On this day · 79 years ago · 1947
79 Years Ago Today: Folk Singer Arlo Guthrie Is Born
Woody Guthrie's son turned an 18-minute story about a littering arrest into a Thanksgiving standard, a movie, and a career built on the family trade: telling the truth slowly, with a guitar in hand.
By Tommi, Acoustic desk · Edited by Cadence ·
Folk singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie was born July 10, 1947, in Brooklyn, the son of Woody Guthrie and dancer Marjorie Mazia. He's best known for 'Alice's Restaurant Massacree,' an 18-minute talking blues song from 1967 about a littering arrest that kept him out of the Vietnam War draft, later adapted into a 1969 film he starred in. Guthrie played Woodstock that same August and reached the pop chart in 1972 with 'City of New Orleans.'
Born into folk music's first family
Per Encyclopaedia Britannica's biography of Arlo Guthrie, he was born July 10, 1947, in Brooklyn, New York, the second of four children of folk singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie and Marjorie Mazia, a professional dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. His parents separated and divorced in the early 1950s, after Huntington's disease, the incurable neurological disorder that would later kill Woody, began altering his behavior. Arlo graduated high school in Stockbridge, Massachusetts in 1965 and briefly attended college in Billings, Montana that same year before returning east to pursue music.
The 18-minute song that beat the draft
Guthrie's defining work arrived in 1967: "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," an 18-minute talking blues song built on a mostly true story. Guthrie was arrested for littering after a Thanksgiving dinner at a friend's home, and the resulting criminal record, absurdly, made him ineligible for the Vietnam War draft. The song turned that bureaucratic accident into a satirical anthem of the 1960s counterculture and, decades later, a Thanksgiving radio staple. Two years after its release, the story's evocation of the era was captured on film in Alice's Restaurant, a 1969 adaptation directed by Arthur Penn with Guthrie starring as himself.
From the screen to Woodstock
That same August, Guthrie was a featured performer at the Woodstock festival in Bethel, New York, cementing his place among the era's defining folk voices alongside Pete Seeger and other left-leaning artists his father had run with a generation earlier. His songwriting followed Woody's template closely: stories about ordinary people, social injustice, and populist ideals of peace and love, delivered in Arlo's own looser, funnier, more conversational style.
A career measured in stories, not just hits
Guthrie's biggest chart moment came in 1972 with "The City of New Orleans," which reached number 18 on the US pop chart and became one of his signature tunes. Decades later, in 1991, he founded the Guthrie Center, a charitable institution in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, at the site of the church where Alice Brock, the real Alice of "Alice's Restaurant," once lived. It's a fitting second act for a career that turned a small-town arrest into a lasting piece of American folk storytelling.
Chasing that folk fingerstyle tone today
Guthrie's own current string gauge isn't documented closely enough on our catalog to cite as fact. But a phosphor bronze light set remains a reliable, warm-sounding modern starting point for the strumming and fingerpicking that carries most folk and singer-songwriter material.
SP Phosphor Bronze Light (.012–.054)
Why this one: A warm, well-balanced phosphor bronze set suited to folk strumming and fingerstyle playing, offered as a general starting point rather than a documented claim about Arlo Guthrie's own gauge.
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