Woody Guthrie: Biography and Much More from Answers.com

Woody Guthrie was one of the most famous and influential American folk singers of the 20th century and the composer of standards such as "This Land is Your Land," "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You" and "Tom Joad." Guthrie spent his youth in Oklahoma and Texas, then moved to Los Angeles in 1936 to earn a living as a singer/songwriter. In the late 1930s he performed concerts and radio broadcasts and became known for his songs about outsiders and down-and-out working men.

He moved to New York City in 1940 and was part of a well-known crowd of political folk artists, radical activists who championed labor unions and anti-fascist communism. Guthrie travelled the U.S.

during the '40s and '50s (including a stint working in Oregon for the Bonneville Power Administration, where he wrote "Roll On Columbia"), but after 1954 he was in and out of hospitals for what was eventually diagnosed as Huntington's Chorea, a degenerative disease that led to his death in 1967. By that time Guthrie was more famous than he had ever been, thanks to the folk rock movement and artists such as and Joan Baez.

Guthrie was named after President .

.. Guthrie served in the Merchant Marines and the Army during World War II.

.. His autobiographical novel Bound For Glory was published in 1943.

.. "Tom Joad" is named for a character in 's novel, The Grapes of Wrath.

.. Guthrie's son, Arlo Guthrie, was an icon of the '60s hippie movement, most famous for his song "The Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (the inspiration for the 1969 movie Alice's Restaurant) and the hit "City of New Orleans.

"

Biographical data and a collection of works from the U.S. government

Biography, discography, images and lyrics

(1912-1967), folksinger, folk songwriter, folk poet, and novelist.

"Grass roots" and "nothing artificial" best describe the songs, poems, and stories that rolled from the mind and pen of Woody Guthrie in the 1930s and 1940s. His song "This Land Is Your Land" is still one of the most widely sung songs in the country, and his children's songs, such as "Put Your Finger in the Air," are thought to be old folk songs by millions of parents, grandparents, and teachers. Using humor and vivid description, he documented the decade and the problems that stalked migrant agricultural workers.

He wrote peace and war songs, cowboy and hobo songs, union and work songs, love songs--songs that made people feel good and take pride in themselves.
Guthrie grew up in Oklahoma in a culturally diverse area, among cowboys, farmers, coal miners, and railroad and oil workers. There were communities of blacks and Creek Indians nearby.

Farmers argued about socialism and the Green Corn Rebellion. His parents were popular and prosperous until Huntington's disease altered his mother's behavior and tore the family apart. When he was fourteen, she was taken to a mental asylum and his father to Pampa, Texas, to recuperate from severe burns.

In his autobiographical novel Bound for Glory, Guthrie tells about those years, which shaped his wanderlust spirit.
In 1929 he joined his father in Pampa, and there experienced the Dust Bowl years. In 1937 he moved to California where he became active in left-wing activities and in late 1939 went to New York City where he met , Pete Seeger, and others involved in the growing folk-topical song movement.

He believed that songs could change social conditions.
Lomax recorded lengthy interviews with him in 1940 for the , and that same year rca Victor issued his Dust Bowl Ballads. Guthrie's largest body of recordings was made for Moses Asch and Folkways Records (the Folkways collection is now owned by the ).

Guthrie wrote over a thousand songs, some of which were given away during his hoboing years and subsequently lost. He also wrote novels, short stories, newspaper columns, magazine articles, and hundreds of letters. Words flowed onto paper as easily as speech from his mouth; his style was natural and unpretentious.

Huntington's disease hospitalized him for the last fifteen years of his life. He fought his illness with humor and courage, and during those years was visited by a growing number of admirers, of whom one was the young Bob Dylan. The 1960s' years of social change were accompanied and sometimes facilitated by songs and singing, and Guthrie's songs became part of the growing urban folk revival.

His influence on Dylan and the folk-rock movement earned him a place in the Rock and Roll Music Hall of Fame, and the list of singers, songwriters, and literary figures who credit him as a major source of inspiration is a long one. Equally important, but often overlooked, is his massive repertoire of traditional folk songs learned in childhood and during his travels.
Woody Guthrie is said to have had "an influence on America as strong as Walt Whitman.

" As critic Clifton Fadiman wrote in 1943, he and his songs are "a national possession, like and Yosemite."
Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (1943); Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (1980).

Guthrie, Woody (Woodrow Wilson Guthrie), 1912–67, American folk singer, guitarist, and composer, b.

Okemah, Okla. Having learned harmonica as a boy and guitar as an adolescent, Guthrie was an itinerant musician and laborer from the age of 13. He was always deeply involved in union and left-wing politics, and he wrote many of his over 1,000 published songs on themes of social injustice, poverty, and politics.

A friend of , Pete , and Ramblin Jack Elliott, Guthrie exerted a strong influence on younger performers, notably Bob . His most famous song is probably “This Land Is Your Land.” See his autobiography, Bound for Glory (1943, rev.

ed. 1968); biographies by J. Klein (1980) and E.

Cray (2004); R. Shelton, ed., Born to Win (1965); H.

Yurchenco and M. Guthrie, A Mighty Hard Road (1970).
Guthrie's son, Arlo Guthrie, 1947–, b.

New York City, is also a folk singer and composer. He is best known for “Alice's Restaurant,” a rambling, witty song that was the basis of a motion picture in which he starred (1969).

Writer and performer of folk songs, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (1912-1967) composed "This Land Is Your Land, " an unofficial national anthem.

Guthrie was born July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma. He had little formal education, for which he compensated to a degree with intensive reading. Guthrie led one of the most tragic lives of any notable American.

His father was a failure in both politics and business and died on skid row. His mother killed his only sister in an insane rage before dying of Huntington's chorea, which she passed on to Guthrie. In later years Guthrie lost his own infant daughter in a fire.

Virtually orphaned at the age of 14 when his family broke up, Guthrie developed an itinerant way of life that he never entirely abandoned until his final hospitalization.
In the course of his travels Guthrie learned to perform folk songs, first those of others but later increasingly his own. In 1937 he obtained through a cousin the first of many, usually short-lived, radio jobs, singing and playing on a station.

He also acquired permanent ties to the . In 1940 he arrived in New York and was discovered by , assistant director of the Archive of Folk Songs of the . Lomax recorded many of Guthrie's songs for the library and promoted his career in other ways, such as by inducing Victor Records to produce a two album, 12 record set of Guthrie's "Dust Bowl Ballads.

" Though they did not sell, the ballads were to have lasting influence.
In 1941 Guthrie joined the Almanac Singers, a left-wing folk music group that included Pete Seeger, ultimately, with Guthrie, its best known member. On February 14, 1942, the achieved their greatest exposure by performing on a program called "This Is War" that was aired by all four networks.

But newspaper stories about the group's Communist affiliations prevented the Almanacs from achieving commercial success, and they dissolved within a year. Most of the members of the Almanacs were ardently anti-Nazi and went into the military. Guthrie too supported the war.

"This Machine Kills Fascists" was inscribed on his guitar. But he hoped to accomplish his goal at a distance, trying vainly to be exempted from the draft. To avoid induction he served in the merchant marine.

That was a dangerous strategy: two of the three ships he served on were lost. In addition, he was drafted anyway. Upon his discharge from the army in 1946 he joined People's Songs, another radical music association.

It too failed because of the Communist connection, which gave even more offense during the than earlier.
Pete Seeger organized a folk-singing group called The Weavers in 1948, and for several years it produced one hit record after another. Though Guthrie was not a Weaver, their success helped his music.

His "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You" became one of their most popular numbers. But The Weavers were soon blacklisted, and the vogue for popularized folk music disappeared with them. By this time Guthrie was visibly failing, and in 1952 Huntington's chorea, a gradual but invariably fatal disease of the nervous system, was diagnosed.

He died of it on October 3, 1967.
Though a poor musician and erratic performer, Guthrie wrote an estimated 1, 000 songs which have earned him a secure place in musical history. When he was discovered, folk music had few fans except radicals and a handful of admirers and musicologists.

Guthrie and The Weavers were responsible for its brief popularity in the late 1940s and early 1950s and influenced the greater following it developed ten years later. Though folk music became less popular, it continued to exist, and Guthrie's legacy is very much a part of it.
Guthrie's legend is harder to assess.

He was famous among leftists in the 1940s, and by the 1960s, though hospitalized and unable to speak, he had become a mythic figure. Bob Dylan, before he himself became famous as the leading composer of political songs, made a pilgrimage to Guthrie's bedside. Guthrie's reputation was based on his authentic folk origins and hobo inclinations, his remarkable talents as a writer and composer, and a romantic appreciation of his politics.

This last was especially misplaced. Guthrie's political instincts were populist, nourished by the indigenous American socialism that flourished briefly in Oklahoma before and during . He was influenced too by the , the fabled , some of whom he met in his travels.

But he early became associated with the Communist Party and, though never subject to party discipline (or any other kind), faithfully followed the Communist line during its worst phases from the 1930s through the .
An honest though politically unsophisticated biography is Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (1980). Guthrie's own memoir, Bound for Glory (1943), bears only a poetic relation to the truth and ends before he had gained any reputation.

His miscellaneous writings, all edited by other people, include Born To Win (1965), Seeds of Man (1976), and The Woody Guthrie Songbook (1976).
This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York Island. From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream's waters.

This land was made for you and me. Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it.

You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don't change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow. Was a great high wall there that tried to stop me.

Was a great big sign there said private Property but on the back side it didn't say nothing. That side was made for you and me. For more famous quotes by Woody Guthrie, visit 1912 election the same year Guthrie was born.

At age 19, he left home for , where he met and married his first wife, Mary Jennings, with whom he had three children. He used his musical talents to earn money as a street musician and by doing small gigs. He left Texas and his family with the coming of the era, following the to .

The poverty he saw on these early trips affected him greatly, and many of his songs are concerned music gigs and to help various peoples and causes. A lifelong and , he also contributed a regular column, "Woody Sez," to the and newspapers. He was a member of the ( or ) for some years.

Conservatives frequently criticized the ostensibly leanings of Guthrie's work; although he was never actually a member of the party, he did express sympathy towards the party many times, which was not unusual among 1930s folk singers.
In the late , Guthrie achieved fame in , California, with radio partner Maxine "Lefty Lou" Crissman as a broadcast performer of commercial "hillbilly" music and traditional folk music. While appearing on radio station KFVD, a commercial radio station owned by a populist-minded Democrat, Guthrie also began to write and perform some of the protest songs that would He also made perhaps his first real recordings: several hours of conversation and songs, recorded by folklorist for the , as well as an album, , for in .

He began writing his autobiography, Bound for Glory, which was completed and published in . It later became a motion picture in 1976 In February 1940, Guthrie wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land." It was inspired in part by his experiences song "When the World's on Fire," best known as sung by the country group around 1930.

Guthrie protested class inequality in the final verse:

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;

By the relief office, I'd seen my people.

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,

Is this land made for you and me?

As I went walking, I saw a sign there,

And on the sign there, It said "no trespassing.

" [In another version, the sign reads "Private Property"]

But on the other side, it didn't say nothing!

That side was made for you and me.

These verses were sometimes omitted in subsequent recordings, sometimes by Guthrie himself.

time, he joined in the legendary folk-protest group , with whom he toured the country, and moved into the cooperative Almanac House in Guthrie originally wrote and sang anti-war songs with the Almanac Singers, but after America's entry into he began writing anti-fascist tunes. Guthrie famously wrote the slogan "This Machine Kills In , Guthrie met of , for whom he first recorded "This Land Is Your Land," along with hundreds of others over the next few years.
"This song is Copyrighted in U.

S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it.

Write it. Sing it. Swing to it.

Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
her in while on furlough from the army.

They moved into a house on Mermaid Avenue in , and together had four children—including Cathy, his daughter who died at age four in a fire, sending him into a serious depression. Guthrie's son became a famous singer-songwriter in his own right. During this period, Guthrie wrote and recorded , a collection of , which includes the song "Goodnight Little Arlo (Goodnight Little Darlin')," written when Arlo was about nine years old.

poem was set to music a decade later by Martin Hoffman, and the song has since been covered by performers such as By the late , Guthrie's health was worsening and his behavior becoming extremely erratic, showing signs of . He left his family, travelling with to California, where he married for a third time and had another child before eventually returning to New York. He received various diagnoses (including and ) ^{from 1956 to 1961, at Brooklyn State Hospital until , and the final years of his life, he was unable to enjoy the renewed interest in his work during the .
By the time of Guthrie's death, his work had been discovered by a new audience, introduced to them in part through hero.}

" Dylan later went on to write Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, a five-page tribute, and included "Song to Woody" on his first, eponymous album (1962).
In , debut album, , included the song "Bound for Glory," a tribute to controversial (especially socialist) lyrics.
In his wife, Marjorie Guthrie, helped found the Committee to Combat Huntington's Disease At Los Gatos).

" She continues performing it, most recently releasing it on her 2005 live album "Bowery During the early 1970's, before adopting the name of and founding Woody Guthrie.
recorded "This Land Is Your Land" live December 28, 1980 at the "brokenlink">Live/1975-85 album (1986). It was a cover song never released by Springsteen before.

In , Woody's daughter Nora approached the British singer about recording lyrics her father had composed in the later years of his life. After researching the lyrics at the Woody Guthrie Archive in , Bragg worked with the band to record 40 tracks, a number of which were released on the albums in 1998, and in 2000. These albums derived their names from the street on Coney Island where Woody lived with Marjorie and their family.

She also approached about writing a song using the lyrics of one of Guthrie's unfinished songs, "I Hear You Sing Again." Ian wrote music in his style for the song, changing some of his lyrics and incorporated some of her own. The song was released on her album Billie's Bones.

Nora Guthrie also invited the punk band to visit the Archive. Subsequently, they covered "Post-War Breakout" and wrote a song called "This Machine Kills Fascists." These efforts have brought Guthrie's music to a new audience of fans.

The recorded an unreleased song of his, titled They later covered "I'm Shipping Up to Boston" on their 2005 CD, The Warrior's Code.
since become a concert staple of hers.
Although initially the subject of much controversy, a statue honoring Guthrie stands in Memorial Park on Main Street in his hometown of Okemah.

Also in Okemah, the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival celebrates his legacy each summer. It is produced by the Woody Guthrie Coalition, founded by his sister, Mary Jo Edgmon. The 2006 festival, July 12-16 in Okemah, featured , Jimmy LaFave, , the Family Band and more.

kicked off the festival.
Guthrie Singles" in . The -based band, Re Mi.

" Also featured performing Guthrie covers were Billy Bragg, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the Indigo Girls, Dave Pirner, Tim Robbins, Bruce Springsteen and Arlo Guthrie, his son.
In 2001, Frankie Fuchs produced "Daddy-O Daddy", rare family songs from lyrics written by Woody, set to music from musicans Melody of Riot" and is mentioned by name in the first track on that album, "Bandages Scars".
In 2006, released a cover of Guthrie's "Union Maid" on Guthrie" album.