Woody Guthrie at 100: the return of a pariah

Woody Guthrie was shunned by his home state. Now Oklahoma can finally embrace the singer-songwriter's work

By Billy Bragg

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/12/woody-guthrie-return-of-pariah

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It was Woody's words that prompted the young Robert Zimmerman to leave his home in the Iron Range of Minnesota and head for New York. Changing his name to Bob Dylan and singing as if he came from the red dirt of Oklahoma, he inspired a generation of articulate young Americans to unleash a torrent of criticism against the complacency of their unequal society. The fact that Woody was a hero to that generation of long-haired freaks ensured that he and his songs would remain largely unsung in Oklahoma.

Yet perceptions change. In the 1990s Woody's daughter, Nora Guthrie, began a labour of love, gathering up all her father's papers and creating the Woody Guthrie Archive in New York City. The man who emerged from the countless boxes of songs, prose and drawings was a much more complex figure than the Dust Bowl balladeer of legend.

Woody was afflicted by Huntington's disease, an incurable degenerative disorder of the nervous system that gradually incapacitates, leading inexorably to death. The years after the second world war are generally held to have marked Woody's decline into ill health, but the archive suggests otherwise. Perhaps aware that he was succumbing to the same illness that had killed his mother, Woody upped his already prodigious output, writing three or four songs a day in the house on Mermaid Avenue, in Brooklyn, where he lived with his wife, Marjorie, and three kids.

He wrote songs about riding in a flying saucer, about making love to film star Ingrid Bergman, about getting drunk and chasing women with his sailor buddies. Clearly the material in the archive – now estimated to stretch to more than 3,000 complete songs – would force us to reassess our idea of who Woody Guthrie was.

Fitting then, as we gather here to celebrate his centenary, that news should come that the Woody Guthrie Archive is relocating to a purpose-built facility in downtown Tulsa. Bringing Woody home is a gamble, but Nora Guthrie knows that Oklahoma needs to rediscover her father's work, now more than ever. Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger sang Woody's most famous song, This Land is Your Land, at Obama's inauguration – but Oklahoma is the only state in the union that failed to return a single district in favour of America's first African-American president.

In the pantheon of American poets, Woody belongs midway between Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan, but it is his roots in Oklahoma that give his work an authentic voice, ringing out from the dusty midwestern plains: a welcome antidote to the easy jibe that, if you're poor and white in this part of the world, you're bound to be a redneck.