Forget Bob Dylan, this folk hero is the true voice of America

Telegraph

2 days ago

'Look out you fascists, here I come,' sings the twangy, nasal voice, to a simple acoustic strum. Even on a home-recording, it's unmistakable. This is the voice of Woody Guthrie, the folk singer who influenced the greats, from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen. It's from I'm a Child Ta Fight, the second single to be released from the upcoming album Woody at Home, Vol. 1 and 2, a painstakingly restored collection of songs recorded by Guthrie at home with his children in Brooklyn in the early 1950s.
They were taped at a time when the singer's health was declining, shortly before he was diagnosed with Huntington's chorea, the inherited neurodegenerative disease that had led to the death of his mother in 1930 in the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane.
Guthrie would himself soon be admitted to Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, where he was a patient from 1956-61. It was there that he was visited by a young Bob Dylan, an event memorialised not only in the song that Dylan wrote for his hero – Song to Woody – but in the 2024 Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. The Oscar-nominated film starred Scoot McNairy as Guthrie and Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, and reawakened interest in the music of both men among a much younger audience.
Guthrie's publisher had gifted him a lo-fi mono recorder to get some songs down on tape. Brought back to life, it's a treasure trove: 22 previously unreleased recordings, including 13 never-before-heard Guthrie songs and three spoken-word tracks.
There is a version of his alternative American national anthem This Land Is Your Land, with new verses, and a recording of his classic evocation of the Dust Bowl era, Pastures of Plenty. Plus the only version recorded by Guthrie of Deportee, from a poem that he'd written in 1948 after a plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California, which killed 28 migrant workers being deported to Mexico: 'Who are these dear friends who are falling like dry leaves?' it reads; 'Radio said, 'They are just deportees'.' The song has taken on new resonance in Trump's America, where officials are rounding up migrant farmworkers and returning them to their countries of origin.
Since the late 1950s, Deportee has been a folk standard, covered (with a different arrangement to Guthrie's) by Springsteen and Dolly Parton, Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, The Byrds, Joan Baez, The Dubliners and Deacon Blue, as well as by country supergroup The Highwaymen (consisting of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings). It speaks to how deeply Guthrie's words touch the heart; to how he captured the plight of the downtrodden down the decades.
And it explains why Guthrie continues to capture the imagination almost 60 years after his death in New York City in 1967. He's a romantic figure, for sure, and one whose life was altered by tragedy, including the death of two loved ones (his four-year-old daughter, Cathy, and his elder sister Clara) in separate fire-related incidents.
The image of him emblazoning his guitar with the legend 'This Machine Kills Fascists' has become part of rock folklore; many musicians have paid homage to it, from Steve Earle's direct tribute to Joe Strummer and his 'Ignore Alien Orders' guitar (Strummer once styled himself Woody, before he became famous with The Clash). Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello had a custom-built axe with 'Arm the Homeless' scrawled on it; peace-loving Pete Seeger had a banjo with 'This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender' printed around the rim.
Guthrie's own story began in Oklahoma in 1912, where he was born the middle of five children to middle-class parents. His father Charley dabbled in real estate and politics; his son remembered him as a hard, fist-fighting type and a member of the Ku Klux Klan, who was reportedly involved in the lynching of an African-American mother and son before Guthrie was born.
After his music-loving mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital with Huntington's, the young Guthrie followed his father to an oil town on the Texas Panhandle, where it jutted into Oklahoma. It was a boom time but lean years would follow, as over-farming turned the rich southern plains into the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. In the Great Dust Storm, Guthrie sang of the morning after the 'Black Sunday' dust storm of 1935: 'We saw outside our window where wheat fields they had grown / Was now a rippling ocean of dust the wind had blown.'
The 'we' referred to Guthrie and his first wife. At 21, he had married 16-year-old Mary Jennings and started a family; soon, he was joining the swelling wave of Texans and 'Okies' travelling to California searching for work. It is this time of great hardship, which John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath, that Guthrie captures in Pastures of Plenty – told from the perspective of a worker moving from place to place.
It's an entire social history in six verses, shot through with an intense political consciousness: 'California, Arizona, I make all your crops / Then it's north up to Oregon to gather your hops / Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine / To set on your table your light sparkling wine'. No wonder Dylan was blown away by the one who came before him. On stage at New York Town Hall in 1963, as Guthrie lay dying, the younger man recited his poem Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie: 'You'll find God in the church of your choice / You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital.'
Guthrie's music, Bruce Springsteen said many years later, was the first in which he 'found a reflection of America that I believed to be true, where I believed that the veils had been pulled off'. It inspired one of the Boss's greatest works, the 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town – right down to the title's echo of the famous line in Pastures of Plenty: 'On the edge of your city you'll see us and then / We come with the dust and we go with the wind.'
Back then, Guthrie had hitchhiked and hopped trains, sign-painting and singing on street corners – until he had to trade his guitar for food – but then he hooked up with a cousin to form a musical double act and pitched up in Los Angeles. They were good enough to get an unpaid radio slot, which blossomed into a contract after Guthrie began singing with Maxine 'Lefty Lou' Crissman.
Within a year, he was able to send the money to bring his wife and children to LA. Guthrie branched out into writing and was sent to report on the poverty that so many faced at the time. It changed him. He met Steinbeck and travelled with the author through California, performing in migrant camps.
He moved to New York after his radio show was cancelled, leaving behind his old life, including his first wife and children (two of whom would later die of Huntington's), and almost froze as he hitchhiked in the snow.
There in a hotel room, in 1940, sick of hearing Irving Berlin's patriotic God Bless America on the radio, he wrote This Land Is Your Land. To Guthrie, the former didn't speak to the struggle of working-class Americans who had lived through the Great Depression; his song did.
The version on Woody at Home is perhaps even more poetic than the original: 'I'm a-chasing my shadow / All across this road map / To my wheat field waving / To my cornfield dancing / As I keep walking, this wind keeps talking / This land was made for you and me'. Springsteen would later call it 'one of the most beautiful songs ever written'.
He also wrote Hard Travelin', reflecting on his years as a hobo living among the working poor. He detailed those experiences further in the semi-fictionalised 1943 memoir Bound for Glory, which received a rave review in The New Yorker: the magazine described his songs as deserving the status of 'a national possession, like Yellowstone and Yosemite'. Guthrie had arrived. Newly divorced, he married Marjorie Greenblatt, a dancer, with whom he had four children, including the singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie (he would later marry again, and have another child).
A tiny proportion of the songs that Guthrie wrote in his lifetime – estimated at around 3,000 – were ever recorded. They include handwritten lyrics from 1954 for a song about the housing policies of the man who owned the apartment complex where he lived in Brooklyn – the father of the 47th US President. 'I suppose that / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial Hate / He stirred up / In the bloodpot of human hearts / When he drawed / That color line / Here at his Beach Haven family project'.
By then the American folk revival was already well under way and Seeger, its guiding light, was just a year away from being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Guthrie was lionised by the folk movement, which recognised him as a passionate and authentic chronicler of hard times, with a political will born of experience. Though his fame would soon be eclipsed by Dylan's, the two will be forever linked.
It is Guthrie whose works seem rooted in something immovable and permanent, like the granite cliffs of Yosemite; they will be with us for a long, long time.