ABSTRACT
Woody Guthrie is today known as America’s pioneering modern folk singer, popularizing a genre of music in the 1930s and 1940s which had previously been limited in range to the Appalachian Mountains, and to pockets of traditional musicians, usually families or workmates, in the American South, the former frontier and the old fishing communities of the Northeast. By performing traditional songs as well as those of his own composition on radio stations in Los Angeles and New York (including nationwide broadcasts for CBS), and at political rallies, union meetings and the urban nightclub scene, Guthrie was also a major factor in transforming American folk music into an urban phenomenon, and one immediately taken up by middle-class musicians such as Pete Seeger and by later folk revivalists such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs.2 As well as being a prolific songwriter, however, Guthrie also contributed articles to the local and national press, wrote several books, and wrote copious quantities of letters, diaries and notebooks directed at others in the music industry, his wives and his children. Through a reading of Guthrie’s lyrics and prose, it is possible to identify two social visions: a conservative one espousing the virtues of independent
small-hold farming and the traditional family, in which traditional gender roles remain unchallenged; and a radical one espousing politicized labour unions, largescale government projects, anti-racism, women’s rights and internationalism.
