On this day · 114 years ago · 1912
114 Years Ago Today: Woody Guthrie Was Born, and Gave Folk Guitar Its Conscience
Woody Guthrie turned a beat-up acoustic guitar into a protest instrument, wrote thousands of songs about the people the Dust Bowl and the Depression left behind, and never let anyone forget it: his guitar said so, in his own handwriting.
By Tommi, Acoustic Fingerstyle desk · Edited by Cadence ·
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma. The folk singer and guitarist wrote thousands of songs, including This Land Is Your Land, and became a foundational influence on American protest music, directly inspiring Bob Dylan. Guthrie famously wrote This Machine Kills Fascists on his guitar, folk music's most quoted piece of guitar graffiti. He died October 3, 1967, at age 55, from complications of Huntington's disease.
A guitar as a witness to the Dust Bowl
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, per the Woody Guthrie Center's own biography. He came of age during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, riding trains and hitchhiking across a country in economic freefall, and he turned what he saw into songs. He wrote thousands of them, country, folk, children's songs, ballads, and topical numbers dashed off almost as fast as the news happened, per Wikipedia's account of his career. His 1940 concept album Dust Bowl Ballads documented the migration he'd lived through, and Mojo magazine later named it one of the 100 Records That Changed the World.
This Machine Kills Fascists
No piece of guitar decoration in American music carries more weight than the sticker Guthrie put on his own instrument. Per Wikipedia's account, he frequently performed with the handwritten or stenciled slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists" displayed on his guitar, a direct statement that he saw songwriting itself as a tool against fascism, not just entertainment set against it. The phrase has outlived Guthrie by decades, turning up on guitars, stickers, and t-shirts across generations of protest musicians who never met him.
This Land Is Your Land, written as an answer song
Guthrie's best-known composition, "This Land Is Your Land," began as a pointed response. Per Wikipedia's account of the song, he wrote the original lyrics on February 23, 1940, after growing tired of hearing Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" on the radio, a song he felt glossed over the hardship he'd witnessed touring Dust Bowl America. The song has since become a de facto second national anthem, its original, more pointed verses about private property and breadlines largely dropped from the schoolroom version most Americans know.
The influence that runs straight to Bob Dylan
Guthrie's health began failing in the late 1940s with symptoms his doctors initially blamed on drinking. Per Wikipedia's account, he was finally diagnosed with Huntington's disease, an inherited degenerative nerve disorder, in 1954, and spent much of his final years hospitalized, first at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, then Brooklyn State Hospital, then Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, where he died on October 3, 1967, at age 55. In the early 1960s, before Guthrie lost the ability to speak, a young Bob Dylan traveled to visit him in the hospital, absorbing his talking-blues cadence and topical songwriting directly from the source before carrying it into the next generation of folk music.
Folk guitar tone for the songs Guthrie built
Guthrie played a simple, well-worn flattop and leaned on his songs and his voice more than any studio polish. A warm, balanced phosphor bronze set is the modern equivalent of that no-frills folk workhorse tone.
EJ16 Phosphor Bronze Light (.012–.053)
Why this one: A warm, no-frills phosphor bronze workhorse set built for straightforward strumming and singing, the modern equivalent of the tone Guthrie built his songs around, not a claim about his own specific gear.
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