July 14, 1912 – Birth of Singer and Political Activist Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie was born on this day in history in Okemah, Oklahoma. He became a singer-songwriter whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political songs. He frequently performed with the slogan “This machine kills fascists” displayed on his guitar.

Woody left for Texas in 1931, where he married and also embarked on a musical career. But he had trouble supporting his growing family; the privations of the Great Depression were exacerbated by the onset of the Great Dust Storm period, which hit the Great Plains in 1935. He headed west, hitchhiking and riding freight trains, looking for ways to earn a living and send money back to his family.

In Los Angeles, he landed a job on a radio station, and began to attract widespread attention, especially from the thousands of relocated Okies gathered in migrant camps. He also used the radio as a forum to speak out against injustice, incorporating his concerns into the songs he wrote. In 1940, folklorist Alan Lomax recorded Woody in a series of conversations and songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Woody also recorded “Dust Bowl Ballads” for RCA Victor, his first album of original songs, and throughout the 1940s he continued to record hundreds of discs for Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records.

During a sojourn in New York City, he made friends with many in the folk music industry, including Lead Belly, Cisco Houston, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Will Geer, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and others. He also joined a folk group with a rotating membership called The Almanac Singers, which advocated for social causes through songs of political protest and activism. Woody became one of the prominent songwriters for the Almanac Singers.

The Almanac Singers, circa 1940. L-R: Woody Gurthrie, Millard Lampell, Bess Lomax Hawes, Pete Seeger, Arthur Stern, Sis Cunningham. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

The Almanac Singers specialized in songs advocating an anti-war, anti-racism and pro-union philosophy. They were part of the Popular Front, a labor movement alliance of liberals and leftists, who had vowed to put aside their differences in order to fight fascism and promote racial and religious inclusiveness and workers’ rights. The Almanac Singers felt strongly that songs could help achieve these goals.

But in addition, as a website dedicated to Guthrie reports in his biography:

The Almanacs helped to establish folk music as a viable commercial genre within the popular music industry. A decade later, original members of the Almanacs would re-form as the Weavers, the most commercially successful and influential folk music group of the early 1950s. It was through their tremendous popularity that Woody’s songs would become known to the larger public.”

Woody never stayed in one place too long, however, and soon took his family and left for Portland, Oregon, and then back east across the country. All of this took a toll on his marriage, however. He divorced, and later in New York, met and married his second wife in 1945.

During the 1940s, Guthrie wrote a large number of original songs. 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. He also published his first novel in 1943, Bound for Glory, a semi-autobiographical account of his Dust Bowl years.

In the late 1940s, Woody began to show signs of a rare, hereditary neurological disease, Huntington’s Chorea, a degenerative disease. (His mother had died of it.) The disease led to extreme emotional states, including uncharacteristic aggression, emotional volatility, and social disinhibition. The disease was at that time poorly understood and untreatable. Guthrie’s second wife thought his erratic behavior posed a danger to their children, and they also divorced. He returned to California, where he married his third wife. But she found the strain of taking care of him too much, and divorced him also. Guthrie’s second wife, Marjorie, re-entered his life and cared for him until his death in 1967.

A month after Woody’s death, his son Arlo released his first commercial recording of “Alice’s Restaurant,” which became an anti-war anthem for the new generation and a symbol of the late 1960s.

Arlo Guthrie in 1979

Woody Guthrie’s influence persisted however. One of his acolytes was the young Bob Dylan, who wrote in Chronicles, Volume One, p. 244., of Guthrie’s repertoire: “The songs themselves were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them.”

As his biographical website notes, in his lifetime, Woody Guthrie wrote nearly 3,000 song lyrics, published two novels, and authored numerous published and unpublished manuscripts, poems, prose, and plays and hundreds of letters and news articles, now housed in the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York.

Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and Arlo Guthrie performing at the 1968 Tribute To Woody Guthrie’ New York City’s Carnegie Hall

There have been many tributes to Guthrie. In 1996, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Case Western Reserve University presented a ten day celebration honoring Woody Guthrie, entitled Hard Travelin’. In 2012,Smithsonian Folkways released Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection, a 150-page large-format book with three CDs containing 57 tracks. 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.