ABSTRACT
Woody Guthrie wrote his 400-plus songs for children in 1940s New York. Modernism, experimental creative pedagogy and progressive socialist politics were symptomatic of a wider sense of post-war growth that fuelled budgets for the arts and education. The urban folk music of Guthrie combined the prosaic machinations of community and family life with profound universal themes. The songs document prosaic domestic activity and reveal progressive philosophies of childhood, the family, parenting, education, Jewish culture and left-wing politics. Guthrie often included his children and wife in the song writing process. His use of the child as a creative collaborator and frequent use of child-centred themes recognise and celebrate the child’s agency.
Guthrie’s prodigious output of songs for children coincided with a boom in the market for children’s recordings. Yet despite Guthrie’s status as a protest singer, novelist and documenter of working-class oppression, many of the albums, song books and other projects that he pitched to record companies, publishers and film producers remained unreleased during his lifetime, some to this day. Guthrie wrote and recorded the majority of his songs for children while he had Huntington’s disease. The developing physical and neurological condition shaped the childhood he depicts in his songs.
