He was named after the man who was to become the twenty-eighth president of the United States, born the third of five children to parents Nora and Charley. They lived in Oklahoma. Charlie, Woodrow’s father, was in the real estate business and doing well. He also dabbled in a bit of politics.
They were a family who loved music, and from the beginning, music was a part of his life. Often, according to Woodrow’s autobiographical piece titled My Life, Charley and Nora would "sing apart and together on hymns, spiritual songs, songs about how to save your lost and homeless soul and self. The color of the songs was the Red Man, the Black Man, and the White folks."
“Along with music,” according to the Library of Congress, “tragedy also touched his early years. When he was just a toddler, their newly built home burnt down, even before the family had a chance to move in.” Then in 1919, his sister Clara burned to death in an unexplained fire. As the Library of Congress continues, “For some time before this accident, Nora had been acting erratically.” She was suspected of setting the girl afire.
Woodrow had seen these episodes, and wrote, "my mother's nerves gave away like an overloaded bridge." She may have set Charley on fire too. In 1927, “a situation that resulted in a long and painful convalescence for [Charley] and a commitment to the state mental hospital in Norman for [Nora],” Woodrow wrote in My Life.
“Before these troubles beset the family,” says the Library of Congress, “they had already seen hard times. Charley had lost his landholdings and much of his self-esteem. Although he held a series of jobs after this loss, none paid well, and [they] fell into poverty. When Charley left Okemah in the wake of his injury, he took the two younger children, Mary Jo and George; but both Woodrow and his older brother Roy remained behind to fend for themselves.”
Woodrow’s mother had a mental condition that the doctors could not fix. They didn’t even know what it was, so they called it dementia, but he knew it was worse than that. When he was seven years old, he could see that his mother was deteriorating. Much later he would learn that the condition was called Huntington’s chorea, and that it was hereditary. He had it too but didn’t know it at the time. As a seven-year-old child, he lost his mother and never saw her again. She was committed to a place where a few years later, she would die.
Woodrow’s family moved on. Charlie and Woodrow’s younger siblings had moved to Pampa. Woodrow would join them there in 1929. What was left of the family still played and sang. They still loved music. It was in Pampa where he first picked up a guitar. Playing it came naturally for him. He practiced by picking along with the church songs and country music he heard on the radio. After a bit, he joined with his aunt and uncle, forming a small band and performing around the area.
He got real good with that guitar and nobody was surprised when he started playing a mandolin, learned how to fiddle, and blow a mouth harp. Woodrow was becoming a real talent. In those days the little towns would put on talent shows for kids to show their stuff. He travelled around the Panhandle, making his name at those shows.
After high school he stuck his thumb out and hitched around the southern states. He lived a hobo life, picking on street corners and collecting a little money in his hat ― spending his night under the stars and dreaming. As he travelled, he was exposed to different music ― regional music, immigrant music ― and he started incorporating it into his style. It was while hoboing around the south that Woody Guthrie started writing his own songs.
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, 112 years ago today. In as few words as possible, I would like to tell his story. That’s a joke. Folks know that nothing I write is short. I like to get into the weeds. In writing this piece I’ll rely heavily on a story written by my very good friend, Jon Randal. It was first published on his eponymous Facebook page, The Jon S. Randal Peace Page. You should understand that Jon writes emotional stories and gets right to the point. His stories tend to be shorter than mine. This piece will incorporate Jon’s and I’ll add my part to it.
So, back to Okemah, Oklahoma. Woody was born when that town when was just ten-years-old. It was named after a Kickapoo Indian chief. In March 1902, Chief Okemah built a bark house in his tribe's traditional fashion on the spot where two railroads were supposed to cross. Two months later a post office opened, officially recognizing the settlement as an incorporated town. Only one of those railroads made it to the town, so it never amounted to much. Still hasn’t. In the 2020 census, Okemah bragged just over 3,000 population. Although the Okemah Tourist website paints a pretty picture, today it’s known for being the birthplace of Woody Guthrie and not a lot else. They hold the annual music festival known as Woodyfest and hope to build a tourist trade based on that. I wish them luck.
Early settlers to the town came from all over. Charley made and lost his early fortune off of plots of land sold at auction. Most of the newcomers were recent immigrants, which was good for Woody. Those new folks from far flung places brought a variety of musical traditions and instruments with them. When Woody began writing songs, that influence shined through. Later he would write a sad poem about immigrants. The newcomers played odd instruments that fascinated Woody. They sang songs from the Appalachian Mountains, Ireland, down south, and up north. They played fiddle music, squeeze boxes, organs, and washtubs, spoons ― singing church hymns, Black blues, old country ballads, and plain old country music. Music was the bright spot in an otherwise dreary town.
For Woody returning from his travels, Okemah held nothing but bad memories. He just passed through as he returned to Pampa. He was 21 (some say 19) by then and hankering to get married. He found his first wife in 16-year-old Mary Jennings, the younger sister of a friend. Woody fathered three children with Mary.
If you don’t know Texas, you need to understand that Pampa is in the Panhandle ― about halfway between Amarillo and the Oklahoma state line. It’s wide-open country with not much to see. When it gets hot in Texas, it’s hotter in Pampa. When it gets cold, Pampa is colder. When the wind blows, as it does most of the time, there’s nothing to stop it.
And that’s what happened in the mid-1930s when the Dust Bowl came blowing in. Pampa was not alone in this. The Dust Bowl impacted the entirety of the western plains, with high winds and choking dust sweeping an area reaching from Texas to Nebraska. Farmers lost everything as well dried up, crops failed, and livestock choked on the blowing sand. The Dust Bowl hit as the nation and the world were already dealing with the Great Depression. With no food and no money, and a land that had turned against them, many just piled what they could into old jalopies and headed west, seeking any kind of work they could find.
Woody witnessed all this firsthand, and it hurt his very soul, for Woody was an empath. As the people around him hurt, he felt the pain right along with them. This was the period that had the greatest impact on his early songwriting. It was also the time that he knew he had to get out of Texas.
Woody did what he knew how to do ― he stuck his thumb out and headed west, leaving the family behind and hoping he could find work so he could bring them to wherever he settled. That was 1937, and he landed in Los Angeles. Pretty quickly he scored work singing on a local radio station. The pay was good enough that he sent money for his wife and children to join him.
Woody’s heart remained with the poor people. Darryl Holter, writing for PBS SoCal reports that “[d]uring his years in Los Angeles from 1937 to 1941 Woody Guthrie spent a lot of time on L.A.'s Skid Row. He often worked there, frequently performing his songs for tips and drinks in the bars, coffee shops, and street corners on Main Street between Fourth and Fifth Streets or writing his Woody Sez articles for a daily newspaper with offices on Fifth Street between Main and Spring Streets. He sometimes slept in flophouses, 20 men to a room. These were the years of the Great Depression marked by high unemployment and grinding poverty, and Woody designated himself the voice for those whose voices too often went unheard: the working people, the Dust Bowl refugees, the poor, the homeless, and the people of Skid Row.”
He met and befriended the actor Will Geer. Geer, in addition to acting, was a radical political activist. He convinced Woody to attend some of the leftist rallies, where he performed for the crowds and rubbed elbows with communist sympathizers. It was a real experience for him. Three years later Geer, who had moved to New York City, wrote to Woody asking if he would come for a visit. Woody’s traveling bone began to twitch. He loaded the family in the car and off to New York they went.
While staying in a hotel not far from Times Square, he wrote what would become the song that he would be most remembered for. As they traveled across the country they heard Kate Smith singing the Irving Berlin song, "God Bless America" almost endlessly. It was on every station from coast to coast. Woody got irritated by the constant repetition, so he decided to write a song to compete with it. What he wrote simply said, in poetic terms, that it was the people who were America ― “This Land is Your Land.”
The big city was good for Woody, and his songwriting showed it. He met and befriended folklorist and singer "Cisco" Houston, banjo playing folksinger Pete Seeger, bluesman Leadbelly, and several more denizens of the Saint Marks district. His most important meet-up introduced him to Alan Lomax. Lomax was a Greenwich Village regular, known as a musician, scholar, political activist, and filmmaker. He made some field recordings of Woody as he played and sang, which he used to wrangle an appearance playing live on CBS Radio. It was his biggest break so far.
In the spring of 1940, Woody recorded his first album. Dust Bowl Ballads contained songs about the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. He sang about the "Okies" giving up their land and heading west into unknown territory and unknown circumstance. Rather unlike the Gray Lady of 2024, the New York Times critics gave Woody ‘s songs high marks, saying "They make you think; they may even make you uncomfortable, though not as uncomfortable as the Okie on his miserable journey. But they are an excellent thing to have on record."
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Despite his successes in the city, Woody longed to return to California. He had earned enough that he could pay cash for a new car, which he loaded up with the family and their few belongings and headed west. Work remained scarce around Los Angeles, but he managed to hire on with the federal government for one of the New Deal agencies. He had to move again, this time to the Pacific Northwest where he was given the task of interviewing workers at the Bonneville Power Administration, asking them questions about the dam project. He would then turn what he learned into poetry, and then put the verse to music. The songs would extoll the benefits of hydroelectric power.
Woody was pretty much thrilled with the job. It showed in the couple dozen songs. As one pundit said, “The odd assignment prompted him to write songs packed with his trademark wordplay, humor, and empathy for working people.” He was paid the astounding sum of $266 weekly.
Once that job ended, he headed back to New York, but Mary and the kids did not. Mary took her brood and headed back to Texas, saying that she was sick with all the moving around, and she wanted a steady home and a school for the kids. That ended Woody’s first marriage.
Heartbroken, he buried himself in his work. Pearl Harbor had just been attacked and New York, like every industrial city, was retooling for war. He began writing songs in support of the effort, calling American workers heroes, supporting labor and denouncing fascism.
It was during this time that his guitar began sporting that famous sign ― This Machine Kills Fascists. He also became a published author during this time, penning a memoir of his travels across the country ― Bound for Glory.
In his diary, written on March 6, 1942, he wrote, "There's a feeling in music and it carries you back down the road you have traveled and makes you travel it again. Sometimes when I hear music I think back over my days ― and a feeling that is fifty-fifty joy and pain swells like clouds taking all kinds of shapes in my mind. Music is in all the sounds of nature and there never was a sound that was not music ― the splash of an alligator, the rain dripping on dry leaves, the whistle of a train, a long and lonesome train whistling down, a truck horn blowing at a street corner speaker ― kids squalling along the streets ― the silent wail of wind and sky caressing the breasts of the desert. Life is this sound, and since creation has been a song. And there is no real trick of creating words to set to music, once you realize that the word is the music, and the people are the song."
Life moved on. He recorded more songs and continued writing poetry that would become songs. By the late 1940s he was displaying symptoms of the same disease that killed his mother. He felt it and knew what was happening. He wrote lyrics but often never got around to setting them to a tune. One of those songs was perhaps the most moving, disturbing story he ever set to paper. Others set it to music, and it became an anthem of the time, covered by a new generation of artists, like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and his own son, Arlo. It was the song I mentioned earlier ― the song about immigrants.
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Now we are at the point where Jon should be heard. Jon is the artist. He sculpts with words, and he has done Woody Guthrie proud. Again, I must note that Jon published this on July 14, 2016, on The Jon S. Randal Peace Page. It appears here in its entirety, just as it appeared then.
~~~
He was reading the newspaper one morning, when he became very angry.
It was 1948. There was a story about a plane crash in California, killing 32 people. What angered him was that only four names were listed in the article because the other passengers were supposedly Mexicans being deported back to Mexico. Some were agricultural workers who had slipped across the border without a passport, others were part of the Bracero Program, who had overstayed their work permits. He saw racist mistreatment and disrespect in the fact that the Mexicans were not named. He felt the Mexicans had only been trying to seek a better life for their families.
He was born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, a small town in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. There were stories that his father may have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, who may have been involved in a lynching. His mother was afflicted with Huntington's disease, but at the time they thought it was dementia. His sister died in a fire. His family struggled to make ends meet.
He would eventually move to Texas and married at age 19. During the Dust Bowl period, he and his family struggled like many others. To seek a better life for his family, he would join thousands of Okies and others who migrated to California to look for work. He had to leave behind his wife and children in Texas, but hoped that once he made enough money, he could send for them.
His name is Woody Guthrie. He started writing poems, such as This Land is Your Land, then made many of them into songs about the injustices he saw in the world. He made friends with John Steinbeck, the author of The Grapes of Wrath and wrote songs about the Dust Bowl Period, about families just trying to survive.
When he read that newspaper article that morning, he became upset about what he believed was the American attitude to what he termed were the "deportees" who died at the plane crash, writing a poem about the unnamed Mexicans who were left “To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil / And be called by no name except deportees.” He felt it was racist, and he remembered how he himself had to leave his birthplace in Oklahoma to provide for his own family.
Cesar Chavez, later to become founder of the United Farm Workers union, would also learn of this tragic crash while serving in the US Navy. It would inspire him to help convince others that farm workers should be treated "as important human beings and not as agricultural implements."
In his poem, Guthrie assigned symbolic names to those who had no names:
"Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees" …
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves …"
Guthrie's poem would be set to music a decade later by college student Martin Hoffman and would become the folk song Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos), which would be popularized by Pete Seeger, and would also be performed by many artists, including Guthrie's son, Arlo, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, and The Byrds.
The song has been referenced in the news lately, from NPR and others, some connecting it to as one article said was "the heartlessness of the American public, media, and law enforcement system towards illegal immigrants." NPR and other news sources have been criticized for even bringing this up. Even the Peace Page has received negative comments for even sharing this information.
Guthrie's son, Arlo, remembered the stories his father told him about the plane crash, wondering whether the names of the "deportees" would actually be found or "if they would simply remain ghosts without names, as if they had no lives at all — as if they didn’t count."
In his poem, his father wrote:
"The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except 'deportees'?"
Although the Mexican victims of the plane crash were placed in a mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California, their graves marked them only as "Mexican Nationals."
Arlo Guthrie would remember the words of his father, saying, "In his lyrics to ‘Plane Wreck at Los Gatos,’ my father, Woody Guthrie, asked a simple question, ‘Who are these friends?’"
Years later, writer Tim Z. Hernandez, for his book All They Will Call You, would finally find the names of the "deportees", spending six years searching for their families.
Arlo Guthrie would say, "I now know who these people were, their lives, their loves, and their journeys . . . the names — now etched in stone in a far-off graveyard — have become friends who will travel with me as long as I am walking.”
It would have also made his father happy to know that "his friends" now have their names.
A memorial at the cemetery now lists all 28 names of the migrant workers, which included three women.
Miguel Negrete Álvarez.
Tomás Aviña de Gracia.
Francisco Llamas Durán.
Santiago García Elizondo.
Rosalio Padilla Estrada.
Tomás Padilla Márquez.
Bernabé López Garcia.
Salvador Sandoval Hernández.
Severo Medina Lára.
Elías Trujillo Macias.
José Rodriguez Macias.
Luis López Medina.
Manuel Calderón Merino.
Luis Cuevas Miranda.
Martin Razo Navarro.
Ignacio Pérez Navarro.
Román Ochoa Ochoa.
Ramón Paredes Gonzalez.
Guadalupe Ramírez Lára.
Apolonio Ramírez Placencia.
Alberto Carlos Raygoza.
Guadalupe Hernández Rodríguez.
Maria Santana Rodríguez.
Juan Valenzuela Ruiz.
Wenceslao Flores Ruiz.
José Valdívia Sánchez.
Jesús Meza Santos.
Baldomero Marcas Torres.
No longer just "deportees" with no names, but people with lives, with families, with hopes and dreams.
~~~
The story of the poem is sad, and sadder still is Woody’s life as he wrote those words. He had remarried and had children again. He was looking forward to a promising future, but as life is known to do ― it tossed him a curve ball. The signs of Huntington's chorea that he recognized so well as the disease that took his mother, he now saw creeping into his personality. The disease attacks the brain, destroying cells and sapping cognitive abilities. Woody slowly lost his muscle control and was institutionalized, where over the next ten years he wasted away.
Before he was gone, and while he could still communicate, a student at the University of Minnesota by the name of Robert Zimmerman had begun listening to Woody’s music. Zimmerman was so fascinated that he hitched to New Jersey so he could visit Woody at the state hospital. Zimmerman, who had recently started going by the moniker “Bob Dylan,” was so fascinated by that visit and the amazing man that he began writing his own songs. A year later, after a few false starts, Dylan wrote one of the most iconic folk/protest songs to come out of the 1960s ― Blowin’ in the Wind.
The disease eventually took Woody’s life, but it did not kill his legacy. As every new generation of folksingers discovers the magic that is Woody Guthrie, his name and his message spreads further. His son, Arlo, began performing for the public, and as Jon writes, became a successful singer-songwriter in his own style. Woody Guthrie died on October 3, 1967, at the age of 55. His obituary in the New York Times noted that he had written as many as 1,000 songs.
The actual number is over 3,000.