Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, better known as Woody, is best known today as the writer of "This Land Is Your Land", but his legacy and importance to the history of American music, and folk music in particular, is much greater than one song. Born in Oklahoma in 1912, Guthrie is forever identified with the Dust Bowl disaster that devastated the Midwest in the 1930s. Like so many other Midwesterners, the disaster led Guthrie to move to California in search of work.
In California, he eventually found success as a radio performer in Los Angeles, signing traditional folk songs as well as his own original compositions, many of which highlighted the plight of the "Okies"and other dispossessed peoples. Songs like "Dust Bowl Blues", "Do Re Mi", "Pretty Boy Floyd" (in which he warned that some people rob with a gun while others rob with a fountain pen captured the sentiments felt by many people who had been evicted from their homes by the banks during the Great Depression) and "Blowin' Down The Road" made up
his first commercial recording, Dust Bowl Ballads, issued in 1940 and consisting largely of songs he debuted on his radio program.
Besides his performances on his radio show, Guthrie, a life-long supporter of left wing causes, began writing a column for the Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker. This column, called "Woody Sez" was not expressly political in nature, but focused on Guthrie's experiences and observations. However, with the outbreak of World War II and the Soviet Union's non-aggression pact with Hitler's Germany, the column led to him losing his radio show and not being able to find work in Los Angeles.
Guthrie moved to New York, where he recorded the Dust Bowl Ballads album, as well as a series of recordings with Alan Lomax, both of songs and oral histories. He got work hosting radio shows in New York, and in 1940 he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land" a response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America". Like virtually all of Guthrie's songs, he only composed the words, while taking the music from traditional folk songs. In the case of 'This Land Is Your Land", the melody was taken from The Carter Family's gospel song "Little Darling, Pal of Mine", also known as "Oh My Loving Brother". In 1941, Guthrie grew tired of New York and moved to the Pacific Northwest, although he wound up returning to New York shortly thereafter to join the Almanac Singers folk group founded by Pete Seeger, and based in Greenwich Village. In 1944, Guthrie began recording for Moses Asch's Folkway Records, eventually recording hundreds of songs for the label. He also finished his autobiography, Bound For Glory, which became a very influential book, particularly on a young Bob Dylan.
In 1952, Guthrie was diagnosed with Huntington's disease, which his mother had died of, and by 1956 his condition had declined to the point where he was committed first to they Greystrone Park Psychiatric Hospital and then the Brooklyn State Hospital, where he remained for the rest of his life. While there, he was visited by the young Dylan, who had traveled to New York from Minnesota with the express intent of meeting his "last hero", Guthrie. As the folk revival that he had helped to foster took shape, he lay slowly dying, finally passing away in 1967.
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