The life and times of Woody Guthrie – the world’s first punk
Emblazoned on his guitar were the words: “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS”. These days that might not be quite as impactful, it might even seem kitsch, but in 1943 it near enough made Woody Guthrie the first musical punk. He was the proverbial folk wanderer, but long before Bob Dylan came along, he was trading in traditional tales for something rather more pointedly timeless.
In fact, Dylan once said of his progenitor’s influence “Nobody played their own songs, the only person I knew who really did it was Woody Guthrie.” With his potent originality shining through and his ability to harness the world around him, as Patti Smith puts it, “a stirring and a desire to stir,” Guthrie inspired a legion of would-be musicians.
The horrors of the Second World War had instilled within generation the sense that they had to go about things differently to their forebears. However, Guthrie was ahead of the curve on this march, leading the charge in the midst of horrors in the first place. With a dogeared guitar and shoes with so many holes they would’ve failed an MOT, he simply wandered and strummed his way into the history books.
However, his legend was far from straightforward. Born in 1912 in the sleepy town of Okemah, Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, and his life was beset by problems. He claims his father joined the Ku Klux Clan, fires cost them their fortune, family members were often sent to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane, school was a struggle and trouble was rife. However, with a constant love of music and a friendship with an African-American shoeshine boy named George who taught him the blues pushing his passion even further, Guthrie figured he could busk his way towards a better life.
In 1961, when Dylan tracked Guthrie down at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains, New Jersey, only five days after arriving in New York from Minnesota himself, that trouble had seemingly returned. In the September of 1954, Guthrie had checked himself into the facility fearing he had a mental disorder as he couldn’t control his muscles. He wouldn’t check out for another two years, and when he did so in May 1956, he spent days wandering the streets of Morristown, New Jersey, in a state of homelessness.
When he was apprehended by police he spent a night in Morris County Jail, before being transferred back to Greystone at his own behest. Upon readmission, it was believed that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Staffers simply could not believe that this staggering man had published countless songs and a book to boot. It would later turn out that Guthrie was suffering from Huntington’s disease, a hereditary condition that affects the ability of a sufferer to control their movement.
Bound for Glory, Guthrie’s autobiographical tale of weaving a serpentine path through the backroads of America, leaving a trail of songs in his wake for anyone who’d listen, had inspired Dylan so much that it formed a key reason why he dropped out of the University in Minnesota. But, aside from his wayfaring ways of living life On the Road and propagating the poetry of the people, the notion of this numen with ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ scribbled on his beat-up six-string was a mental seed that later flowered into an entire generation of poet’s with prickly iconoclasm and acerbic political ways at their core. In short, Guthrie simply matter more than any other musician to many of his devout followers.
This influence largely began from a perilous place. Guthrie married for the first time aged 20 and quickly found himself the father of three. It became an epic struggle to support this young family when the Dust Bowl descended. So, like many others he fled to California in search of work. This was a fortunate move. He soon met his radio partner Lefty Lou and began playing on his show.
Even more fortunately, they wrote Dust Bowl Ballads together and the sleeve of subsequent records they pressed the following statement: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.” From the get-go, this indicated his unique iconoclasm. From then on he become beloved a sort of ‘Oklahoma cowboy’ as he was dubbed, and built up his legacy travelling the States disseminating his political messages in poetic tunes. He was now an icon—the first of a few who would follow in his footsteps… quite literally.
When Dylan finally caught up with him and set about reaffirming his status when illness had eroded his prominent place, and Guthrie’s condition had declined. He could barely move, his speech suffered good days and bad, and performing was a feat left long behind him. Fortunately, for both hero and worshipper, Dylan was a self-professed “Woody Guthrie jukebox” and if there is one thing the true original folk vagabond loved, it was hearing his own songs.
In the novel My Name is New York, Dylan recalls, “When I met him, he was not functioning with all of his facilities at 100 percent. I was there more as a servant,” he says. “I knew all of his songs, and I went there to sing him his songs. He always liked the songs.” Adding, “He’d ask for certain ones — and I knew them all!”
Thereafter, the two shared a unique bond that would last a lifetime and beyond. As though their lives were woven into place by some mystic figures of musical fate, even their respective artistic narratives are similar. When Guthrie first arrived in New York City when he was 27 years old, he wrote his most famous song within a week, ‘This Land is Your Land’. For the next 27 years, he wrote countless songs and overflowing notebooks as he voyaged through the streets of the big apple, both securing his legacy, and not seeming to give too much of a damn about it as long as his message was heard.
