‘Alice’s Restaurant’: America’s best and only Thanksgiving song
In America, Thanksgiving serves as the official launch of the holiday season. It’s a day dedicated primarily to food—essentially the world’s largest Sunday roast—with a side helping of American football, marching band parades, and uncomfortable political conversations with visiting aunts and uncles. Some might call it a trial run for Christmas, just without the gifts or the traditional songs—save, perhaps, for one.
For over 50 years now, hundreds of radio stations across the US have made a point of playing Arlo Guthrie’s unlikely 1967 hit ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ on Thanksgiving Day, usually around noon when people are typically en route to the home of their designated turkey carver. Clocking in at 18 minutes and 34 seconds, the song can last the entirety of that journey for some families, making it quite the memorable soundtrack to a holiday otherwise pretty scant on original anthems.
Aside from some acoustic guitar plucking throughout, ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ (which is officially titled ‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacree’ but is rarely addressed as such) is essentially a spoken-word comedy monologue book-ended by a sing-along chorus: “You can get anything you want / at Alice’s Restaurant.” It was written by Guthrie—son of the folk legend Woody Guthrie—when he was just 19 years old and recounts an exaggerated version of a real experience he’d had in 1965 on a Thanksgiving weekend in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
“Now it all started a-two Thanksgivings ago, was on two years ago on Thanksgiving,” Guthrie explains in a blended drawl of his dad and Dylan, “When my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the restaurant. But Alice doesn’t live in the restaurant, she lives in the church nearby the restaurant, in the belltower, with her husband Ray and Fasha the dog. And living in the belltower like that, they got a lot of room downstairs where the pews used to be in, an’ having all that room, seeing as how they took out all the pews, they decided that they didn’t have to take out their garbage for a long time.”
From here, Guthrie weaves together the story of how he and his buddy—having decided to help their friends by taking that garbage to the “city dump”—were instead arrested for littering (the dump was closed on Thanksgiving). The embarrassing episode takes on much greater meaning in the third act of the song, however, as Guthrie—now under review to be drafted into the army during the Vietnam War—is questioned about his criminal record.
“You want to know if I’m moral enough to join the army,” Guthrie says, “to burn women, kids, houses and villages—after being a litterbug?” The backdoor social commentary and anti-war message of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ is part of what made it a hit in the late 1960s (even inspiring a 1969 film of the same name), but it also makes it all the more unusual that the song carried on as a “holiday tradition”, considering that Guthrie’s ultimate message was one of rebellion; instructing anyone in his audience who finds themselves in “a similar situation” to go into their meeting with the draft board and sing the ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ chorus to get out of service.
On Thanksgiving day in 2024, ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ will have an extra bit of meaning to it, as the Alice who partially inspired it—the former restaurant owner and Thanksgiving host Alice Brock—passed away on November 21st, 2024, at the age of 83.
“This coming Thanksgiving will be the first without her,” Guthrie wrote on Facebook after hearing the news. “Alice and I spoke by phone a couple of weeks ago, and she sounded like her old self. We joked around and had a couple of good laughs even though we knew we’d never have another chance to talk together.”
