( 1912-1967 )
	sample track
	Woody Guthrie Merchandise
	Original manuscript of "This Land is Your Land"

  Woody Guthrie was born in the year that Woodrow Wilson was elected President, and since Charley and Nora Guthrie were strong Democrats they named their son after him: Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, born in Okemah, Oklahoma on July 14, 1912. Charley was a combination real estate man, entrepreneur, and politician. By the standards of Okemah he did pretty well, only to see his luck turn sour when his house in Okemah burned down. Shortly thereafter, Woody's sister Clara burned to death. On top of the loss of a house and a daughter, Charley's political campaigning was fairly unsuccessful, and his real estate business was spoiled by a nearby oil boom.

  Despite the hard times of his childhood, Woody was a playful, happy child. He was somewhat of a town jester in Okemah, known as the scraggly kid who could frequently be seen carrying a burlap bag of recently-collected junk, dancing around to his own harmonica music. Though Woody's actual school experience was not great (he was somewhat of a class clown), he had a true craving for knowledge. Later, when the family moved to Pampa, Texas, he went through nearly every book in the town's small library, and even wrote a book which the librarian put on the shelves with the psychology manuals.

  Woody discovered at a very young age that he had musical abilities, and could easily make up songs at any time. As a teenager in Pampa he formed a group called the Corncob Trio with his friends Matt Jennings and Cluster Baker. They played around town anywhere they could, for any audience they could find (usually just themselves). Later, Woody would marry Matt's sister. Woody's music grew to have a wry, and sometimes biting sense of humor, but he overwhelmingly chose to sing feel-good songs and humorous songs, instead of singing about his own misery and following the self-indulgent path of most popular musicians. He said later in life:

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. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.

I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you've not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow."

Woody Guthrie with Pete Seeger

 

  Perhaps Woody's outlook came from a conversation he had had with his sister Clara on her deathbed. She had been so badly burned that she could not feel any pain, and she spent her final hours laughing and trying to cheer up those around her. Woody later reported her remarks to him:

  In 1933, Woody married Matt Jennings' younger sister Mary. She was five years younger than he was--and he was only 21. They would have three children. Two years later, in 1935, disaster struck. The dust storms hit, farms were lost, and Woody hit the road to California, as did thousands of people from Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. He wrote a song about leaving Pampa, saying "So, long its been good to know ya, this dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home, I've got to be drifting along." Over the years, he rewrote the song to fit many different circumstances, and the original remains a favorite among fans.

 

  What Woody saw on the road touched him deeply--people by the hundreds who had been completely dispossessed, losing their belongings and their dignity, trying to find their lives again. It aroused a sense of indignation and anger in him that he never lost. He also saw these people arriving in what they thought would be the "promised land" of California only to be exploited and humiliated further by land owners and powerful growers. With his blend of sardonic humor and grief over their fate, he wrote a song called "Do Re Mi":

  It was during this California phase--and later New York phase--of Woody's life that his union organizing activities came to prominence. He went from singing about the plight of the workers to singing about their banding together to do something about it. This was also the beginning of his tenuous relationship with the American Communist Party during the 1930s. After one of his radio shows a friend of his who had caught some of the political undertones of his songs asked if he'd like to sing for a workers' rally. He told Woody he'd be sharing the stage with some party members and some pretty strong left-wing folks. Woody's reputed response was, "Left wing, chicken wing, it don't make no difference to me." He would later play music at Communist Party gatherings and even write columns in communist newspapers, but he always maintained that he was not a member of any "earthly organization."

 

  Of course, the 1930s were period in US history when the polarization between the rich and the poor was far more pronounced than usual. It was also before labor unions had become an established, if not entrenched, part of the American socio-political landscape. In many people's minds, lines between the rich and the poor were very distinctly drawn; Woody found that the Communist Party was on the same side of the issues as he was, so he worked for them sometimes. His most definitive comment on the whole situation was to say, "I ain't a communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life." He wrote a column for the Party newspaper, The Daily Worker, and in those California days he teamed up with a young actor named Will Geer. They traveled together doing rallies and benefits with and for the support of the Party. (Will Geer played Grandpa Walton on the TV series "The Waltons"). When Geer landed a part in the Broadway play, "Tobacco Road," he invited Woody to come out and join him in New York. Woody did just that. Abruptly leaving his California life, Woody travelled to New York City in the late 1930s. It was in New York that he came to meet up with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Leadbelly, Cisco Houston, and nearly all the people who would be the center of his musical and political activities for the rest of his life. One of the songs that best typifies this stage of his life is called "Union Maid." Ina Wood, a femminist union organizer with whom Woody and Pete stayed for a while in Oklahoma City, criticized the two for their lack of women's songs. Women were as fundamental to the labor movement as men, and they deserved to be represented in and inspired by songs. That very evening, Woody wrote "Union Maid."

  If Woody had one problem--should we choose to call it that--above all others, it was that he didn't seem to be able to handle success very well. He was an extremely talented and gifted person, but whenever that talent would start to show some tangible fruit, he seemed to grow nervous or restless. He was not interested in fame or popularity, nor did he care for excessive amounts of money. With his radio jobs came unprecedented amounts of money, much of which he simply mailed home to Mary.

  After landing a singing job on a CBS radio show called "Back Where I Come From" that made him fairly popular (or at least better known), Woody had an offer to write a book about his life. He sent for Mary and the kids to come to New York. His life was going so well that he soon became uncomfortable with it, and announced to Mary and the kids that they were going back West again. He headed back across the country once more because . . . well, just because he felt it was time to do that. But there was nothing for him on the West Coast this time; he couldn't even get his old radio job in Los Angeles back again.

  Just as he was preparing to head back east to join the Almanac Singers (a communal group of folk singers formed and loosely organized by Pete Seeger), Woody instead decided to pursue a possible, not even definite, offer to work on the music for a documentary film. The film was to be made by the Bonneville Power Authority, the company that built and operated the Grand Coulee Dam. The film, it turned out, was never made, but Woody's travels on the Columbia River put yet another part of the country in his blood - and it yielded the most creative period of his life. He was greatly impressed and heartened by the Grand Coulee and what it represented to him. This was well before environmental and ecological concerns were being voiced, or concerns about excessive technology were being expressed. For Woody, and others of his stand-up-for-the-working-class persuasion, the Grand Coulee Dam meant jobs for people who didn't have jobs, and cheap electricity for people who up until then could not afford it. "Your power is turning our darkness to dawn," he sang, "so roll on Columbia, roll on."

  From the Pacific Northwest Woody went back to New York again and joined Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers. Mary, meanwhile, had decided she could no longer deal with trying to keep up with Woody's wanderlust. She and the kids had made it up to the Northwest with Woody, but now she returned to Los Angeles to raise the children in as stable an environment as she could provide. (She eventually returned to Texas--near El Paso--where she had family. Two of their children succumbed to Huntington's Disease later in life, and the other died in a car accident. Quite some years ago Mary was still living in Texas using the name Mary Guthrie Boyle. Is she still there, anybody?) Back in New York, in 1940, Woody began a relationship with a woman named Marjorie Mazia who was a dancer in the Martha Graham troupe. They were soon married.

  Woody's politics took a turn as the United States came into the Second World War. Early in the war, communist-sympathizing singers were confused about what stance they should take on the war. They wrote anti-war songs, citing the typical "rich man's war, poor man's fight" nature of international conflict, and since Stalin and Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact, they felt it wrong to support a fight against Hitler. Yet the far Left obviously found no consonance with Nazi ideals, and they passionately despised Hitler's ways. So for a time, Woody, the Almanac Singers, and similar performers were torn on what their opinon of the war should be. When Hitler broke his agreement with Stalin, though, the American Left could freely and adamantly support the war. After all, Americans and Soviets were fighting side by side against a common enemy, and a thoroughly despicable enemy at that. Since the US was fighting fascism, Woody and the Almanac Singers wrote dozens of songs about defeating fascism and Hitler. And since any kind of strike would cripple the war effort, all the old union songs were put on the shelf for awhile. Eventually though, Pete Seeger joined the army, and that left the Almanac singers up in the air.

  Marjorie became pregnant with her and woody's first child around this time--a child Woody fanticized about and named "Railroad Pete" before it was born. The child turned out to be a girl, so they named her Cathy instead, and Woody became incredibly devoted to her. Playing with Cathy prompted the writing of a whole series of children's songs by Woody, the most popular being "Take Me For a Ride in the Car-Car." His crowning achievement in this phase of his life, though, was the publication in 1943 of his autobiography, Bound For Glory. A review in The New Yorker magazine said, "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 review in The New York Times compared him to the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey. Others ranked him with Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg.

  During World War II, Woody served in the merchant marine three times, partially because of coaxing from Cisco Houston, but mostly in hopes of avoiding the army. Each time, his ship was sunk by a torpedo, and he returned home. Cisco and Woody spent much of their time in the Merchant Marine with newfound friend Jim Longhi, who recently published a book regarding the trio's experiences called Woody, Cisco, and Me. Woody was actually drafted into the army at age 32 on VE Day and was discharged in the fall, so he never saw combat. Soon after returning from the Army, the tragic dimension of Woody's life caught up to him again.

  In 1946 an electrical fire destroyed the apartment in which Woody and Marjorie were living - and it killed Cathy. Losing Cathy took something out of Woody's life that he never got back.
Not long after losing Cathy, he and Marjorie had their second child, a son named Arlo. Two other children named Joady and Nora came along after Arlo. As most know, Arlo Guthrie has become a singer and songwriter in his own right.

 

  After a long creative dry spell, Woody heard of an incident in California that finally inspired him to write again. In January 1948, a plane full of Mexican migrant workers crashed over California's Los Gatos canyon. Woody noticed that their names were not even known to the reporters. One report said that the plane crash wasn't too bad because all the deceased (except for the pilot) were "just deportees." Hearing the report must have taken Woody back to earlier days when he was working in the fields and feeling the plight and the pain of the workers first hand. The result was one of his most beautiful, poignant songs called "Good-bye Juan," also titled "Deportees" and "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon." It was a beautiful song, but sadly it was Woody's only impressive piece of work in years; it later turned out to be his last great work.

  Woody had always been a little, well, odd, but usually in a funny, playful way. Beginning in the early 1950s, though, his oddities began to severly disrupt his life. He would often have sporadic outbursts of irrational behavior. There were times when he couldn't control his guitar playing, and times when his mind failed him. His deterioration contributed to a disastrous episode involving another run to California to see his old friend Will Geer, who was now coping with 1950s American conservativism as best he could. The McCarthy era was now in full swing, and Geer had been blacklisted for his earlier Communist Party activities and was unable to get work. Woody met a woman named Anneke who was 20 years his junior and ran off with her. They went to Mexico where he obtained a Mexican divorce from Marjorie so they could get married, and they had a child. The child was put up for adoption. When the couple eventually ended up back in New York, Marjorie recognized that something was seriously wrong with Woody, and she took care of them both. Anneke soon went her way and the marriage was quickly dissolved. At first, Bob and Sid Gleason (old fans of Woody) looked after Woody a bit while he was in and out of the hospital. In the Gleasons' home in East Orange, Majorie and the kids, plus a blend of young folk musicians and old friends, all visited Woody on the times he was allowed to leave the hospital. Later, Marjorie succeeded in getting Woody tranferred, and she disassociated Woody and herself from the Gleasons, who were understandably resentful. By now Woody's illness had been diagnosed as Huntington's Disease - the same one that took his mother's life.

  During the mid-to-late 1950s and into the 1960s a new generation discovered Woody Guthrie, and some of his songs became very popular. Before being blacklisted, The Weavers did a recording of "So Long, It's Been Good To Know Ya" that became a nationwide hit. Some of Woody's old union songs were revived, revamped, and slightly rewritten to become part of the civil rights and peace movements. In the winter of 1960-1, a young, unknown and aspiring singer/song-writer from Hibbing, Minnesota hitched his way to New York to visit Woody at his bedside. Changing his name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, this songwriter spent much of his early career trying to emulate Woody in musical style, dress, and posture. He even took on a fake Oklahoma accent. Later, Dylan would joke that in those days he was practically a Woody Guthrie "jukebox." Woody's profound influence on American music as a whole is reflected in his influence on artists like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Ani DiFranco.

  In 1967, after a heroic 15-year struggle with Huntingon's Disease, Woody died. A year prior to his death he was given the Conservation Service Award by the U.S. Department of the Interior because of the love for, and kinship with, the land that is contained in so many of his songs and writings. Then, in 1988, Woody was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Marjorie Mazia Guthrie went on to found the Committee to Combat Huntington's Disease and devoted the rest of her life working for it. The gene that causes Huntington's Disease has been located, but a cure has not yet been found.

  Will Rogers Guthrie, Woody and Mary Jennings' son, died in a car accident; their daughters, Gwen and Sue, succumbed to Huntington's Disease. Woody and Anneke Van Kirk's daughter Lorina Lynn died in a car accident while only 19 years old. Those who have followed Arlo's life and career are breathing a little more easily as Arlo moves through his late 40s with no apparent sign of having the disease. Joady and Nora Guthrie are also doing well--Nora runs the Woody Guthrie Foundation in New York City. Mary Jo, Woody's youngest sister, still lives in Seminole, Oklahoma, not too far from Okemah. Arlo's son, Abe, plays keyboards and tours with Arlo, and Abe has a four-year-old son named Krishna. Thus, at this writing, there are four generations of Guthries alive and well.