What or who came before Woody Guthrie?
Ask a room full of music fans to pinpoint the birth of punk, and you’d better hope you’ve got a drink with a very deep bottom.
Names like Sex Pistols, the Ramones, The Stooges, The New York Dolls get thrown around as obvious choices, but then, just as the debate rolls into its third hour, someone wearing corduroy quietly chirps up to tell you that the answer is Woody Guthrie.
It’s certainly true that long before Iggy Pop was hurling himself across stages, the Ramones were stripping rock down to two-minute blasts of speed and the Sex Pistols were making Britain panic, Guthrie was already writing for ordinary people, attacking injustice without compromise, travelling with little more than a guitar, living outside the commercial music industry and treating art as a tool for resistance, including painting “This machine kills fascists” on the side of his guitar.
His influence can be heard throughout punk’s DNA, and nowhere more clearly than in Joe Strummer, who, before becoming the voice of The Clash, reportedly adopted the nickname ‘Woody’ as a nod to the American songwriter whose politics and drive fascinated him. While Guthrie’s acoustic ballads were a world away from the snarling urgency of the Clash’s ‘White Riot’, they shared the same conviction that songs should comfort the powerless and unsettle the powerful and never exist simply to fill silence.
So, given that Guthrie was punk before the genre had a name, it begs the question where his inspiration come from, and the answer lies not in a recording studio or a rock club, but (at least in part) in the meetings of the 1905 Chicago founded Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies, the radical labour union that sought to unite workers across trades, races and nationalities into what it called “One Big Union”.
Gutherie’s own politics and music owed much to the Wobblies who also understood that people remember melodies long after they’ve forgotten manifesto, something politicians often overlooked, so rather than delivering dry lectures on class struggle, they rewrote hymns and popular tunes with biting new lyrics about strikes, poverty and exploitation, collecting them in the famous Little Red Songbook.
Led by activist Joe Hill, members sang on picket lines, in union halls and even prison cells, so by the time Guthrie arrived in California during the Dust Bowl and encountered socialists, communists and the Wobblies in the late 1930s, the blueprint for his making was already in place.
The Industrial Workers of the World helped fuel Guthrie’s belief that songs could be more than entertainment, and the fact that in the hands of workers, songs could build solidarity and give ordinary people a voice, while in the hands of the powerful, they could distract, pacify and reinforce the status quo. Guthrie allegedly carried a copy of the Wobblies’ Little Red Songbook wherever he went, and you can hear that conviction running through his entire catalogue, even if history has softened its edges.
‘This Land Is Your Land’ is still widely treated as a patriotic singalong, yet Guthrie wrote it as a direct challenge to inequality, and in one of its most overlooked verses, he encounters a No Trespassing sign before shrugging that “on the other side, it didn’t say nothing”, questioning the very idea that land could belong to a privileged few. In spirit, it isn’t far removed from Rage Against the Machine snarling, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”, both certainly rejecting the idea that authority deserves obedience simply because it possesses power.
The Clash’s greatest protest songs, ‘White Riot’, ‘Clampdown’, ‘Washington Bullets’, ‘Know Your Rights’, belong to the same lineage as Guthrie and the Industrial Workers of the World’s ballads, speaking directly to working people while refusing to flatter those in power; Strummer understood what Guthrie had realised decades earlier, which is that music isn’t just something to consume but to use as weapons.
So maybe the history of punk doesn’t begin with safety pins, leather jackets or sneering vocals but with a much older belief that can be traced all the way back to the Industrial Workers of the World and beyond.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Punk Newsletter
All the latest Punk content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.