Woody Guthrie was a giant of Western American folk music,
looming large in the American imagination. But the man who helped pioneer resistance music was also
unfairly blacklisted and had anything but an easy life. Here's the tragic story of Woody Guthrie.
Named after the soon-to-be president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born July 14,
1912, in the small town of Okemah , Oklahoma. His father, Charles Guthrie,
was a successful businessman, local politician, and KKK member — basically
everything Woody would grow up to fight against. Although slavery was formally outlawed,
Jim Crow laws, white supremacy, and an epidemic of racist violence were spreading across the country.
This was during a time when the KKK had nearly total control over the state of Oklahoma.
The year before Woody's birth, Charley attended and possibly participated in the horrific
lynching of Laura Nelson and her son, L.D. Nelson. Ten years later, the Tulsa Race
Massacre was carried out by mobs of white men, roughly 60 miles from Guthrie's birthplace.
Though he came from money, family misfortunes would leave young Woody
Guthrie struggling along with other poor, displaced, and Black Americans.
As a result, he quickly latched onto the egalitarian ideas of socialism.
That his father embodied many of the things he'd come to stand against affected Woody,
his work, and ideology profoundly.
While Woody's early years were spent in relative comfort with his successful businessman father,
things changed quickly for the Guthries. After World War I, bad real estate deals
led to Charley losing his land. With his mother Nora institutionalized for displaying erratic
and occasionally violent behavior, Charley left for Pampa, Texas, with his two younger children,
Mary Jo and George, leaving Woody and his older brother Roy to fend for themselves in Okemah.
The need to survive made 14-year-old Woody Guthrie extremely resourceful. In addition to playing
music on the street for change, he picked through the trash to find scrap to sell and stayed with
friends or traveled for whatever other work he could find. During his junior year of high school,
although he was popular for his humor and music, Woody dropped out to join his father in Pampa.
While living in Pampa, Woody learned to play the fiddle, banjo, guitar, and violin
so he could play at dances for money. But he also worked for a bootlegger, painted signs,
and did whatever else he needed to. Despite earning very little money for all his work, Woody
Guthrie was known for giving it away to anyone he thought needed it more than him. This was noble,
but it would also cause problems when it came to keeping his young family fed in the coming years.
Woody Guthrie met his first wife, Mary Jennings, in Pampa, and they married in 1933 when he was
just 19. By then the great drought that caused the Dust Bowl was already devastating the Plains.
By 1934, the once-fertile region had been turned into a desert wasteland,
deepening the impact of the Great Depression. With a new family to provide for,
Woody migrated to California during the Dust Bowl.
At the time, novelty cowboy singers were wildly popular. In 1937, Woody found work performing a
comedic musical hillbilly act for radio on KFVD in Hollywood. Along with his broadcast partner
Maxine "Lefty Lou" Crissman, he was able to ride the wave of cowboy nostalgia and make a name
for himself in Los Angeles. The duo received thousands of fan-letters and a little money.
But as Guthrie's audience grew, so did general awareness of his socialist views. The songs
Guthrie was singing on the radio expressed a notably left wing political ideology.
Amid fears that the radio station would appear sympathetic to the Soviet Union,
Guthrie was fired. The more politically vocal he became, the more his following shrank.
However, Woody Guthrie continued to develop and share his voice and ideas.
In New York, Woody Guthrie was supported by a like-minded community of radicals and musicians
like Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Burl Ives, and many others. His popularity climbed again,
and in 1941 he formed an anti-war folk group called The Almanac Singers. By this time,
Mary and the children were living back in California and the Guthries
were all but divorced. Woody, however, stayed furiously busy.
At first the Almanac Singers wrote songs critical of the war, but when Hitler invaded
the Soviet Union in June 1941, their music became explicitly anti-fascist. This was the era where
the famous phrase, quote, "this machine kills fascists" began appearing on Woody's guitar.
Before the divorce with Mary was finalized,
Woody Guthrie was already starting a family with Marjorie Mazia . He joined up with the
military-adjacent civilian naval group the Merchant Marine after being persuaded by a friend,
did his time, and returned home, but soon received another draft notice.
His pleas for deferment were denied, and he was sent out again. But Guthrie's communist
leanings became less and less tolerable to the United States government. So in retaliation for
some of his writing in communist newspapers, the FBI suspended Guthrie's seaman's papers.
He was then drafted into the Army just as World War II was coming to an
end. But as it turned out, this would not be the end of his harassment by the government.
Whatever the public thought about his politics,
many in the government considered the prolific writer of folk songs, children's music,
and ballads for the working class to be a potential threat to the United States.
As early as 1941, the FBI was keeping files on Woody Guthrie. The files were filled with things
like traffic citations, missed car payments, and even work he had done for the Department
of the Interior as so-called evidence of Woody's activity with the Communist Party.
This surveillance continued even as his health was declining due to Huntington's disease.
In 1953, the FBI interviewed his physicians, demanding doctors break patient confidentiality
so the government could monitor his health status and classify him as a security risk.
Guthrie was publicly declared a communist by the House Un-American Activities Committee,
or HUAC, in 1948, then publicly smeared and blacklisted.
The tragic irony is that, while he certainly shared the same views,
Woody Guthrie was never actually a registered member of the Communist party. And while the
label hasn't stopped Guthrie from staying on in the popular imagination, it's hard not to wonder
what his legacy could have been if he hadn't been hounded by a paranoid government for so long.
As the Red Scare reached a boiling point, Hollywood stopped making movies that could
potentially be seen as controversial or socially aware during McCarthyism. Woody Guthrie lost
film projects he'd had lined up, and his loosely autobiographical book Bound for Glory was shelved.
The same sad phenomenon occurred within the music industry,
as RCA Victor discontinued his Dust Bowl Ballads in a major blow.
Soon, the singer who wrote song after song praising the power of unions couldn't even find
work. In the wake of the anti-communist frenzy, union members were forced to sign
anti-communist oaths as a condition of membership, so they were scared of retribution.
In some ways, this experience made Woody Guthrie into a martyr. While newspaper
headlines continued to echo the paranoid and dangerous accusations by HUAC, Guthrie wrote,
"These Un-American Committee boys are causing more folks to love us communists than to hate us."
However false this bravado might have been, there is no denying that the Guthries were
struggling financially after Woody was given the McCarthy treatment,
which worsened tensions with his wife Marjorie. Guthrie's friend,
actor, and fellow blacklisted leftist Will Geer bought property in Topanga Canyon where he lived
off the land with his family and built a theater that became a refuge for other starving artists.
Woody moved into a shack on the property following a split with Marjorie.
After the HUAC hearings, Woody Guthrie's struggle to find work
left Marjorie working almost nonstop to support the family. By the late 1940s,
Guthrie was already suffering the effects of the same disease that had violently taken his mother.
Huntington's disease destroys brain cells, leading to mood disorders,
psychotic breaks, dementia, and death, usually within 15 to 20 years of the diagnosis.
As Guthrie began to show the erratic, unpredictable and occasionally violent
behavior caused by Huntington's, Marjorie became afraid for their children. After
repeated violent outbursts and brief hospital stays, doctors suggested to Marjorie that
Woody go to California for the safety of the children, and with few options available to him,
he did. Shortly after he went to Topanga Canyon, the Guthries divorced.
While living on the Geer property in Topanga Canyon, Woody's health continued to worsen.
But as prolific and expressive as he was, he kept playing music and performing whenever he could.
It was in this cloistered, artistic community that he met Anneke Van Kirk, a married hippie who lived
nearby. Though she was half his age, the two began an affair and eventually married in 1953.
Woody's ongoing struggles meant he couldn't provide financial security,
and the couple had to rely on friends in the area for many of their needs.
This only exacerbated tensions in the community that had started with Anneke and Woody's affair.
Many of their friends didn't approve of the situation, resenting the fact that Woody had
run off with the wife of someone who was generally well-regarded in the community.
On top of that, Anneke was exhausting herself trying to take care of Woody as his health
continued its steep decline. They moved around from state to state for a bit, but divorced in
1956. They'd had one child together, named Lorinna, whom Anneke gave up for adoption.
Woody Guthrie had complicated relationships with all of his children. His first three with
Mary — Gwendolyn, Sue, and Bill — were loved but also largely neglected by their father,
and were left to be raised by Mary. On the other hand, Guthrie was extremely devoted to Cathy,
Arlo, Nora, and Joady, the four children he had with Marjorie.
Arlo went on to become a celebrated artist during the 1960s folk revival. Lorinna, born on the cusp
of Guthrie's long period of hospitalization and slow death, was all but forgotten.
The mythic tragedy that seemed to dog Woody Guthrie throughout his life was carried down
to some of his offspring, too. His son Bill died in an auto accident at the age of 23.
His daughters Gwendolyn and Sue both died at age 41 from Huntington's disease.
His daughter Cathy, whom he was closest to and nicknamed "Stackabones," had died at age 4,
sending him into a deep depression which Marjorie later believed
had been the trigger for his Huntington's symptoms.
Woody was only 42 when he entered the hospital for the last time in 1954.
He would remain hospitalized, with some brief breaks and transfers between hospitals, until his
death in 1967. The slow process of death brought on by Huntington's would be truly miserable for
anyone. As it advances, the disease causes people to lose mobility, memory, and even the ability to
speak and move. For Guthrie, the extremely prolific writer and singer who devoted his
life to communicating with others through music and activism, this was a fate worse than death.
He and Marjorie had stayed in contact, having never truly fallen out of love,
so as his condition worsened, she came back into his life to care for him until he died.
Even with the diagnosis, the disease wasn't very well understood,
and Woody Guthrie went essentially untreated. Eventually he could only
communicate by moving his eyes. He died at the age of 55 on October 3, 1967.
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