Age, Biography, and Wiki
Woody Guthrie was born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma. He is best known for his contributions to American folk music, with iconic songs like "This Land is Your Land" and "Pretty Boy Floyd." Guthrie's life was marked by his activism and his unique ability to blend music with social commentary. He passed away on October 3, 1967.
| Occupation | Autobiographer |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 14 July 1912 |
| Age | 113 Years |
| Birth Place | Okemah, Oklahoma, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Cancer |
| Country | U.S |
| Date of death | 3 October, 1967 |
| Died Place | New York City, U.S. |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is limited publicly available information regarding Woody Guthrie's physical measurements. However, he was known for his rugged and weathered appearance that reflected his life of traveling and performing.
Socialism had an important impact on the work of Woody Guthrie. In the introduction to Will Kaufman’s book Woody Guthrie an American Radical, Kaufman writes, "Woody Guthrie spent his productive life on the warpath-against poverty, political oppression, censorship, capitalism, fascism, racism, and, ultimately, war itself." Guthrie would time and time again back these beliefs up in his lyrics, specifically against capitalism at the height of the depression in the United States.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Guthrie was married three times:
- Mary Jennings (married 1933–1943)
- Marjorie Greenblatt (married 1945–1967 until his death)
- Marjorie was a dancer and the mother of his children, including Arlo Guthrie.
Guthrie was brought up by middle-class parents in Okemah, Oklahoma. He left Okemah in 1929, after his mother, suffering from the Huntington’s disease that would later kill him too, was institutionalized. Guthrie followed his wayward father to Pampa, Texas, where the elder Guthrie was running a seedy flophouse. "Pampa was a Texas oil boom town and wilder than a woodchuck," Guthrie wrote in his autobiography, and though he lived there for just eight years, the town’s influence on him and his music was undeniable. He married at 20, but with the advent of the dust storms that marked the Dust Bowl period, he left his wife and three children to join the thousands of Texans and Okies who were migrating to California looking for employment. He worked at Los Angeles radio station KFVD, achieving some fame from playing hillbilly music, made friends with Will Geer and John Steinbeck, and wrote a column for the communist newspaper People's World from May 1939 to January 1940.
His parents named him after Woodrow Wilson, then Governor of New Jersey and the Democratic candidate who was elected as President of the United States in fall 1912. Charles Guthrie was an industrious businessman, owning at one time up to 30 plots of land in Okfuskee County. He was actively involved in Oklahoma politics and was a conservative Democratic candidate for office in the county. Charles Guthrie was reportedly involved in the 1911 lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson. (Woody Guthrie wrote three songs about the event in the 1960s. He said that his father, Charles, became a member of the Ku Klux Klan during its revival beginning in 1915. )
Three significant fires impacted Guthrie's early life. In 1909, one fire caused the loss of his family's home in Okemah a month after it was completed. When Guthrie was seven, his sister Clara died after setting her clothes on fire during an argument with her mother, and, later, in 1927, their father was severely burned in a fire at home. Guthrie's mother, Nora, was afflicted with Huntington's disease, although the family did not know this at the time. What they could see was dementia and muscular degeneration.
When Woody was 14, Nora was committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane. At the time his father Charles was living and working in Pampa, Texas, to repay debts from unsuccessful real estate deals. Woody and his siblings were on their own in Oklahoma; they relied on their eldest brother Roy for support. The 14-year-old Woody Guthrie worked odd jobs around Okemah, begging meals and sometimes sleeping at the homes of family friends.
Guthrie had a natural affinity for music, learning old ballads and traditional English and Scottish songs from the parents of friends. Guthrie befriended an African-American shoeshine boy named George, who played blues on his harmonica. After listening to George play, Guthrie bought his own harmonica and began playing along with him. He used to busk for money and food. Although Guthrie did not do well as a student and dropped out of high school in his senior year before graduation, his teachers described him as bright. He was an avid reader on a wide range of topics.
In 1929, Guthrie's father sent for Woody to join him in Texas, but little changed for the aspiring musician. Guthrie, then 18, was reluctant to attend high school classes in Pampa; he spent most of his time learning songs by busking on the streets and reading in the library at Pampa's city hall. He regularly played at dances with his father's half-brother Jeff Guthrie, a fiddle player. His mother died in 1930 of complications of Huntington's disease while still in the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane.
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.
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. Seeger accompanied Guthrie back to Texas to meet other members of the Guthrie family. He recalled an awkward conversation with Mary Guthrie's mother, in which she asked for Seeger's help to persuade Guthrie to treat her daughter better.
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 [sic] real hard to think of being a dad." Guthrie quit after the seventh broadcast, claiming he had begun to feel the show was too restrictive when he was told what to sing. Disgruntled with New York, Guthrie packed up Mary and his children in a new car and headed west to California.
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. Guthrie continued to write songs and began work on his autobiography. The end product, Bound for Glory, was completed with editing assistance by Mazia and was first published by E.P. Dutton in 1943. 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."
While he was on furlough from the Army, Guthrie married Marjorie. After his discharge, they moved into a house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island and over time 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.
By the late 1940s, Guthrie's health was declining, and his behavior was becoming extremely erratic. He received various diagnoses (including alcoholism and schizophrenia). In 1952, it was finally determined that he was suffering from Huntington's disease, a genetic disorder inherited from his mother. Believing him to be a danger to their children because of his behavior, Marjorie suggested he return to California without her. They eventually divorced.
As his health worsened, he met and married his third wife, Anneke van Kirk. They had a child, Lorina Lynn. The couple moved to Fruit Cove, Florida, where they briefly lived. They lived in a bus on land called Beluthahatchee, owned by his friend Stetson Kennedy. Guthrie's arm was hurt in an accident when gasoline used to start the campfire exploded. Although he regained movement in the arm, he was never able to play the guitar again. In 1954, the couple returned to New York, living in the Beach Haven apartment complex owned and operated by Fred Trump in Gravesend, Brooklyn; Guthrie composed there the song "Old Man Trump". Shortly after, Anneke filed for divorce, a result of the strain of caring for Guthrie. Anneke left New York after arranging for friends to adopt Lorina Lynn. Lorina had no further contact with her birth parents. She died in a car crash in California in 1973 at the age of 19. After the divorce, Guthrie's second wife, Marjorie, re-entered his life and cared for him until his death.
His son Bill (with his first wife Mary Guthrie) died in an auto-train accident in Pomona, California, at the age of 23. His two daughters with Mary, Gwendolyn and Sue, both inherited Huntington's disease and died at age 41.
Woody Guthrie died at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center of complications of Huntington's disease on October 3, 1967. According to a Guthrie family legend, he was listening to his son Arlo's "Alice's Restaurant", a recording of which Arlo had delivered to Woody's bedside, shortly before he died. His remains were cremated and scattered at sea. By the time of Guthrie's death, his work had been discovered by a new audience, introduced to them through Dylan, Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, his ex-wife Marjorie, and other new members of the folk revival, including his son Arlo Guthrie.
At age 20, Guthrie met and married his first wife, Oklahoma-born Mary Jennings (1917–2014), in Texas in 1931. They had three children together: Gwendolyn, Sue, and Bill. Bill died at the age of 23 as the result of an automobile accident. The daughters both died of Huntington's disease at the age of 41, in the 1970s. Evidently the disease had been passed on from their father, although Guthrie himself was diagnosed with the condition later in life, in 1952, when he was 43 years old. Guthrie and Mary divorced in 1940.
After his discharge from the hospital, Guthrie had a romantic relationship with Anneke van Kirk from late 1952, marrying her in 1953 and having a daughter, Lorinna Lynn. However, due to his deteriorating condition, this relationship led to their divorce just one year later. Guthrie had a total of eight children over his three relationships.
Guthrie's unrecorded written lyrics housed at the archives have been the starting point of several albums including the Wilco and Billy Bragg albums Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II, created in 1998 sessions at the invitation of Guthrie's daughter Nora. Blackfire interpreted previously unreleased Guthrie lyrics. Jonatha Brooke's 2008 album, The Works, includes lyrics from the Woody Guthrie Archives set to music by Jonatha Brooke. The various artists compilation Note of Hope: A Celebration of Woody Guthrie was released in 2011. Jay Farrar, Will Johnson, Anders Parker, and Yim Yames recorded her father's lyrics for New Multitudes to honor the 100th anniversary of his birth and a box set of the Mermaid Avenue sessions was also released.
Guthrie wrote numerous Jewish lyrics that can be linked to his close collaborative relationship with Aliza Greenblatt, who lived near Guthrie and his family in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Guthrie, the Oklahoma troubadour, and Greenblatt, the Jewish wordsmith, often discussed their artistic projects and critiqued each other's works, finding common ground in their shared love of culture and social justice. Their collaboration flourished in 1940s Brooklyn, where Jewish culture was interwoven with music, modern dance, poetry, and anti-fascist, pro-labor, socialist activism. Guthrie was inspired to write songs that arose from this unlikely relationship; he identified the problems of Jews with those of his fellow Oklahomans and other oppressed peoples.
In 2003, Jimmy LaFave produced a Woody Guthrie tribute show called Ribbon of Highway, Endless Skyway. The ensemble show toured around the country and included a rotating cast of singer-songwriters individually performing Guthrie's songs. Interspersed between songs were Guthrie's philosophical writings read by a narrator. In addition to LaFave, members of the rotating cast included Ellis Paul, Slaid Cleaves, Eliza Gilkyson, Joel Rafael, husband-wife duo Sarah Lee Guthrie (Woody Guthrie's granddaughter) and Johnny Irion, Michael Fracasso, and The Burns Sisters. Oklahoma songwriter Bob Childers, sometimes called "the Dylan of the Dust", served as narrator.
On September 30, 2022, Dropkick Murphys released This Machine Still Kills Fascists. The acoustic album consists of ten songs featuring unused lyrics by Guthrie. Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, reached out to the band giving them exclusive access to her father's archives. "I collected lyrics on all kinds of topics … lyrics that seemed to be needed to be said — or screamed — today. Ken Casey is a master at understanding Woody's lyrics, which can be complicated, long, deadly serious, or totally ridiculous. DKM is capable of delivering them all" Nora Guthrie said.
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| Husband | Mary Jennings (m. 1933-1940) Marjorie Greenblatt (m. 1945-1953) Anneke van Kirk (m. 1953-1956) |
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Net Worth and Salary
Woody Guthrie's net worth at the time of his death in 1967 is not well-documented. However, during his active career, he earned a significant income from his music and performances. For example, in 1940, he was paid $180 a week, which was a substantial amount at that time. His legacy continues to generate revenue through royalties and tributes.
Business and Investments
Guthrie did not leave behind any specific business ventures or investments. However, his legacy is preserved through the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which houses his archives and promotes his work.
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 construction of the 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.
Upon his return to California, Guthrie lived at the Theatricum Botanicum, a summer-stock type theatre founded and owned by Will Geer. Together with singers and actors who had been blacklisted by HUAC, he waited out the anti-communist political climate.
The Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, also known as "WoodyFest", has been held annually since 1998 in mid-July to commemorate Guthrie's life and music. The festival is held on the weekend closest to Guthrie's birth date (July 14) in Guthrie's hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma. Planned and implemented annually by the Woody Guthrie Coalition, a non-profit corporation, its goal is to preserve Guthrie's musical legacy. The Woody Guthrie Coalition commissioned a local Creek Indian sculptor to cast a full-body bronze statue of Guthrie and his guitar, complete with the guitar's well-known message reading, "This machine kills fascists". The statue, sculpted by artist Dan Brook, stands along Okemah's main street in the heart of downtown and was unveiled in 1998, the inaugural year of the festival.
In I'm Not There, a 2007 biographical movie about Bob Dylan, one of the characters introduced in the film as segments of Dylan's life is a young African-American boy who calls himself "Woody Guthrie". The purpose of this particular character was a reference to Dylan's youthful obsession with Guthrie. The fictional Woody also reflects the fictitious autobiographies that Dylan constructed during his early career as he established his own artistic identity. In the film there is even a scene where the fictional Woody visits the real Woody Guthrie as he lies ill and dying in a hospital in New York (a reference to the times when a nineteen-year-old Dylan would regularly visit his idol, after learning of his whereabouts, while he was hospitalized in New York in the 1960s). Later, a sketch on Saturday Night Live would spoof these visits, alleging that Dylan stole the line, "They'll stone you for playing your guitar!" from Guthrie.
Social Network
Woody Guthrie passed away before the advent of modern social networking platforms. However, his legacy continues to inspire a strong online community, with many fans and artists sharing his music and message across various social media platforms.
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 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.
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.
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."
Education
Guthrie's formal education was limited, but he was largely self-educated. He gained much of his knowledge through his travels and interactions with people from different backgrounds. His experiences greatly influenced his music and worldview.
In September 1996, Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Case Western Reserve University cohosted Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, a 10-day conference of panel sessions, lectures, and concerts. The conference became the first in what would become the museum's annual American Music Masters Series conference. Highlights included Arlo Guthrie's keynote address, a Saturday night musical jamboree at Cleveland's Odeon Theater, and a Sunday night concert at Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra. Musicians performing over the course of the conference included Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the Indigo Girls, Ellis Paul, Jimmy LaFave, Ani DiFranco, and others. In 1999, Wesleyan University Press published a collection of essays from the conference and DiFranco's record label, Righteous Babe, released a compilation of the Severance Hall concert, Til We Outnumber 'Em, in 2000.
* La Chapelle, Peter. Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California. University of California Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-520-24888-5 (hb); ISBN 978-0-520-24889-2 (pb)
Conclusion
Woody Guthrie's impact on American music and culture is immeasurable. His legacy continues to inspire new generations of musicians and artists, ensuring his music remains relevant long after his passing. Despite not having a documented net worth in 2025, his influence and contributions to folk music are invaluable.
