1930s During the
Dust Bowl period, Guthrie joined the thousands of
Okies and others who migrated to California to look for work, leaving his wife and children in Texas. Many of his songs are concerned with the conditions faced by working-class people. During the latter part of that decade in
Los Angeles, he achieved fame with radio partner
Maxine "Lefty Lou" Crissman as a broadcast performer of commercial
hillbilly music and traditional folk music. Guthrie was making enough money to send for his family to join him from Texas. While appearing on the radio station
KFVD, owned by a populist-minded
New Deal Democrat, Frank W. Burke, Guthrie began to write and perform some of the protest songs that he eventually released on his album
Dust Bowl Ballads. {{quote box While at KFVD, Guthrie met newscaster Ed Robbin. Robbin was impressed with a song Guthrie wrote about political activist
Thomas Mooney, wrongly convicted in a case that was a
cause célèbre of the time. Robbin, who became Guthrie's political mentor, introduced Guthrie to socialists and communists in Southern California, including Will Geer. He also introduced Guthrie to writer John Steinbeck. Robbin remained Guthrie's lifelong friend and helped Guthrie book benefit performances in the communist circles in Southern California. Notwithstanding Guthrie's later claim that "the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the
Communist Party", he was never a member of the party. Guthrie was identified as a
fellow traveler—an outsider who agreed with the platform of the party while avoiding party discipline. Guthrie wrote a column for the communist newspaper ''
People's World''. The column, titled "Woody Sez", appeared a total of 174 times from May 1939 to January 1940. "Woody Sez" was not explicitly political, but it covered current events as observed by Guthrie. He wrote the columns in an
exaggerated hillbilly dialect and usually included a small comic. These columns were published posthumously as a collection. Without the daily radio show, Guthrie's employment chances declined, and he returned with his family to Pampa, Texas. Although Mary was happy to return to Texas, Guthrie preferred to accept Will Geer's invitation to New York City and headed east. For a time, he slept on a couch in
Will Geer's apartment. Guthrie made his first recordings—several hours of conversation and songs recorded by the folklorist
Alan Lomax for the
Library of Congress—as well as an album,
Dust Bowl Ballads, for
Victor Records in
Camden, New Jersey. In February 1940, he wrote his most famous song, "
This Land Is Your Land", as a response to what he felt was an overplaying of
Irving Berlin's "
God Bless America" on the radio. Guthrie thought the lyrics were unrealistic and complacent. He adapted the melody from an old gospel song, "Oh My Loving Brother", which had been adapted by the country group the
Carter Family for their song "Little Darling Pal Of Mine". Guthrie signed the manuscript with the comment, "All you can write is what you see." Although the song was written in 1940, it was four years before he recorded it for
Moses Asch in April 1944. Sheet music was produced and given to schools by
Howie Richmond sometime later. In March 1940, Guthrie was invited to play at a benefit hosted by the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Farm Workers, to raise money for migrant workers. There he met the folk singer
Pete Seeger, and the two men became good friends. From April 1940, Guthrie and Seeger lived together in the Greenwich Village loft of sculptor
Harold Ambellan and his fiancée. Guthrie had some success in New York at this time as a guest on
CBS's radio program
Back Where I Come From and used his influence to get a spot on the show for his friend
Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter. Ledbetter's Tenth Street apartment was a gathering spot for the musician circle in New York at the time, and Guthrie and Ledbetter were good friends, as they had busked together at bars in Harlem. In November 1941, Seeger introduced Guthrie to his friend the poet
Charles Olson, then a junior editor at the fledgling magazine
Common Ground. The meeting led to Guthrie writing the article "Ear Players" in the Spring 1942 issue of the magazine. The article marked Guthrie's debut as a published writer in the mainstream media. In September 1940, Guthrie was invited by the Model Tobacco Company to host their radio program
Pipe Smoking Time. Guthrie was paid $180 a week, an impressive salary in 1940. He was finally making enough money to send regular payments back to Mary. He also brought her and the children to New York, where the family lived briefly in an apartment on
Central Park West. The reunion represented Woody's desire to be a better father and husband. He said, "I have to set real hard to think of being a dad." Disgruntled with New York, Guthrie packed up Mary and his children in a new car and headed west to California. Choreographer
Sophie Maslow developed
Folksay as an elaborate mix of modern dance and ballet, which combined folk songs by Woody Guthrie with text from
Carl Sandburg's 1936 book-length poem
The People, Yes. The premiere took place in March 1942 at the Humphrey-Weidman Studio Theatre in New York City. Guthrie provided live music for the performance, which featured Maslow and her New Dance Group. Two and a half years later, Maslow brought
Folksay to early television under the direction of Leo Hurwitz. The same group performed the ballet live in front of
CBS TV cameras. The 30-minute broadcast aired on WCBW, the pioneer CBS television station in New York City (now
WCBS-TV), from 8:15–8:45 pm ET on November 24, 1944. Featured were Maslow and the New Dance Group, which included among others Jane Dudley, Pearl Primus, and William Bales. Woody Guthrie and fellow folk singer Tony Kraber played guitar, sang songs, and read text from
The People, Yes. The program received positive reviews and was performed on television over WCBW a second time in early 1945.
Pacific Northwest released in 1949. Playing time 21:10. In May 1941, after a brief stay in Los Angeles, Guthrie moved to
Portland, Oregon, in the
neighborhood of Lents, on the promise of a job.
Gunther von Fritsch was directing a documentary about the
Bonneville Power Administration's construction of the
Grand Coulee Dam on the
Columbia River, and needed a narrator. Alan Lomax had recommended Guthrie to narrate the film and sing songs onscreen. The original project was expected to take 12 months, but as filmmakers became worried about casting such a political figure, they minimized Guthrie's role. The
Department of the Interior hired him for one month to write songs about the
Columbia River and the benefits of Bonneville's construction of federal dams for the documentary's soundtrack. Guthrie toured the Columbia River and the Pacific Northwest. Guthrie said he "couldn't believe it, it's a paradise", which appeared to inspire him creatively. In one month Guthrie wrote 26 songs, including three of his most famous: "
Roll On, Columbia, Roll On", "
Pastures of Plenty", and "
Grand Coulee Dam". The surviving songs were released as
Columbia River Songs. The film "Columbia" was not completed until 1949 (see below). At the conclusion of the month in Oregon and Washington, Guthrie wanted to return to New York. Tired of the continual uprooting, Mary Guthrie told him to go without her and the children. Although Guthrie would see Mary again, once on a tour through Los Angeles with the Almanac Singers, it was essentially the end of their marriage. Divorce was difficult, since Mary was a
Catholic, but she reluctantly agreed in December 1943.
Almanac Singers Following the conclusion of his work in the Northwest, Guthrie corresponded with
Pete Seeger about Seeger's newly formed folk-protest group, the
Almanac Singers. Guthrie returned to New York with plans to tour the country as a member of the group. The singers originally worked out of a loft in New York City hosting regular concerts called "
hootenannies", a word Pete and Woody had picked up in their cross-country travels. The singers eventually outgrew the space and moved into the cooperative Almanac House in
Greenwich Village. Initially, Guthrie helped write and sing what the Almanac Singers termed "peace" songs while the Nazi–Soviet Pact was in effect. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, the group wrote anti-fascist songs. The members of the Almanac Singers and residents of the Almanac House were a loosely defined group of musicians, though the core members included Guthrie,
Pete Seeger,
Millard Lampell and
Lee Hays. In keeping with common utopian ideals, meals, chores and rent at the Almanac House were shared. The Sunday hootenannies were good opportunities to collect donation money for rent. Songs written in the Almanac House had shared songwriting credits among all the members, although in the case of "
Union Maid", members would later state that Guthrie wrote the song, ensuring that his children would receive residuals. In the Almanac House, Guthrie added authenticity to their work, since he was a "real" working class Oklahoman. "There was the heart of America personified in Woody ... And for a New York Left that was primarily Jewish, first or second generation American, and was desperately trying to get Americanized, I think a figure like Woody was of great, great importance", a friend of the group,
Irwin Silber, would say. Woody routinely emphasized his working-class image, rejected songs he felt were not in the country blues vein he was familiar with, and rarely contributed to household chores. House member
Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, another Okie, would later recall that Woody "loved people to think of him as a real working class person and not an intellectual". Guthrie contributed songwriting and authenticity in much the same capacity for Pete Seeger's post-Almanac Singers project ''
People's Songs'', a newsletter and booking organization for labor singers, founded in 1945.
Bound for Glory Guthrie was a prolific writer, penning thousands of pages of unpublished poems and prose, many written while living in New York City. After a recording session with Alan Lomax, Lomax suggested Guthrie write an autobiography. Lomax thought Guthrie's descriptions of growing up were some of the best accounts he had read of American childhood. During this time, Guthrie met Marjorie Mazia (the professional name of Marjorie Greenblatt), a dancer in New York who would become his second wife. Mazia was an instructor at the
Martha Graham Dance School, where she was assisting
Sophie Maslow with her piece
Folksay. Based on the folklore and poetry collected by
Carl Sandburg,
Folksay included the adaptation of some of Guthrie's
Dust Bowl Ballads for the dance. It is told in the artist's down-home dialect. The
Library Journal complained about the "too careful reproduction of illiterate speech". However, Clifton Fadiman, reviewing the book in
The New Yorker, remarked that "Someday people are going to wake up to the fact that Woody Guthrie and the ten thousand songs that leap and tumble off the strings of his music box are a national possession, like
Yellowstone and
Yosemite, and part of the best stuff this country has to show the world." This book was the inspiration for the movie
Bound for Glory, starring
David Carradine, which won the 1976
Academy Award for Original Music Score for Original Song Score and Its Adaptation or Adaptation Score, and the
National Board of Review Award for Best Actor, among other accolades. In 1944, Guthrie met
Moses "Moe" Asch of
Folkways Records, for whom he first recorded "This Land Is Your Land". Over the next few years, he recorded "
Worried Man Blues", along with
hundreds of other songs. These recordings would later be released by Folkways and Stinson Records, which had joint distribution rights. The Folkways recordings are available (through the
Smithsonian Institution online shop); the most complete series of these sessions, culled from dates with Asch, is titled
The Asch Recordings.
World War II years Guthrie believed performing his anti-fascist songs and poems in the United States was the best use of his talents.
Labor for Victory In April 1942,
Time magazine reported that the
AFL (American Federation of Labor) and the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had agreed to a joint radio production, called
Labor for Victory. NBC agreed to run the weekly segment as a "public service". The AFL and CIO presidents
William Green and
Philip Murray agreed to let their press chiefs,
Philip Pearl and
Len De Caux, narrate on alternate weeks. The show ran on NBC radio on Saturdays 10:15–10:30 pm, starting on April 25, 1942.
Time wrote, "De Caux and Pearl hope to make the Labor for Victory program popular enough for an indefinite run, using labor news, name speakers and interviews with workmen. Labor partisanship, they promise, is out." Writers for
Labor for Victory included: Peter Lyon, a progressive journalist;
Millard Lampell (born Allan Sloane), later an American movie and television screenwriter; and
Morton Wishengrad, who worked for the AFL. For entertainment on CIO episodes, De Caux asked singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie to contribute to the show. "Personally, I would like to see a phonograph record made of your 'Girl in the Red, White, and Blue. The title appears in at least one collection of Guthrie records. Guthrie consented and performed solo two or three times on this program (among several other WWII radio shows, including
Answering You,
Labor for Victory,
Jazz in America, and
We the People). On August 29, 1942, he performed "The Farmer-Labor Train", with lyrics he had written to the tune of "
Wabash Cannonball". (In 1948, he reworked the "Wabash Cannonball" melody as "The Wallace-Taylor Train" for the
1948 Progressive National Convention, which nominated former U.S. Vice President
Henry A. Wallace for president.) The
Almanac Singers (of which Guthrie and Lampell were co-founders) appeared on
The Treasury Hour and CBS Radio's
We the People. The latter was later produced as a
television series. (Also,
Marc Blitzstein's papers show that Guthrie made some contributions to four CIO episodes (dated June 20, June 27, August 1, August 15, 1948) of
Labor for Victory.) While
Labor for Victory was a milestone in theory as a national platform, in practice it proved less so. Only 35 of 104 NBC affiliates carried the show. Episodes included the announcement that the show represented "twelve million organized men and women, united in the high resolve to rid the world of Fascism in 1942". Speakers included
Donald E. Montgomery, then "consumer's counselor" at the
U.S. Department of Agriculture. He made several voyages aboard merchant ships SS
William B. Travis, SS
William Floyd, and SS
Sea Porpoise, while they traveled in
convoys during the
Battle of the Atlantic. He served as a mess man and dishwasher, and frequently sang for the crew and troops to buoy their spirits on transatlantic voyages. His first ship,
William B. Travis, hit a mine in the
Mediterranean Sea, killing one person aboard, but the ship sailed to
Bizerte, Tunisia under her own power. His last ship,
Sea Porpoise, took troops from the United States to England and France for the
D-Day invasion. Guthrie was aboard when the ship was torpedoed off
Utah Beach by the
German submarine U-390 on July 5, 1944, injuring 12 of the crew. Guthrie was unhurt and the ship stayed afloat;
Sea Porpoise returned to England, where she was repaired at
Newcastle. In July 1944, she returned to the United States. Guthrie was an active supporter of the
National Maritime Union, one of many unions for wartime American merchant sailors. Guthrie wrote songs about his experience in the Merchant Marine but was never satisfied with them. Longhi later wrote about Guthrie's marine experiences in his book
Woody, Cisco and Me. The book offers a rare first-hand account of Guthrie during his
Merchant Marine service, at one point describing how Guthrie referred to his guitar as a "Hoping Machine". But later during duty aboard the troop ship, Guthrie built an actual "Hoping Machine" made of cloth, whirligigs and discarded metal attached to a railing at the stern, aimed at lifting the soldiers' spirits. In 1945, the government decided that Guthrie's association with communism excluded him from further service in the Merchant Marine; he was drafted into the
U.S. Army. While he was on
furlough from the Army, Guthrie married Marjorie. After his discharge, they moved to
Brooklyn, New York, where they lived in a house on Mermaid Avenue in the
Coney Island neighborhood. Over time, they had four children: daughters Cathy and
Nora; and sons
Arlo and Joady. Cathy died as a result of a fire at the age of four, and Guthrie suffered a serious depression from his grief. Arlo and Joady followed in their father's footsteps as singer-songwriters. When his family was young, Guthrie wrote and recorded
Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child, a collection of
children's music, which includes the song "Goodnight Little Arlo (Goodnight Little Darlin')", written when Arlo was about nine years old. During 1947, he wrote
House of Earth, an historical novel containing explicit sexual material, about a couple who build a house made of clay and earth to withstand the
Dust Bowl's brutal weather. He could not get it published. It was published posthumously in 2013, by
Harper, under actor
Johnny Depp's publishing imprint,
Infinitum Nihil. Guthrie was also a prolific sketcher and painter, his images ranging from simple, impressionistic images to free and characterful drawings, typically of the people in his songs. In 1949, Guthrie's music was used in the documentary film
Columbia River, which explored government dams and hydroelectric projects on the river. Guthrie had been commissioned by the US
Bonneville Power Administration in 1941 to write songs for the project, but it had been postponed by World War II.
Post-war: Mermaid Avenue slogans The years immediately after the war when he lived on Mermaid Avenue were among Guthrie's most productive as a writer. His extensive writings from this time were archived and maintained by Marjorie and later his estate, mostly handled by his daughter Nora. Several of the manuscripts also contain writing by a young Arlo and the other Guthrie children. During this time
Ramblin' Jack Elliott studied extensively under Guthrie, visiting his home and observing how he wrote and performed. Elliott, like
Bob Dylan later, idolized Guthrie. He was inspired by the singer's idiomatic performance style and repertoire. Because of the decline caused by Guthrie's progressive
Huntington's disease, Arlo Guthrie and Bob Dylan both later said that they had learned much of Guthrie's performance style from Elliott. When asked about this, Elliott said, "I was flattered. Dylan learned from me the same way I learned from Woody. Woody didn't teach me. He just said, If you want to learn something, just steal it—that's the way I learned from
Lead Belly." ==Later life and death==