Woody Guthrie

His parents named him for Woodrow Wilson, then governor of New Jersey and running for president. His father Charley held as many as 30 plots of land in Okfuskee County and stood for county office, was reportedly among the men at the 1911 lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson in Okemah, and, by Woody's own later account, joined the Klan when it revived after 1915. Fire took the family house in 1909. Fire took his sister Clara when he was seven, after she set her clothes alight during a fight with their mother. Fire nearly took his father in 1927. His mother, whose Huntington's disease had no name yet, went into the state asylum when he was 14, and he begged meals and slept where people would have him.

He married in Pampa, Texas at 20, left a wife and three children when the dust came, and went to California, where a Los Angeles station put him on the air playing hillbilly music with a partner billed as Lefty Lou. He wrote 174 columns for a communist newspaper between May 1939 and January 1940. In a New York hotel room on February 23, 1940, tired of hearing God Bless America on the radio, he wrote a sarcastic answer titled God Blessed America for Me, set to a Carter Family tune. He did not record it for four years. The Interior Department later hired him for a month to write songs about federal dams on the Columbia, and he produced 26. In 1943 he shipped out with the Merchant Marine, having painted THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS on his guitar.

His daughter Cathy died at four in an apartment fire in 1947, and he did not get over it. By the late 1940s his behavior was frightening people, and the diagnoses came back alcoholism, then schizophrenia. It was Huntington's, inherited from his mother, and nobody said so until 1952. Doctors told his second wife Marjorie to divorce him and take the children, because of the paranoia and the violence at home, and she did in 1953 and then managed his care for the rest of his life anyway. In Florida with his third wife he poured gasoline on a campfire and it went up. The arm recovered enough to move. It never played a guitar again. Anneke left, arranged for friends to adopt their daughter Lorina, and Lorina died in a car crash at 19.

He spent his last 11 years in three hospitals, Greystone Park in New Jersey, then Brooklyn State, then Creedmoor in Queens, and by 1965 he could not speak and answered by moving his eyes. A young Bob Dylan came and sat with him. He died on October 3, 1967, and his ashes went into the sea. Marjorie turned the disease that killed him into what is now the Huntington's Disease Society of America. Two of his daughters died of it at 41. His archive opened in Tulsa in 2013, 70 miles from Okemah. Among the papers was a lyric he wrote in the 1950s about the landlord of his Brooklyn housing complex, a builder named Fred Trump.

Woody Guthrie's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Woody Sez article
  174 columns for the People's World between May 1939 and January 1940 1939
• Dust Bowl Ballads album
  The record that carried the migration east 1940
• This Land Is Your Land song
  Written February 23, 1940 as God Blessed America for Me, to a Carter Family melody 1940
• Roll On, Columbia, Roll On song
  One of 26 songs written in a single month on an Interior Department contract 1941
• Pastures of Plenty song
  From the same month on the Columbia River 1941
• Bound for Glory book
  An autobiography, and a considerable act of self-invention 1943

• 1919 aged ~7 His sister Clara dies of burns at 14 She set her clothes on fire during an argument with their mother. Woody was seven.
• 1926 aged ~14 His mother is committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane Nobody yet knew the word Huntington's. He was 14 and largely on his own.
• 1933 aged ~21 Marries Mary Jennings in Pampa, Texas, at 20
• February 23, 1940 aged 27 Writes This Land Is Your Land in a New York hotel room His answer to God Bless America. He did not record it until 1944.
• May 1941 aged 28 Writes 26 Columbia River songs in one month for the Interior Department
• June 1943 aged 30 Joins the Merchant Marine with Cisco Houston and Jim Longhi His ship was torpedoed off Utah Beach on July 5, 1944.
• 1947 aged ~35 His daughter Cathy dies at four in an apartment fire
• 1952 aged ~40 Diagnosed with Huntington's disease after years of wrong answers The earlier verdicts had been alcoholism and schizophrenia.
• October 3, 1967 aged 55 Dies at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center at 55 He had been hospitalized continuously since 1956 and could not speak after 1965.

• Bob Dylan b. 1941
  Songwriter whose poetic lyrics transformed folk, rock, and the role of popular music in public life. visited him in hospital
• Bruce Springsteen b. 1949
  Songwriter whose music made working-class life, aspiration, and disappointment central themes of American rock. took up the form
• John Steinbeck 1902–1968
  Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men chronicled American hardship. friend, and wrote the same migration
• Dorothea Lange 1895–1965
  Documentary photographer whose Depression-era images defined the visual record of the 1930s. photographed what he sang
• Irving Berlin 1888–1989
  Songwriter whose vast catalog, from 'God Bless America' to Broadway standards, helped define the American popular songbook. answered his song
• César Chávez 1927–1993
  Labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the United Farm Workers union. organized the workers he sang about