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Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (July 14, 1912 –
October 3, 1967), known almost universally as
"Woody", was a folk singer and raconteur who wrote
some of United States|America's best-loved songs.
He is best known for "This Land is Your Land"
(http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/musi
c/audio/mp3/this_land.mp3 MP3 clip).

Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1912, the
year his namesake Woodrow Wilson was elected
President of the United States|President.  At age
19 he left home for Texas, where he met and
married his first wife, Mary Jennings, with whom
he had three children. He left Texas (and his
family) with the Dust Bowl, following the Okies to
California. The poverty he saw on these early
trips affected him greatly, and many of his songs
are concerned with the inequities faced by
America's working men and women.  A lifelong
socialism|socialist and trade unionist, he also
contributed a regular article, "Woody Sez," to the
Daily Worker.

In 1935 or 1937 he achieved fame in California as
a Music radio|radio performer of both traditional
folk music and his protest songs.

In 1939 or 1940, Guthrie moved to New York, New
York|New York City and was embraced by its leftist
and folk music community. He also made perhaps his
first real recordings: several hours of
conversation and songs, recorded by folklorist
Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress, as well as
an album, Dust Bowl Ballads, for Victor Records in
Camden, New Jersey. He began writing his
autobiography, Bound for Glory, which was
completed and published in 1943.

In 1940, Guthrie wrote his most famous song, "This
Land is Your Land", which was inspired in part by
his experiences during a cross-country trip, and
in part by his distaste for the Irving Berlin
anthem "God Bless America", which he considered
unrealistic and complacent (he was tired of
hearing Kate Smith sing it on the radio).  In the
original version of "This Land is Your Land"
Guthrie protested class inequality with the 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.
and protested the institution of private ownership
of land with the verse,
:As I went walking, I saw a sign there;
:And on the sign there, It said, 'NO TRESPASSING.'
:But on the other side, It didn't say nothing.
:That side was made for you and me.
In another version, the sign reads "Private
Property."
These verses were left out of subsequent
recordings (even by Guthrie himself), turning what
was a protest song into one more along the lines
of the then current style of patriotic songs.

The melody Guthrie used for "This Land is Your
Land" is the melody for the old gospel song, "When
the World's on Fire". This song is probably best
known as recorded by the country/bluegrass
legends, The Carter Family around 1930.

In May 1941, he was commissioned by the Department
of the Interior and its Bonneville Power
Administration to write songs about the Columbia
River and the building of the federal dams; the
best known of these are "Roll On, Columbia" and
"Grand Coulee Dam." Around the same time, he met
Pete Seeger and joined the legendary Almanac
Singers, with whom he toured the country and moved
into the cooperative Almanac House in Greenwich
Village.

Guthrie originally wrote and sang anti-war songs
with the Almanac Singers, but eventually he and
they, along with the Communism|Communist milieu
with which they were associated, joined the
anti-fascism|fascist cause -- Guthrie famously
wrote the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists" on
his guitar. He joined the United States Merchant
Marine|Merchant Marine, where he served with
fellow folk singer Cisco Houston, and then the
Army.

In 1944, Woody met Moses Asch|Moses "Moe" Asch of
Folkways Records, for whom he first recorded "This
Land is Your Land," along with hundreds of others
over the next few years.

He began courting Marjorie Mazza in 1942 and
married her in 1945 while on furlough from the
Army. They moved into a house on Mermaid Avenue in
Coney Island, and together had four children,
including Cathy, who died at age four in a house
fire, sending him into serious depression, and
Arlo Guthrie|Arlo, who became a famous
singer-songwriter in his own right. It was during
this period that he wrote and recorded Songs to
Grow on for Mother and Child, a collection of
children's music.  

Meanwhile, he was still writing topical songs, as
well.  The 1948 crash of a plane carrying 28
Mexican farm workers from Oakland, California, to
be deported back to Mexico inspired "Deportee
(Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)", which has since been
covered by performers such as Pete Seeger, Dolly
Parton, and Woody's son Arlo Guthrie.  "Pastures
of Plenty", written around the same time, also
sympathized with the struggle of immigrant farm
workers.

By the late 1940s, Guthrie's health was worsening
and his behavior becoming extremely erratic. He
left his family, traveling with Ramblin' Jack
Elliott to California, where he married for a
third time and had another child, before
eventually returning to New York. He received
various diagnoses (including alcoholism and
schizophrenia), before he was finally discovered
to be suffering from the degenerative nervous
disorder Huntington's disease|Huntington's chorea,
which had killed his mother. He was hospitalized
until his death on October 3, 1967. By that time
his work had been discovered by a new audience,
introduced to him in part through Bob Dylan, who
visited Guthrie in the last years of his life and
described him as "my last hero."  

In 1964, Phil Ochs's debut album included the song
"Bound for Glory", a tribute to Guthrie and a
criticism of revisionism and ignorance among
modern audiences who preferred to forget some of
Guthrie's more controversial (especially
socialist) lyrics.

In 1995, Woody's daughter Nora approached the
British singer Billy Bragg about recording lyrics
her father had composed in the later years of his
life.  After researching the lyrics at the Woody
Guthrie Archive in New York City, Bragg worked
with the band Wilco to record 40 tracks, a number
of which were released on the albums Mermaid
Avenue in 1998, and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II in
2000. She also approached Janis Ian 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 2004 album
Billie's Bones.



==Quotation==
:"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."

:"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."

==External links==

*http://www.woodyguthrie.org/ The Woody Guthrie
Foundation and Archives
*http://www.geocities.com/Nashville/3448/guthrie.h
tml The Songs of Woody Guthrie
*http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wwghtml/wwgtimeline.h
tml Timeline of Guthrie's life
*http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/musi
c/audio/mp3/this_land.mp3 Ballads: This Land is
Your Land mp3 - University of Virginia
*http://thrashersblog.com/2005/07/son-volts-new-ok
emah-and-melody-of.html Woody Guthrie's Spirit
Channeled in Today's Music