Woody Guthrie

Based on Wikipedia: Woody Guthrie

The Guitar That Killed Fascists

Woody Guthrie walked around with a message scrawled across his guitar: "This machine kills fascists." It wasn't a metaphor. He meant it literally. In an age when Hitler's armies were marching across Europe and Mussolini was bombing Ethiopia, Guthrie believed that songs—the right songs, sung to the right people—could actually help defeat totalitarianism.

He wasn't entirely wrong.

The man who wrote "This Land Is Your Land" didn't write it as a patriotic anthem. He wrote it as an argument. As a protest. As a direct response to what he considered the saccharine complacency of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," which radio stations played so relentlessly in 1940 that Guthrie couldn't escape it. He thought Berlin's song painted an unrealistic picture of America—a country where, in Guthrie's experience, dust storms buried entire towns and families starved while looking for work that didn't exist.

So he wrote his own version of America. And that version has outlasted almost everything else from its era.

Oklahoma Burning

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma—a small town that would shape him in ways both beautiful and terrible. His parents named him after the Democratic presidential candidate who would win the White House that fall, which tells you something about the family's political leanings.

His father, Charles Edward Guthrie, was a hustler in the best and worst senses of the word. At one point he owned thirty plots of land in Okfuskee County. He was deeply involved in Oklahoma politics as a conservative Democrat. He was also, according to his son, a member of the Ku Klux Klan during its revival in 1915, and reportedly participated in the 1911 lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson.

Woody would write three songs about that lynching decades later. The weight of what his father had done followed him his entire life.

Fire followed the Guthrie family too. Three significant fires shaped Woody's childhood. The first destroyed the family home in 1909, just a month after it was completed. When Woody was seven, his sister Clara died after her clothes caught fire during an argument with their mother. And in 1927, his father was severely burned in yet another house fire.

But the cruelest blow came from something invisible.

The Disease Nobody Understood

Woody's mother, Nora, had something wrong with her. The family could see it—the dementia creeping in, the muscles slowly losing their ability to function—but they had no name for it. No explanation. No hope of treatment.

What Nora Guthrie suffered from was Huntington's disease, a genetic neurological disorder that slowly destroys nerve cells in the brain. It typically appears in a person's thirties or forties and progresses relentlessly over ten to twenty-five years. There is no cure. There was even less understanding of it in the 1920s.

When Woody was fourteen, his mother was committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane. His father had already left for Pampa, Texas, trying to recover from failed real estate deals. The children were scattered. Woody survived by working odd jobs around Okemah, begging meals, sleeping on the couches of family friends.

He was essentially homeless at fourteen. But he had music.

Learning to Play

Guthrie had a natural affinity for music that no amount of hardship could suppress. He learned old English and Scottish ballads from the parents of friends—songs that had survived the Atlantic crossing and generations of oral tradition. He befriended an African-American shoeshine boy named George who played blues harmonica, and after listening to George play, Woody bought his own harmonica and taught himself.

He started busking—playing music on street corners for whatever coins people would throw. It was survival, but it was also an education. Every song he heard, he absorbed. Every style, he tried to master.

His teachers described him as bright, an avid reader on almost any topic. But he dropped out of high school in his senior year. Formal education couldn't hold him. The road was calling.

Pampa and the Dust

In 1929, when Woody was eighteen, his father sent for him to come to Texas. Charles was running a flophouse in Pampa—a far cry from his thirty plots of Oklahoma land. Woody went, but not to finish high school. He spent his days busking on streets and reading in the library at Pampa's city hall. He played fiddle dances with his father's half-brother Jeff.

His mother died in 1930, still in the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane, from complications of the disease that nobody understood.

A year later, Woody met Mary Jennings. She was the younger sister of his musician friend Matt. They married in Pampa in 1933, when Woody was twenty years old.

Then the dust came.

The Dust Bowl was one of the worst ecological disasters in American history. Decades of aggressive farming had stripped the Great Plains of the native grasses that held the topsoil in place. When a severe drought hit in the early 1930s, the exposed soil simply blew away. Massive dust storms—called "black blizzards"—buried entire towns. The sky turned dark at midday. People died from "dust pneumonia" as the fine particles filled their lungs.

Thousands of families from Oklahoma, Texas, and the surrounding states fled west toward California, where they'd heard there was work picking fruit. They were called "Okies" regardless of where they actually came from. They traveled in overloaded cars down Route 66, desperate and hungry and hoping for something better.

Woody Guthrie was one of them. He left Mary and their children in Texas and joined the exodus.

California and the Radio

In Los Angeles, Guthrie found something unexpected: fame. He teamed up with a radio partner named Maxine Crissman, who went by "Lefty Lou," and together they performed hillbilly music and traditional folk songs on KFVD, a radio station owned by Frank W. Burke, a populist Democrat who supported the New Deal.

The show was a hit. Guthrie was making enough money to send for his family.

But something was changing in him. The suffering he'd witnessed—the Okies in their roadside camps, the children without food, the families torn apart by economic devastation—demanded more than entertainment. At KFVD, he began writing and performing protest songs.

A newscaster at the station named Ed Robbin heard a song Guthrie had written about Thomas Mooney, a political activist wrongly convicted in a case that had become a cause célèbre of the American left. Robbin was impressed. He became Guthrie's political mentor, introducing him to socialists and communists in Southern California.

One of those introductions was to Will Geer, an actor who would later become famous as Grandpa Walton on the television show The Waltons. Another was to John Steinbeck, who was writing about the same migrant workers Guthrie had traveled with. The two men recognized something in each other.

Fellow Traveler

Guthrie later claimed that "the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party." But this wasn't true. He never actually joined the party.

What he was, in the terminology of the era, was a "fellow traveler"—someone who agreed with the Communist platform while avoiding party discipline. He wrote a column for the communist newspaper People's World called "Woody Sez," which appeared 174 times between May 1939 and January 1940. The column wasn't explicitly political; it was Guthrie's observations on current events, written in an exaggerated hillbilly dialect with small comics included.

His politics were sincere, even if his party membership was not. He genuinely believed in worker solidarity, in the redistribution of wealth, in the dignity of ordinary people against the predations of the powerful. These beliefs would inform his music for the rest of his life.

They would also cost him his radio job.

The Pact That Changed Everything

In August 1939, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as it was called, shocked the world. Two ideological enemies had agreed not to attack each other. Secretly, they had also agreed to divide up Poland between them.

For American communists and fellow travelers, this created an impossible dilemma. The party line shifted overnight from anti-fascism to neutrality. Some members quit in disgust. Others followed the new directive.

Guthrie wrote a song praising the pact.

The owners of KFVD, who were anti-Stalin even if they were pro-labor, couldn't stomach it. They fired both Robbin and Guthrie. Without his daily radio show, Guthrie's employment prospects in California evaporated. He returned with his family to Pampa, Texas.

But he didn't stay long. Will Geer invited him to New York City. Mary wanted to stay in Texas. Woody went east alone.

This Land Is Your Land

New York's folk music community embraced him immediately. They called him "the Oklahoma cowboy." He slept on Will Geer's couch. He recorded hours of conversation and songs for the folklorist Alan Lomax, who was building an archive of American folk music for the Library of Congress.

And in February 1940, he wrote his most famous song.

"This Land Is Your Land" was born from irritation. Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" was everywhere on the radio, and Guthrie couldn't stand it. The song's portrayal of America seemed willfully blind to the suffering Guthrie had witnessed. So he wrote an answer.

He adapted the melody from an old gospel song called "Oh My Loving Brother," which the Carter Family had already adapted for their song "Little Darling Pal Of Mine." Folk music worked that way—melodies were shared property, passed from hand to hand like tools.

Guthrie signed the manuscript with a note: "All you can write is what you see."

He wouldn't record it for another four years. But when he did, it entered the American bloodstream and never left.

The Almanac Singers and the War

In March 1940, Guthrie played a benefit hosted by the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Farm Workers. There he met Pete Seeger, a young folk singer from a musical family. The two became close friends. Seeger even traveled to Texas with Guthrie to meet his family—though Mary's mother pulled Seeger aside and asked for his help convincing Woody to treat her daughter better.

From April 1940, Guthrie and Seeger lived together in a Greenwich Village loft. They became part of a circle of musicians that included Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, the legendary blues and folk singer whose apartment on Tenth Street served as a gathering place for New York's folk scene. Guthrie and Lead Belly had busked together in Harlem bars. They were good friends.

Seeger formed a folk-protest group called the Almanac Singers, and Guthrie joined. The group lived communally in what they called Almanac House in Greenwich Village, hosting regular concerts they called "hootenannies"—a word Pete and Woody had picked up in their cross-country travels.

Meanwhile, Guthrie's marriage to Mary was ending. She'd grown tired of his constant departures, his inability to settle down. When he left for New York after his work in the Pacific Northwest, she told him to go without her and the children. They divorced in December 1943.

The Columbia River Songs

In May 1941, Guthrie had taken a job in Portland, Oregon, working on a documentary about the Bonneville Power Administration's construction of hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River. Alan Lomax had recommended him for the job.

The original project was supposed to last twelve months, but the filmmakers got nervous about Guthrie's political reputation and minimized his role. The Department of the Interior hired him for just one month to write songs for the documentary's soundtrack.

One month. Twenty-six songs. Three of them became American standards.

"Roll On, Columbia, Roll On" celebrated the river itself. "Pastures of Plenty" captured the lives of migrant workers. "Grand Coulee Dam" praised the massive public works project that was bringing electricity to the Pacific Northwest.

Guthrie toured the Columbia River and fell in love with the landscape. "I couldn't believe it," he said. "It's a paradise." The region seemed to unlock something in him creatively. In thirty days, he produced a body of work that other songwriters might spend years trying to match.

Dance and Television

Guthrie's music was finding its way into unexpected places. The choreographer Sophie Maslow developed a piece called Folksay that combined Guthrie's folk songs with text from Carl Sandburg's book-length poem The People, Yes. The premiere took place in March 1942 at the Humphrey-Weidman Studio Theatre in New York, with Guthrie providing live music.

Two and a half years later, Maslow brought Folksay to television—one of the earliest examples of folk music on the new medium. The thirty-minute broadcast aired on WCBW, the pioneering CBS television station in New York, on November 24, 1944. Guthrie and fellow folk singer Tony Kraber played guitar, sang songs, and read text from Sandburg's poem. The program received positive reviews and was broadcast again in early 1945.

For a brief moment, Guthrie had even hosted a network radio show. The Model Tobacco Company hired him in September 1940 to host Pipe Smoking Time, paying him $180 a week—an impressive salary at the time. He was finally making enough money to send regular payments to Mary and even brought her and the children to New York, where they lived briefly in an apartment on Central Park West.

But Guthrie quit after seven broadcasts. He claimed the show was too restrictive, that he was told what to sing. He couldn't stand being controlled.

The Disease Returns

Guthrie married twice more after Mary. He fathered eight children in total. One of them, Arlo Guthrie, would become a nationally known musician in his own right, famous for the talking blues song "Alice's Restaurant."

But the disease that had destroyed his mother was waiting for him too.

Huntington's disease is caused by a defect in a single gene on chromosome four. If one of your parents has it, you have a fifty percent chance of inheriting it. There's no way to prevent it, no way to slow it down once it starts. The nerve cells in your brain begin to die, and as they die, you lose control of your movements, your cognition, your emotions.

Woody Guthrie began showing symptoms in the 1950s. His handwriting deteriorated. His movements became erratic. People who didn't know about the disease sometimes assumed he was drunk.

He was hospitalized in 1954 and spent most of his remaining years in hospitals and institutions. The man who had written "This Land Is Your Land," who had traveled across America singing about the dignity of ordinary people, who had declared that his guitar killed fascists—that man slowly disappeared into the disease that had taken his mother.

He died on October 3, 1967. He was fifty-five years old.

Two of his daughters would later die of the same disease.

The Machine That Kept Killing

Guthrie's influence on American music is almost impossible to overstate. His Dust Bowl Ballads album appeared on Mojo magazine's list of 100 Records That Changed the World. Many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress.

The list of musicians who cite him as an influence reads like a history of American popular music: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger, Jerry Garcia, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg, Jeff Tweedy. Dylan visited Guthrie in the hospital during his final years and wrote "Song to Woody" as a tribute. Springsteen's music carries Guthrie's DNA in its concern for working people and its belief in America as an idea worth fighting for.

Guthrie wrote hundreds of songs—country, folk, children's songs, ballads, improvised works. He wrote about the Dust Bowl and the migrant workers. He wrote about the Columbia River and the beauty of the Pacific Northwest. He wrote about fascism and worker solidarity and the simple dignity of being alive.

He never stopped believing that songs could change the world.

The guitar that killed fascists is silent now. But the songs keep playing. They're sung in schools and at protests, at folk festivals and around campfires. "This Land Is Your Land" has been called an alternative national anthem, though Guthrie might have found that designation suspicious—he wrote it, after all, as a critique of patriotic songs.

Maybe that's the point. Maybe the best patriotism is the kind that argues with itself, that sees the country's flaws clearly while still believing it can be better. That's what Guthrie's music does. It shows us America as it was—the dust storms, the migrant camps, the lynchings, the poverty—and insists that this land was made for you and me.

All of us. Every last one.