Guthrie, Woody (1912–1967)

Woody Guthrie would become an influential song-writer, the musical voice of the working class and political left, championing labor unions, peace, antifascism, civil liberties, and much more. Though never a member of the Communist Party, Guthrie pursued his idiosyncratic fusion of Marxism and Protestantism. In particular, “This Land Is Your Land” would become the unofficial national anthem by the 1960s.

Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie was born on July 14, 1912, to Nora and Charley Guthrie in Okemah, Oklahoma. Less than 2 weeks earlier, Woodrow Wilson had been nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for president, and Charley Guthrie was a loyal Democrat. Woody's father had served as district court clerk and had made a decent income in real estate and insurance, providing a middle-class lifestyle for his family, which included five children until the accidental death by fire of their eldest daughter, Clara, in 1919. In the early 1920s the Guthrie family experienced hard economic times, while Nora began to undergo the increasing symptoms of Huntington's chorea, a degenerative disease that led to her commitment to the state mental hospital in 1927. The teenage Woody was then basically on his own.

Woody Guthrie moved to Pampa, Texas, in 1929 and married Mary Jennings in 1933; they would have three children. They struggled through the growing Depression, with Guthrie improving on the guitar and mandolin. He moved to Los Angeles in 1937 and began performing with his cousin Jack Guthrie, a western singer. They landed a program on KFVD, but soon Jack was replaced by Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman, a partnership that lasted until mid-1938. Identifying with the migrant workers flooding into California from the Dust Bowl, Guthrie was attracted to the left politics of Ed Robbin and actor Will Geer, who brought him to Communist Party events. He had a column in People's World, the Party's West Coast paper, and he performed in the migrant worker camps, trying out his topical songs, such as “Dustbowl Refugee” and “Vigilante Man.”

Upon Geer's invitation, Guthrie arrived in New York City in February 1940, where the well-read Guthrie passed himself off as an unlettered hick. He appeared in the “Grapes of Wrath” benefit concert in New York, sharing the stage with Geer, Pete Seeger, Aunt Molly Jackson, Burl Ives, the Golden Gate Quartet, and Alan Lomax, who soon had Guthrie on his Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio program. Lomax, who headed the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress, also brought Guthrie to Washington, D.C., where he recorded his stories and 40 songs. Lomax also persuaded Guthrie and Seeger to put together a book of labor songs, titled Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, which would not be published until the 1960s. Guthrie's first album for RCA Victor, Dust Bowl Ballads, included “Talking Dust Bowl Blues,” “Do Re Mi,” “I Ain't Got No Home in This World Anymore,” and “Tom Joad.” He briefly had his own network radio show, Pipe Smoking Time. He next obtained a commission to write songs [Page 662]for the Bonneville Power Administration, then building the Grand Coolee Dam on the Columbia River in 1941. In a very productive month, he wrote some of his most powerful songs, including “Roll On, Columbia, Roll On,” “Pastures of Plenty,” and “The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done.”

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