Woody Guthrie
| |
|---|---|
Guthrie with guitar labeled
"This machine kills fascists" in 1943. | |
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Woodrow Wilson Guthrie |
| Born | July 14, 1912 Okemah, Oklahoma, U.S. |
| Died | October 3, 1967 (aged 55) New York City |
| Genres | |
| Occupation(s) | Singer-songwriter |
| Instruments | |
| Years active | 1930–1956 |
| Associated acts | Almanac Singers |
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (/ˈɡʌθri/; July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) was an American singer-songwriter, who is considered one of the most significant figures in American western folk music. His music, including songs, such as "This Land Is Your Land", has inspired several generations both politically and musically.
Guthrie wrote hundreds of country, folk, and children's songs, along with ballads and improvised works. His album of songs about the Dust Bowl period, Dust Bowl Ballads, 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 such as 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, Brian Fallon, and Sixto Rodríguez have acknowledged Guthrie as a major influence on their work. He frequently performed with the slogan "This machine kills fascists" displayed on his guitar.
Guthrie was brought up by middle-class parents in Okemah, Oklahoma, until he was 14, when his mother Nora was hospitalized as a consequence of Huntington's disease, a fatal hereditary neurological disorder. His father moved to Pampa, Texas, to repay debts from unsuccessful real estate deals. During his early teens, Guthrie learned folk and blues songs from his parents' friends. 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 did not appear to belong to any. With the outbreak of World War II and the non-aggression pact the Soviet Union had signed with Germany in 1939, the owners of KFVD radio were not comfortable with Guthrie's political leanings. 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. Guthrie died in 1967 from complications of Huntington's disease. His first two daughters also died of the disease. 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 and country musicians, including mentoring Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan.
Biography
Early life: 1912–31
Okemah in Oklahoma
Woody Guthrie's Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, childhood home as it appeared 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 30 plots 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 revived beginning in 1915.)
Three significant fires occurred during Guthrie's early life.
There was one in 1909 that caused the loss of his family's home in
Okemah, a month after the house 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 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.
Guthrie and Mary divorced in 1940. He married twice more, to
Marjorie Greenblatt (1945–53), and Anneke Van Kirkand (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.[25] 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.
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.
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 "When The World's On Fire". 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 fiancee. 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 [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.
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 member of the Catholic Church, but she reluctantly agreed in December 1943.
Almanac Singers
Woody Guthrie, 1943
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, until
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviet-aligned
position 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 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.
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 with 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: "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." A film adaptation of Bound for Glory was released in 1976, starring David Carradine.
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 it 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
This page from a collection of Guthrie's sheet music published in 1946 includes his Mermaid Avenue address and one of his anti-fascist slogans
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.
Upon his return to California, Guthrie lived at the Theatricum Botanicum, a summer-stock type theatre founded and owned by Will Geer. Together with singers and actors who had been blacklisted by HUAC, 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, where they briefly lived. They lived in a bus on land called Beluthahatchee, owned by his friend Stetson Kennedy.
Guthrie's arm was hurt in an 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. Van Kirk left New York after arranging for friends
to adopt Lorinna Lynn. Lorinna had no further contact with her birth
parents. She died in a car accident in California in 1973 at the age of
19. After the divorce, Guthrie's second wife, Marjorie, re-entered his
life and cared for him until his death.
Increasingly unable to control his muscles, Guthrie was hospitalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris County, New Jersey, from 1956 to 1961; at Brooklyn State Hospital (now Kingsboro Psychiatric Center) in East Flatbush until 1966; and finally at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens Village, New York, until his death in 1967.
Marjorie and the children visited Guthrie at Greystone every Sunday.
They answered fan mail and the children 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 Howard Beach, New York, where Marjorie and the children then lived.
During the final few years of his life, Guthrie had become
isolated except for family. The progression of Huntington's threw
Guthrie into extreme emotional states, causing him to lash out at those
nearby and to damage a prized book collection of Anneke's. Huntington's symptoms include uncharacteristic aggression, emotional volatility, and social disinhibition.
Guthrie's illness was essentially untreated, because of a lack of
knowledge about the disease. Because of his professional renown, his
death from this cause helped raise awareness of the disease. Marjorie
helped found the Committee to Combat Huntington's Disease, which became
the Huntington's Disease Society of America. None of Guthrie's three surviving children with Marjorie has developed symptoms of Huntington's.
His son Bill with his first wife Mary Guthrie died in an auto-train accident in Pomona, California, at the age of 23. His and Mary's two daughters, Gwendolyn and Sue, both suffered from Huntington's disease. They each died at age 41.
Folk revival and death
In
the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new generation of young people were
inspired by folk singers such as 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, Dylan regularly visited him.
Woody 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 through Dylan, Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, his ex-wife Marjorie and other new members of the folk revival, and his son Arlo.
I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.
I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built.
I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work
Personal life
Guthrie was married three times and fathered eight children, including American folk musician Arlo Guthrie.
- 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)
- Grandfather of musician Sarah Lee Guthrie
Musical legacy
Woody Guthrie Foundation
The Woody Guthrie Foundation is a non-profit organization that serves
as administrator and caretaker of the Woody Guthrie Archives. The
archives house the largest collection of Guthrie material in the world. In 2013, the archives were relocated from New York City to the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after being purchased by the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Foundation. The Center officially opened on April 27, 2013.
The Woody Guthrie Center features, in addition to the archives, a
museum focused on the life and the influence of Guthrie through his
music, writings, art, and political activities. The museum is open to
the public; the archives are open only to researchers by appointment.
The archives contains thousands of items related to Guthrie, including
original artwork, books, correspondence, lyrics, manuscripts, media,
notebooks, periodicals, personal papers, photographs, scrapbooks, and
other special collections.
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, includes lyrics from the Woody Guthrie Archives set to music by Jonatha Brooke. The various artists compilation Note of Hope: A Celebration of Woody Guthrie was released in 2011. Nora selected Jay Farrar, Will Johnson, Anders Parker, and Yim Yames to record her father's lyrics for New Multitudes to honor the 100th anniversary of his birth and a box set of the Mermaid Avenue sessions was also released.
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
English anti-fascist musician Billy Bragg is one of several artists influenced by Guthrie. He and rock band Wilco recorded three albums' worth of new music containing Guthrie's previously unpublished lyrics.
Since his death, artists have paid tribute to Guthrie by covering his songs or by dedicating songs to him. On January 20, 1968, three months after 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 both concerts were eventually released as LPs and later combined into one CD.
A film of the Hollywood Bowl concert was discovered recently and issued
as a DVD in 2019 ['Woody Guthrie All star tribute concert 1970'-(MVD
Visual. MVD2331D,2019)]
The Irish folk singer Christy Moore was also strongly influenced by Woody Guthrie in his seminal 1972 album Prosperous, giving renditions of "The Ludlow Massacre" and Bob Dylan's "Song to Woody". Dylan also penned the poem Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie as a tribute. Andy Irvine—Moore's bandmate in Irish folk group Planxty and lifelong admirer of Guthrie—wrote his tribute song "Never Tire of the Road" (released on the album Rain on the Roof), which includes the chorus from a song Guthrie recorded in March 1944: "You Fascists Are Bound to Lose".
In 1986, Irvine also recorded both parts of Guthrie's "The Ballad of
Tom Joad" together as a complete song—under the title of "Tom Joad"—on
the first album released by his other band, Patrick Street. 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 1979 Sammy Walker's LP Songs From Woody's Pen was
released by Folkways Records. Though the original recordings of these
songs date back more than 30 years, Walker sings them in a traditional
folk-revivalist manner reminiscent of Guthrie's social conscience and
sense of humor. Speaking of Guthrie, Walker said: "I can't think of
hardly anyone who has had as much influence on my own singing and
songwriting as Woody."
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.
As a part of Guthrie's centennial celebrations, the New Multitudes performers played compositions including his lyrics at Webster Hall in New York City (from left to right: Anders Parker, Will Johnson [drumming], Jay Farrar, and Yim Yames)
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 Huntington's Disease Society of America to commemorate the organization's 40th Anniversary.
In "I'm Not There", a 2007 biographical movie about Bob Dylan,
one of the characters introduced in the film as segments of Dylan's
life is a young African-American boy who calls himself "Woody Guthrie".
The purpose of this particular character was a reference to Dylan's
youthful obsession with Guthrie. The fictional Woody also reflects the
fictitious autobiographies that Dylan constructed during his early
career as he established his own artistic identity. In the film there is
even a scene where the fictional Woody visits the real Woody Guthrie as
he lies ill and dying in a hospital in New York (a reference to the
times when a nineteen-year-old Dylan would regularly visit his idol,
after learning of his whereabouts, while he was hospitalized in New York
in the 1960s). Later, a sketch on "Saturday Night Live" would spoof
these visits, alleging that Dylan stole the line, "They'll stone you for
playing your guitar!" from Guthrie.
Guthrie has continued to remain popular decades after his death; this mural was painted in his hometown of Okemah in 1994
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.
In 1988 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 2000 he was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Guthrie was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 1997. In 2006, Guthrie was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. 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 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. The final concert in the series took place on July 14, 2012, Guthrie's 100th birthday.
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 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.
In the centennial year of Guthrie's birth another album of newly composed songs on his lyrics has been released: New Multitudes. On March 10, 2012, there was a tribute concert at the Brady Theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma. John Mellencamp, Arlo Guthrie, Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion, the Del McCoury Band and the Flaming Lips performed.
The Grammy Museum held a tribute week in April 2012 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame a tribute in June. A four-disc box Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions by Billy Bragg and Wilco, with 17 unreleased songs and a documentary, was planned for April release.
On July 10, 2012, Smithsonian Folkways released the Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection,
a 150-page large-format book with three CDs containing 57 tracks. The
set also contains 21 previously unreleased performances and six never
before released original songs, including Woody's first known—and
recently discovered—recordings from 1937.
The box set received two nominations for the 55th Annual Grammy Awards,
including Best Historical Album and Best Boxed Or Special Limited
Edition Package. It also won an Independent Music Award for Best
Compilation Album in 2013.
Selected discography
- Dust Bowl Ballads (1940)
- Nursery Days (1951)
- Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child (1956)
- Bound for Glory (1956)
- Ballads of Sacco & Vanzetti (1960)
- Woody Guthrie Sings Folk Songs (1962)
- Hard Travelin' (1964)
- Library of Congress Recordings (1964)
- Columbia River Collection (1987)
- This Land Is Your Land, The Asch Recordings, Vol.1 (1997)
- Muleskinner Blues, The Asch Recordings, Vol.2 (1997)
- Hard Travelin', The Asch Recordings, Vol.3 (1998)
- Buffalo Skinners, The Asch Recordings, Vol.4 (1999)
- The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949 (2007)
- My Dusty Road (2009)
- Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection (2012)
