How many songs did Woody Guthrie write?
One of the towering influences on contemporary American folk, despite enjoying little adulation during his lifetime, his legacy is showered with retrospectively, singer-songwriter and travelling bard Woody Guthrie scored country and talking blues protest songs championing socialism, workers’ rights, and documenting the plight of the everyman during the New Deal era and the Dust Bowl’s devastation of the country’s vast prairies.
Born in 1912 in Oklahoma’s early oil boom town Okemah, Guthrie grew up at the centre of the Native American Muscogee-Creek Nation and a large black township in nearby Boley. Known as a ‘Sundown Town’, a reference to the many signs across the area warning black folk to leave the area before sunset, Guthrie witnessed firsthand the discrimination that formed part of Okemah’s social mores, later alleging his conservative Democrat father Charles was involved in the ’11 lynching of Laura and LD Nelson, and later a keen member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Whatever degree of internal disentangling Guthrie undertook from the flagrant racism so enmeshed in his formative environment, a path toward Civil Rights support and loathing for fascism, both domestic and international, soon defined his worldview and emancipatory lyricism. As the Dust Bowl crisis struck rural America, Guthrie joined the Westward exodus of fellow ‘Okies’ after a spell in Texas to the shining hinterland of California and, by the end of the ’30s, hosted The Woody and Lefty Lou Show on Los Angeles’ KFVD radio with hillbilly artist Maxine ‘Lefty Lou’ Crissman, taking full advantage of his broadcast platform to perform songs aimed for the working-class experience of the Great Depression.
It was through the newfound attention of the radio show and his working men folk songs that he attracted the city’s socialist circles, eventually embracing communism despite a lack of card membership of the Communist Party USA. He wrote regular columns for the communist People’s World magazine and reportedly expressed admiration for Joseph Stalin’s leadership of the USSR and hoped for Kim Il-sung’s victory in the Korean War. “Left wing, right wing, chicken wing… it don’t make no difference to me,” Guthrie supposedly quipped when pressed on his communist commitments. Despite such glib evasions, his red reputation kept him firmly on the FBI’s watchlist, and he was ultimately booted off his radio show in ’39.
It was after he arrived in New York in ’40 that he reached a career-high, recording his seminal Dust Bowl Ballads LP and writing the immortal rebuke against ‘God Bless America’s sanitised patriotic fantasy with ‘This Land Is Your Land’, a populist anthem promoting the American Dream as an ideal fit for everybody regardless of class or creed. It was also the period of prolific writing intensity, penning thousands of prose and poems, crafting songs for the Popular Front left-folk ensemble Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger, and even his semi-fictitious autobiography Bound for Glory.
So, how many songs did Guthrie write?
According to the Woody Guthrie Center, he wrote over 3,000 songs, albeit many never recorded. His voluminous body of work was sketched across over 100 notebooks, correspondence papers, and various documentation all collated at the centre’s archive, illustrating the singer’s lifelong dedication to left-activism, anti-capitalism, and fighting political oppression.
Following his wartime duties as a drafted Merchant Marine, the Huntington’s disease that claimed his mother as a teen soon reared its head and plagued the remainder of his life, dying bedridden and unable to move to a New York psychiatric centre in ’67. One of his last notable works was ’54’s ‘Old Man Trump’, an excoriating attack on US President Donald Trump’s multi-millionaire father, Fred, for his racist real estate practices in Brooklyn’s Beach Haven apartments, refusing tenancy to people of colour in adherence with the Federal Housing Agency’s “inharmonious uses of housing” policy, a euphemistic practice of ensuring white only residentials.
Disgusted and moving out as soon as he could, Guthrie’s fierce class analysis and unerring social justice saw which way the wind was blowing with the real estate mogul dynasty and their discriminatory extraction of wealth. As the global right pursues its oppressive agenda with an emboldened full-chest in the political contemporary, Guthrie’s humble but powerful folk humanism praising collective solidarity, universal empathy, and the tearing down of capital’s ruthless stranglehold still echoes with stark pertinence.
