- Born
- Died
- Birth nameWoodrow Wilson Guthrie
- Height5′ 7″ (1.70 m)
- Charley and Nora Guthrie named their son after the Democrat elected president that year. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie knew hard times as a youngster (his house burned down, his sister Clara burned to death, his father's small-town business and political careers never went anywhere, his mother suffered from undiagnosed Huntington's Disease and was declared insane), but he enjoyed performing (dancing, playing harmonica, writing songs) and learning (he read voraciously in the public library). In 1933 he married Mary Jennings, five years his junior, with whom he would have three children. In 1935 he joined the Oakies and Arkies driven to California by the Dust Bowl. His songs went from describing the tragedy of the migrants to urging their unionization. Though he wrote a column for the Weekly People, he never joined the Communist Party. When Will Geer got a part in the play "Tobacco Road" he invited Woody to join him in New York where he met Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Leadbelly, Cisco Houston. He was commissioned to write songs for a never-completed documentary on Washington State's Grand Coulee Dam, and it was in the Pacific Northwest that his family left him. Back in New York in 1940, Woody joined Pete Seeger's Alamanc Singers and married Martha Graham dancer Marjorie Mazia. His autobiography, Bound for Glory, was published in 1943. He served in the Merchant Marine in World War II, and three ships were torpedoed from under him. In 1947 his and Marjorie's daughter, Cathy, was burned to death in an apartment fire. They had three more children: Arlo, Joady and Nora. In 1953 he married for a third time, to Anneke Van Kirk. They had a child, Lorinna Lynn Guthrie. When Anneke and Guthrie divorced, their daughter was adopted by a couple they knew, and did not have any further contact with Guthrie. Lorinna died prematurely (at age 19) in 1973, in a car accident in California.
In the 1950s he experienced bouts of irrational behavior and was often unable to play his guitar; his condition was ultimately diagnosed as Huntington's Disease. The rest of that decade and into the 1960s a new generation, notably including Bob Dylan, began to discover and play his music, adapting some of it to the new Civil Rights movement.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Ed Stephan <stephan@cc.wwu.edu>
- SpousesAnneke Van Kirk(December 2, 1953 - 1956) (divorced, 1 child)Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia(November 13, 1945 - July 1953) (divorced, 4 children)Mary Guthrie Boyle(October 28, 1933 - 1940) (divorced, 3 children)
- Had "This machine Kills fascists" inscribed on his guitar
- Uplifting songs about working-class people
- His guitar was inscribed with the words, "This machine kills fascists."
- He was cremated and his ashes were scattered off Coney Island. The family scattered the ashes of Marjorie in the same place when she died.
- For two years during the 1950s, the landlord of his Beach Haven apartment complex in Brooklyn was Fred Trump, father of future US President Donald Trump.
- Was Bob Dylan's idol and mentor. Dylan visited him many times in the hospital in the last years of his life, and modeled his own folk-writing style after Guthrie's. The first Dylan-written song ever released was a tribute to his hero, 'Song to Woody', which appeared on his self-titled 1962 debut album.
- Father of Arlo Guthrie
- Working people have always known that songs are a good way to say what you got to say about work, wages, school, cats, love, marriage, keeping house, or doctor bills. If the fight gets hot, the songs get hotter. If the going gets tough, the songs get tougher.
- [When asked why he'd scrawled "This Machine Kills Fascists" across the front of his guitar] Well, you see this guitar makes me feel like beatin' the Fascists, and then that makes me sing how much I hate 'em. When I sing for a bunch of folks, folks workin', for soliders, sailors, seamen, that sort of makes all of us whip it up a little. Then we all get to feelin' a little more like beatin' 'em, and 'course if a fascist then just sort of happens to get in our way, he just naturally comes out loser. That's all.
- I hate a song that makes you think that you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight those kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down and rolled over you, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.
- [from a scribbled lyric discovered in a notebook in his archives] I am the works, the whole works. The saint, the sinner, the drinker, the thinker.
- It's a folk singer's job to comfort disturbed people and to disturb comfortable people
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