Okemah’s Dust Bowl bard wrote hundreds of people’s songs
Woody Guthrie (1912–1967), named for Woodrow Wilson in Okemah, Oklahoma, became American folk’s touchstone. Dust Bowl Ballads fixed migrant hardship in song; Huntington’s disease, the same illness that institutionalised his mother, later ended his life after hundreds of folk, children’s, and protest pieces.
He left Okemah in 1929 after Nora Guthrie’s institutionalisation, drifting into California camps and New York left circles—associated with communists though membership evidence is lacking. Three marriages produced eight children including musician Arlo.
Born on 14 July 1912 in Okemah and named after Woodrow Wilson, he grew up amid fires: one destroyed the new family home in 1909, his sister Clara died after her clothes caught fire, and his father was badly burned in 1927. His mother Nora had Huntington's disease and was committed to the state hospital when he was 14, leaving him to work odd jobs and beg meals. He learned old English and Scottish ballads from friends' parents and took up harmonica after hearing a shoeshine boy named George play blues.
In Pampa, Texas, he busked, read in the city hall library and played dances with a fiddling uncle, then joined the Dust Bowl migration to California. On the Los Angeles station KFVD he found fame alongside Maxine 'Lefty Lou' Crissman, and the newscaster Ed Robbin introduced him to leftists including Will Geer and to John Steinbeck. He wrote a column called Woody Sez for People's World yet was never a party member, and KFVD fired him after he defended the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact.
In New York he recorded hours of talk and song for Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress and the album Dust Bowl Ballads for Victor. In February 1940 he wrote This Land Is Your Land as a rebuttal to the constant airplay of Irving Berlin's God Bless America, borrowing a gospel tune the Carter Family had used. A March 1940 benefit for migrant workers introduced him to Pete Seeger, and that September a tobacco company paid him $180 a week to host Pipe Smoking Time.
Source: Woody Guthrie
