The tragic reason a psychiatric hospital assumed Woody Guthrie had schizophrenia
When Billy Bragg was out on tour in 1998, playing the newly discovered Woody Guthrie songs he’d recorded with Wilco, he liked to challenge audiences to try and imagine a Hollywood movie in which the great folk balladeer Guthrie could have played a supporting character.
Most of the film buffs at Bragg’s shows were inclined to say The Grapes of Wrath, the 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s classic Dust Bowl novel. That was a logical pick, since Guthrie had become the lyrical voice of those Dust Bowl times and had even been a musical advisor on the movie. Bragg argued, however, that people were missing out on a key part of the man’s real identity if they merely saw him as the troubadour of the Great Depression.
Instead, Bragg nominated a very different film: the peppy musical On the Town, in which Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly play mischievous sailors on leave in New York City.
“That’s the New York of Woody Guthrie,” Bragg told the Indianapolis Star, “That movie was made in 1949. At that time, Woody was travelling on the subway to gigs, taking his kids to school, and writing songs”.
60 years after his death, Guthrie has morphed into a Johnny Appleseed-like American folk hero, and while he did travel with migrant workers from his native Oklahoma to California in the 1930s, it was only one facet of his life and career as a songwriter. Some of his most prolific years came after World War II, when he lived on Mermaid Avenue in Brooklyn, developing his friendships with Pete Seeger and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and building the foundation for the New York folk scene of the ‘50s and ‘60s. He was, by all accounts, a city boy as much as a cowboy, full of vibrancy and curiosity.
This made the final chapter of Guthrie’s life all the more tragic. As he’d long feared, he was soon stricken by the same muscular disease that had afflicted his mother when he was a boy. It was later diagnosed as Huntington’s disease, but as his health began to fail in the ’50s, many of his friends and family didn’t know what the problem was or how to help him. By ’56, he was briefly homeless and wandering the streets of Morristown, New Jersey, and when police picked him up, he wound up in the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, where he’d spend most of the next five years.
Unrecognisable to the staff at Graystone, Guthrie explained that he’d written countless popular songs and a best-selling book, but this only led his carers to briefly surmise that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. It didn’t seem possible that someone in Guthrie’s state, at the age of 44, could have been a celebrated national figure in the recent past.
That confusion was soon cleared up, of course, and Guthrie’s stay at Graystone would eventually include regular visits from Seeger, Phil Ochs, and other admirers. He also started spending most weekends outside of the hospital at the home of Bob and Sidsel Gleason in East Orange, New Jersey, which is where a baby-faced Bob Dylan met his hero in January of 1961.
Guthrie, on that fabled occasion, was said to have passed Dylan a note, as it was getting hard for him to speak, which said, “I ain’t dead yet”.
