whether they were accidents or the result of actions by Guthrie's mother Nora, who was afflicted with Huntington's disease, although the family did not know this at the time. It leads to dementia as well as muscular effects.
Nora Guthrie was eventually committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane, where she died in 1930 from Huntington's disease. Judging from the circumstances of her father's death by drowning, researchers suspect that George Sherman suffered from the same hereditary disease.
When Nora Guthrie was institutionalized, Woody Guthrie was 14. His father Charley was living and working in Pampa, Texas to repay his 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. According to one story, Guthrie made friends with an African-American blues harmonica player named "George", whom he would watch play at the man's shoe shine booth. Before long, Guthrie bought his own harmonica and began playing along with him. In another interview 14 years later, Guthrie claimed he learned how to play harmonica from a boyhood friend, John Woods, and that his earlier story about the shoe-shining player was false.
He seemed to have a natural affinity for music and easily learned to "play by ear". He began to use his musical skills around town, playing a song for a sandwich or coins. Guthrie easily learned old Irish ballads and traditional songs from the parents of friends. Although he did not excel as a student (he dropped out of high school in his fourth year and did not graduate), his teachers described him as bright. He was an avid reader on a wide range of topics. Friends recall his reading constantly.
Eventually, Guthrie's father sent for his son to come to Texas, but little changed for the aspiring musician. Guthrie, then 18, was reluctant to attend high school classes in Pampa and spent much time learning songs by busking on the streets and reading in the library at Pampa's city hall. He was growing as a musician, gaining practice by regularly playing at dances with his father's half-brother Jeff Guthrie, a fiddle player. At the library, he wrote a manuscript summarizing everything he had read on the basics of psychology. A librarian in Pampa shelved this manuscript under Guthrie's name, but it was later lost in a library reorganization.
1930s: traveling
At age 19, Guthrie met and married his first wife, Mary Jennings, with whom he had three children, Gwendolyn, Sue and Bill, all of whom would later die prematurely. With the advent of the
Dust Bowl era, Guthrie left Texas, leaving Mary behind, and joined the thousands of
Okies who were migrating to
California looking for work. Many of his songs are concerned with the conditions faced by these
working class people.
California
In the 1930s, Guthrie lived on Preston Avenue at Ewing St. in
Echo Park, California; a
Los Angeles, California neighborhood nicknamed "Red Hill" for the concentration of political radicals living there. During the late 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, who were still living in Texas. While appearing on the commercial radio station
KFVD, owned by a populist-minded
New Deal Democrat Frank Burke, Guthrie began to write and perform some of the protest songs that would eventually appear on ''
Dust Bowl Ballads''.
It was at KFVD that Guthrie met newscaster Ed Robbin. Robbin was impressed with a song Guthrie wrote about Thomas Mooney, believed by many to be a wrongly convicted man who was, at the time, a leftist ''cause célèbre''. Robbin, who became Guthrie's political mentor, introduced Guthrie to socialists and communists in Southern California, including Will Geer. He 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 not subject to party discipline. Guthrie requested to write a column for the Communist newspaper, ''The Daily Worker''. 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; they were published 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 the nonaggression 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. Both Robbin and Guthrie left the station. Without the daily radio show, his prospects for employment diminished, and Guthrie and his family returned to Pampa, Texas. Although Mary Guthrie was happy to return to Texas, the wanderlusting Guthrie soon after accepted 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 leftist folk music community. For a time, he slept on a couch in
Will Geer's apartment. Guthrie made what were 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.
Guthrie was tired of the radio overplaying Irving Berlin's "God Bless America". He thought the lyrics were unrealistic and complacent. Partly inspired by his experiences during a cross-country trip and his distaste for "God Bless America", he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land", in February 1940; it was subtitled "God Blessed America for Me." The melody is adapted from an old gospel song, "Oh My Loving Brother." This was best known as "When The World's On Fire", sung by the country group The Carter Family. Guthrie signed the manuscript with the comment, "All you can write is what you see, Woody G., N.Y., N.Y., N.Y.". He protested against class inequality in the fourth and sixth verses:
:''As I went walking, I saw a sign there,''
:''And on the sign there, It said "no trespassing."'' [In another version, the sign reads "Private Property"]
:''But on the other side, it didn't say nothing!''
:''That side was made for you and me.''
:''In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;''
:''By the relief office, I'd seen my people.''
:''As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,''
:''Is this land made for you and me?''
These verses were often omitted in subsequent recordings, sometimes by Guthrie. Although the song was written in 1940, it was four years before he recorded it for Moses Asch in April 1944., Sheet music was not produced and given to schools by Howie Richmond until 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. Later, 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.
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 leftwing 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 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 [''sic''] 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.
Pacific Northwest
In May 1941, after a brief stay in Los Angeles, Guthrie moved the family north to
Washington state 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", "
Pastures of Plenty", and "
Grand Coulee Dam". The surviving songs were released as ''
Columbia River Songs''. The film was never completed and was released only in a limited form.
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 member of the Catholic Church, but she reluctantly agreed in December 1943.
Almanac Singers
Following the conclusion of his work in Washington State, 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 "
hootenannys", 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 Almanacs Singers termed "peace" songs; while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Communist line was that World War II was a capitalist fraud. 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 socialist ideals, meals, chores and rent at the Almanac House were shared. The Sunday hootenannys 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.
''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, a dancer in New York who would become his second wife. Mazia was an instructor at the prestigious
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 due to the patient editing assistance of Mazia and was first published by E.P. Dutton in 1943. It is vividly told in the artist's down-home dialect, with the flair and imagery of a true storyteller. ''Library Journal'' complained about the "Too careful reproduction of illiterate speech." But Clifton Fadiman, reviewing the book in the ''New York Times'', paid the author a fine tribute: "Some day 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." A
film adaptation of ''Bound for Glory'' was released in 1976.
The Asch recordings
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 Institute 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 at home was the best use of his talents; 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 pressured Guthrie to join the
U.S. Merchant Marine. Guthrie followed their advice: he served as a mess man and dishwasher, and frequently sang for the crew and troops to buoy their spirits on transatlantic voyages. Guthrie made attempts to write about his experience in the Merchant Marine, but was never satisfied with the results. Longhi later wrote about these 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, Guthrie's association with communism made him ineligible for further service in the Merchant Marine, and he was drafted into the
U.S. Army.
While he was on furlough from the Army, Guthrie and Marjorie were married. After his discharge, they moved into a house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, and over time had four children. One of their children, Cathy, died as a result of a fire at age four, sending Guthrie into a serious depression. Their other children were Joady, Nora and Arlo. Arlo followed in his father's footsteps as a singer-songwriter. During this period, 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.
A 1948 crash of a plane carrying 28 Mexican farm workers from Oakland, California in deportation back to Mexico inspired Woody to write "Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)".
Mermaid Avenue
The years living on Mermaid Avenue were among Guthrie's most productive periods as a writer. His extensive writings from this time were archived and maintained by Marjorie and later his estate, mostly handled by Guthrie's daughter, Nora. Several of the manuscripts contain scribblings by a young Arlo and the other Guthrie offspring.
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 and was inspired by his idiomatic performance style and repertoire. Due to Guthrie's suffering Huntington's disease, Dylan and Guthrie's son Arlo later claimed they learned much of Guthrie's performance style from Elliott. When asked about Arlo's claim, 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
By the late 1940s, Guthrie's health was declining, and his behavior was becoming extremely erratic. He received various diagnoses (including
alcoholism and
schizophrenia), but 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, Marjorie suggested he return to California without her; they eventually divorced.
Upon his return to California, Guthrie lived in a compound owned by Will Geer; with blacklisted singers and actors, he waited out the anti-communist political climate. As his health worsened, he met and married his third wife, Anneke Van Kirk. They had a child, Lorinna Lynn. The couple moved to Fruit Cove, Florida briefly. They lived in a bus on land called Beluthahatchee, owned by his friend Stetson Kennedy. Guthrie's arm was hurt in a campfire accident when gasoline used to start the campfire exploded. Although he regained movement in the arm, he was never able to play the guitar again. In 1954, the couple returned to New York. Shortly after, Anneke filed for divorce, a result of the strain of caring for Guthrie. Anneke left New York and allowed friends to adopt Lorina Lynn. Lorinna had no further contact with her birth parents and died in 1973 at the age of nineteen in a car accident in California. After the divorce, Guthrie's second wife, Marjorie, re-entered his life; it was Marjorie who cared for him and assisted him until his death.
Guthrie, increasingly unable to control his muscles, was hospitalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital from 1956 to 1961, at Brooklyn State Hospital until 1966, and finally at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center until his death. Marjorie and the children visited Guthrie at Greystone every Sunday. They answered fan mail and played on the hospital grounds. Eventually a longtime fan of Guthrie invited the family to his nearby home for the Sunday visits. This lasted until Guthrie was moved to the Brooklyn State Hospital, which was closer to where Marjorie lived.
When Bob Dylan, who idolized Guthrie and whose early folk career was deeply inspired by him, learned that Guthrie was hospitalized in Brooklyn, he was determined to meet his idol. By this time, Guthrie was said to have his "good days" and "bad days". On the good days, Dylan would sing songs to him, and at the beginning Guthrie seemed to warm to Dylan. When the bad days came, Guthrie would berate Dylan. Reportedly on Dylan's last visit, Guthrie didn't recognize him. Dylan said that he made his trek to New York City primarily to seek out his idol. At the end of his life, Guthrie was largely alone except for family. Due to the progression of Huntington's, he was difficult to be around. Guthrie's illness was essentially untreated, due to a lack of information about the disease. His death helped raise awareness of the disease and led Marjorie to help found the Committee to Combat Huntington's Disease, which became the Huntington's Disease Society of America. None of Guthrie's three remaining children with Marjorie has developed symptoms of Huntington's. Two of Mary Guthrie's children (Gwendolyn and Sue) suffered from the disease. (Her son Bill died in an auto-train accident in Pomona, California, at age 23.) Both died at 41 years of age.
Folk revival and Guthrie's death
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new generation of young people were inspired by folk singers including Guthrie. These "folk revivalists" became more politically aware in their music than those of the previous generation. The
American Folk Revival was beginning to take place, focused on the issues of the day, such as the
civil rights movement and
free speech movement. Pockets of folk singers were forming around the country in places such as
Cambridge, Massachusetts and the
Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. One of Guthrie's visitors at Greystone Park was the 19-year-old
Bob Dylan who idolized Guthrie. Dylan wrote of Guthrie's repertoire: "The songs themselves were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them." After learning of Guthrie's whereabouts, Bob Dylan regularly visited him. Guthrie died of complications of Huntington's disease on October 3, 1967. By the time of his death, his work had been discovered by a new audience, introduced to them in part through
Bob Dylan,
Pete Seeger,
Ramblin' Jack Elliott, his ex-wife Marjorie and other new members of the folk revival, and his son
Arlo.
Family
Married: Mary Esta Jennings (1933–1943), Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia (1945–1953), Anneke van Kirk (1953–1954)
Children (8): Gwendolyn Gail (1935–1976), Sue (1937–1978), Bill (1939–1962), Cathy Ann (1943–1947), Arlo Davy (1947-), Joady Ben (1948-), Nora (1950-), Lorinna Lynn (1954–1973)
Musical legacy
Foundation and archives
The Woody Guthrie Foundation is a non-profit organization that serves as administrator and caretaker of the Woody Guthrie Archives. The archive houses the largest collection of Guthrie material in the world. Guthrie's unrecorded written lyrics housed at the Archives have been the starting point of several albums including the
Wilco and
Billy Bragg albums ''
Mermaid Avenue'' and ''
Mermaid Avenue Vol. II'', created in 1998 sessions at the invitation of Guthrie's daughter Nora. The Native American (Diné) trio Blackfire also interpreted previously unreleased Guthrie lyrics at Nora's invitation. Jonatha Brooke's 2008 album, "The Works" (RELEASE: August 26, 2008, LABEL: Bad Dog Records) includes lyrics from the Woody Guthrie Archives set to music by Jonatha Brooke.
Folk Festival
The
Woody Guthrie Folk Festival is held annually in mid-July to commemorate Guthrie's life and music. The festival is held on the weekend closest to Guthrie's birth date (July 14) in Guthrie's hometown of
Okemah, Oklahoma. Planned and implemented annually by the Woody Guthrie Coalition, a non-profit corporation, the goal is simply to ensure Guthrie's musical legacy. The Woody Guthrie Coalition commissioned a local Creek Indian sculptor to cast a full-body bronze statue of Guthrie and his guitar, complete with the guitar's well-known inscription: "This machine kills fascists". The statue, sculpted by artist Dan Brook, stands along Okemah's main street in the heart of downtown and was unveiled in 1998, the inaugural year of the festival.
Jewish songs
Marjorie Mazia was born Marjorie Greenblatt and her mother,
Aliza Greenblatt, was a well-known Yiddish poet. With her, Guthrie wrote numerous Jewish lyrics. Guthrie’s Jewish lyrics can be traced to the unusual collaborative relationship he had with his mother-in-law, who lived across from Guthrie and his family in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Guthrie (the Oklahoma troubadour) and Greenblatt (the Jewish wordsmith) often discussed their artistic projects and critiqued each other’s works, finding common ground in their shared love of culture and social justice, despite very different backgrounds. Their collaboration flourished in 1940s Brooklyn, where Jewish culture was interwoven with music, modern dance, poetry and anti-fascist, pro-labor, classic socialist activism. Guthrie was inspired to write songs that came directly out of this unlikely relationship, both personal and political; he identified the problems of Jews with those of his fellow Okies and other oppressed peoples.
These lyrics were rediscovered by Nora Guthrie and were set to music by the Jewish Klezmer group The Klezmatics with the release of ''Happy Joyous Hanukkah'' on JMG Records in 2007. The Klezmatics also released ''Wonder Wheel — Lyrics by Woody Guthrie'', an album of spiritual lyrics put to music composed by the band. The album, produced by Danny Blume, was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album.
Tributes
Since his death, artists have paid tribute to Guthrie by
covering his songs or by dedicating songs to him. One of the first artists to do so was Scottish folk artist
Donovan, who covered Guthrie's "Car, Car (Riding in My Car)" on his 1965 debut album ''
What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid''. On January 20, 1968, three months following Guthrie's death,
Harold Leventhal produced ''A Tribute to Woody Guthrie'' at New York City's
Carnegie Hall. Performers included Jack Elliott, Pete Seeger,
Tom Paxton,
Bob Dylan and
The Band,
Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie,
Richie Havens,
Odetta, and others. Leventhal repeated the tribute on September 12, 1970 at the
Hollywood Bowl. Recordings of the two concerts were eventually compiled as an album. The legendary Irish folk singer,
Christy Moore, was also strongly influenced by Woody in his seminal 1970 album ''
Prosperous'', giving renditions of "
The Ludlow Massacre" and Bob Dylan's "
Song to Woody". Bob Dylan also penned, ''
Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie'' as a later tribute song to Guthrie.
Bruce Springsteen also performed a cover of Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" on his live album ''
Live 1975-1985''. In the introduction to the song, Springsteen referred to it as "just about one of the most beautiful songs ever written."
In September 1996 Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Case Western Reserve University cohosted ''Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie'', a 10-day conference of panel sessions, lectures, and concerts. The conference became the first in what would become the museum's annual American Music Masters Series conference. Highlights included Arlo Guthrie's keynote address, a Saturday night musical jamboree at Cleveland's Odeon Theater, and a Sunday night concert at Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra. Musicians performing over the course of the conference included Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the Indigo Girls, Ellis Paul, Jimmy LaFave, Ani DiFranco, and others. In 1999, Wesleyan University Press published a collection of essays from the conference and DiFranco's record label, Righteous Babe, released a compilation of the Severance Hall concert, '''Til We Outnumber 'Em'', in 2000.
From 1999 to 2002 the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service presented the traveling exhibit, ''This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie''. In collaboration with Nora Guthrie, the Smithsonian exhibition draws from rarely seen objects, illustrations, film footage, and recorded performances to reveal a complex man who was at once poet, musician, protester, idealist, itinerant hobo, and folk legend.
In 2003, Jimmy LaFave produced a Woody Guthrie tribute show called ''Ribbon of Highway, Endless Skyway''. The ensemble show toured around the country and included a rotating cast of singer-songwriters individually performing Guthrie's songs. Interspersed between songs were Guthrie's philosophical writings read by a narrator. In addition to LaFave, members of the rotating cast included Ellis Paul, Slaid Cleaves, Eliza Gilkyson, Joel Rafael, husband-wife duo Sarah Lee Guthrie (Woody Guthrie's granddaughter) and Johnny Irion, Michael Fracasso, and The Burns Sisters. Oklahoma songwriter Bob Childers, sometimes called "the Dylan of the Dust", served as narrator. When word spread about the tour, performers began contacting LaFave, whose only prerequisite was to have an inspirational connection to Guthrie. Each artist chose the Guthrie songs that he or she would perform as part of the tribute. LaFave said, "It works because all the performers are Guthrie enthusiasts in some form". The inaugural performance of the Ribbon of Highway tour took place on February 5, 2003 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The abbreviated show was a featured segment of ''Nashville Sings Woody'', yet another tribute concert to commemorate the music of Woody Guthrie held during the Folk Alliance Conference. The cast of ''Nashville Sings Woody'', a benefit for the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, also included Arlo Guthrie, Marty Stuart, Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Janis Ian, and others.
Woody and Marjorie Guthrie were honored at a musical celebration featuring Billy Bragg and the band Brad on October 17, 2007 at Webster Hall in New York City. Steve Earle also performed. The event was hosted by actor/activist Tim Robbins to benefit the Huntington¹s Disease Society of America to commemorate the organization's 40th Anniversary.
Copyright controversy
In his recordings in the early 1940s Woody Guthrie included the following “Copyright Warning”:
“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.” Currently the copyright in much of Woody's songs is claimed by a number of different organizations.
When JibJab published a parody of Woody's song This Land Is Your Land to comment on the US 2004 Presidential election, Ludlow Music attempted to have this parody taken down, claiming it breached their copyright. JibJab then sued to affirm their parody was Fair Use, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) acting for them. As part of their research on the case they found that the song had actually been first published by Woody Guthrie in 1945, although the copyright was not registered until 1956. This meant that when Ludlow applied to renew the copyright in 1984 they were 11 years too late, and the song had in fact been in the public domain since 1973 (28 years from first publication). Ludlow agreed that JibJab were free to distribute their parody. In an interview on NPR Arlo Guthrie said that he thought the parody was hilarious and he thought Woody would have loved it too.
Ludlow still claims copyright in this song; however, it is not clear what the basis of this claim is.
Posthumous honors
Pete Seeger had the
Sloop ''Woody Guthrie'' built for an organization he founded, the
Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. It was launched in 1978. Now operated by the Beacon Sloop Club, it serves to educate people about
sailing and the history and environs of the
Hudson River.
Although Guthrie's catalogue never brought him many awards while he was alive, in 1988 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the same year Bob Dylan was inducted (much of Dylan's initial folk music work was heavily influenced by Guthrie), and in 2000 he was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 1987 "Roll On Columbia" was chosen as the official Washington State Folk Song,
and in 2001 Guthrie's "Oklahoma Hills" was chosen to be the official state folk song of Oklahoma.
On September 26, 1992, The Peace Abbey, a multi-faith retreat center located in Sherborn, Massachusetts, awarded Guthrie their Courage of Conscience Award for his social activism and artistry in song which conveyed the plight of the common person.
On June 26, 1998, as part of its Legends of American Music series, the United States Postal Service issued 45 million 32-cent stamps honoring folk musicians Huddie Ledbetter, Guthrie, Sonny Terry and Josh White. The four musicians were represented on sheets of 20 stamps.
In July 2001, CB's Gallery in New York City began hosting an annual Woody Guthrie Birthday Bash concert featuring multiple performers. This event moved to the Bowery Poetry Club in 2007 after CB's Gallery and CBGB, its parent club, closed.
In 2005, the Boston-based punk band Dropkick Murphys recorded "I'm Shipping Up to Boston". The song's lyrics are from a poem written by Guthrie, and the music was composed by the band. The song was released in 2005 on the album ''The Warrior's Code'' and gained fame when it was used as part of the soundtrack for the 2006 movie ''The Departed''.
In 2006, The Klezmatics set Jewish lyrics written by Guthrie to music. The resulting album, ''Wonder Wheel'', won the Grammy award for best contemporary world music album.
On April 27, 2007, Guthrie was one of four Okemah natives inducted into Okemah's Hall of Fame during the town's Pioneer Day weekend of festivities.
On February 10, 2008, ''The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949'', a rare live recording released in cooperation with the Woody Guthrie Foundation, was the recipient of a Grammy Award in the category Best Historical Album. Less than two years later, Guthrie was again nominated for a Grammy in the same category with the 2009 release of ''My Dusty Road'' on Rounder Records.
Selected discography
Many Guthrie tracks have been repeatedly repackaged and reordered. Items here are listed in order of the most recent published date, not original recording date.
See also
Arlo Guthrie
List of songs by Woody Guthrie
List of albums by Woody Guthrie
Lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson
Pete Seeger
References
Citations
Printed sources
Further reading/listening
Hogeland, William (March 14, 2004), Emulating the Real and Vital Guthrie, Not St. Woody, New York Times.
Down Home Radio Show. LeadBelly & Woody Guthrie live on WNYC Radio, Dec. 1940. Audio re-broadcast of a 1940 radio show. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
Earle, Steve. Woody Guthrie. ''The Nation'', July 21, 2003. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
Electronic Frontier Foundation. Scanned images of some of Woody Guthrie's original works. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
Jackson, Mark Allen. ''Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie''. University Press of Mississippi, January, 2007. ISBN 978-1-60473-102-6
La Chapelle, Peter. Is Country Music Inherently Conservative? History News Network. Nov. 12, 2007. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
La Chapelle, Peter. ''Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California''. University of California Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-520-24888-5 (hb); ISBN 978-0-520-24889-2 (pb)
Library of Congress. Timeline of Woody Guthrie (1912–1967). Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
Library of Congress. Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song: Correspondence, 1940–1950. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
Marroquin, Danny. Walking the Long Road. PopMatters.com. Aug. 4, 2006. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
Public Broadcasting Service. ''Woody Guthrie: Ain't Got No Home''. Documentary from PBS' American Masters series, July 2006. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
University of Oregon. ''Roll On Columbia: Woody Guthrie and the Bonneville Power Administration''. Video documentary. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
University of Virginia. Guthrie singing "This Land Is Your Land". MP3 recording. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
Symphony Silicon Valley Concert Recordings. David Amram's ''Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie'' Recorded September 30, 2007. Audio recording. Retrieved on January 11, 2008.
WoodyGuthrie.de. Woody Guthrie Related Audio. Miscellaneous Real Audio files featuring Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Alan Lomax and others. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
External links
The Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives
''Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song: Correspondence, 1940–1950'', Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. American Memory presentation of archival correspondence written by Woody Guthrie to the staff of the Archive of American Folk Song. Retrieved August 31, 2009
Woody Guthrie in NYC, 1943 - slideshow by ''Life magazine''
Woody Guthrie's Discography on Smithsonian Folkways
Songfacts interview with Anna Canoni (Guthrie's granddaughter)
Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture - Guthrie, Woody
Voices of Oklahoma interview with Nora Guthrie. First person interview conducted with Nora Guthrie speaking about her father, Woody Guthrie, on October 7, 2010. Original audio and transcript archived with Voices of Oklahoma oral history project.
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