ABSTRACT
Among the many images that we have of Woody Guthrie, the image of him being a hobo,2 a ‘ramblin’ man’ who constantly roams the country without finding a place where he really feels ‘at home’, seems to be particularly prominent. To be sure, this image may well be a result of Guthrie’s way of life, which was indeed characterized by rootlessness and restlessness. ‘Guthrie was restless, always restless’, insisted his first wife Mary, pointing out that Woody ‘was not one to do the same thing over and over. He was not an eight-to-five man, no way in the world’.3 Guthrie travelled, ‘stomp[ing] the railroad tracks, to swap songs with the men huddled in hobo jungles or listen to stories about a fearsome railroad detective known as East Texas Red’,4 biographer Ed Cray notes, describing Guthrie’s spontaneous decisions to leave his family and to ‘hit the road’ again and again to gather raw material that he would later rearrange in songs, stories or as cartoons.
