ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. The American singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie was born 100 years ago this coming Saturday, July 14th. To call Guthrie prolific would be a real understatement. He wrote thousands of songs, including "This Land is Your Land," and his legacy and influence remain strong nearly 45 years after his death.
Bradley Klein explores the enduring spirit of Guthrie's work.
BRADLEY KLEIN, BYLINE: Woodrow Wilson Guthrie grew up rough and poor and wild in a family scarred by tragedy. His older sister died in a fire when he was six. His mother was eventually committed to a mental hospital, where she died when Woody was 18. And, by then, the Guthrie's native Oklahoma was reeling from the one-two punch of the Great Depression followed by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the westward migration it spawned.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I AIN'T GOT NO HOME")
JOE KLEIN: The farther we get away from Woody's birth and Woody's death and take a look at his influence, it helps us learn a little bit more about ourselves as Americans.
KLEIN: Joe Klein is a journalist for Time magazine and the author of the political novel, "Primary Colors." He also wrote a 1980 biography of Woody Guthrie.
KLEIN: There's a wild ass quality to this country that he personified. And, you know, when I go around the country now, the greatest fear is that we're losing that. We're losing our creativity. We're losing our individualism. Woody was an individual, a militantly individual individual.
KLEIN: Guthrie blew out of Oklahoma on the winds of the Dust Bowl, along with hundreds of thousands of displaced Americans. He was in his 20s when he landed in the California farmlands, but another Guthrie biographer, Elizabeth Partridge, says Woody just didn't have a knack for farm work.
ELIZABETH PARTRIDGE: Woody was not a physical worker, so he was not out in those fields picking like everybody else in California, but he was the first one to show up and have his guitar and lead a cotton strike. If he could be there doing the music, he was happy.
KLEIN: So Guthrie found his place in the world as a troubadour supporting farm workers and union movements. He was too independent to be a card carrying communist, but his sympathies were always with the poor and the powerless. His politics veered far to the left.
PARTRIDGE: But, you know, society was also gaining such a strong leftist position because there were so many people in his same shoes.
KLEIN: Guthrie's songs connected with those people and he headed east to make his first recordings at the advent of World War II. By 1943, he'd written an autobiography that led the New York Times to call Guthrie a national treasure, but Guthrie's politics stayed far to the left, even as the political climate shifted during the Cold War.
He wound up playing to small audiences, for the most part, like this one in a rare concert recording from 1949 with his second wife, Marjorie.
MARJORIE GUTHRIE: What did happen in the Dust Bowl area that made you want to sit down and write all the songs that you did about the Dust Bowl?
: Sort of like to write about wherever I happened to be. I just happened to be in the Dust Bowl. I mean, it wasn't something I particularly wanted or (unintelligible), but since I was there and the dust was there, I thought, well, I'll write a song about it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TALKING DUST BOWL BLUES")
KLEIN: As the 1950s turned to the '60s, interest in folk music picked up and Guthrie's politics resonated once again. Bob Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Pete Seeger championed his songs, introducing him to a new generation. But, by then, Guthrie's health was failing as a result of Huntington's disease, a neurological disorder he inherited from his mother.
Woody Guthrie died on October 3rd, 1967, but that's not the end of his story.
NORA GUTHRIE: So let's go into the archives, first of all.
KLEIN: Guthrie's daughter, Nora, has largely written the latest chapter. She runs the Woody Guthrie Foundation and she leads me into a nondescript room filled with her father's artistic legacy. It's hard to exaggerate the sheer volume of his output. Many thousands of pages of drawings, paintings, writings and lyrics fill floor-to-ceiling shelves. Guthrie seemed to have written about every place he ever went to and every person he ever met.
GUTHRIE: He loved writing. He loved - as my mother would say, he loved the feeling of a pen on paper, just that visceral experience. He loved that. It was his energy coming out of his fingertips.
KLEIN: Nora Guthrie has opened this archive not only to researchers and biographers, but also to musicians like Jeff Tweedy of the band Wilco. He came here and held the battered journal that contains Woody's handwritten lyrics to "This Land is Your Land."
JEFF TWEEDY: I remember it feeling like I was getting to hold the Declaration of Independence.
KLEIN: But most of the archive is made up of unpublished writings. They reflect the full range of Guthrie's interests.
TWEEDY: He was everything I thought he was and an enormous amount more. You know, I wasn't expecting there to be ribald songs about prostitutes or Jewish songs and that felt like the Woody Guthrie I would have liked to imagine or invent if it wasn't real.
KLEIN: Among the songs that Tweedy found in the archives and recorded was one called "California Stars."
GUTHRIE: It was on a yellow piece of paper, with a blue ballpoint - he hadn't been to California in 10 years, at least, probably already knew he had Huntington's and he wished he could go back in time, stop the progress of an illness.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CALIFORNIA STARS")
KLEIN: Tweedy says, as he sifted through the archives, he started to get a sense of the genuineness that was part of Woody's appeal in the 1930s and is still there today.
TWEEDY: There's this incredible generosity of spirit and openness to experiencing the world and experiencing the people in the world and almost a childlike embrace of whatever happens. And that's always going to be inspiring when you can find someone that has such a gift for being themselves.
KLEIN: About 300 of Woody Guthrie's unpublished song lyrics have now been set to music and recorded by a new generation, more than he recorded himself in his lifetime. And Nora Guthrie says that musicians are still finding new material.
GUTHRIE: It's been 20 years and I still haven't read all the lyrics. And just watching each of the artists turn the pages, what happens is they find themselves in Woody's lyrics. Every artist finds something different.
KLEIN: Just days ago, a researcher found a previously unknown song in the archive. That's number 3,002. For NPR News, I'm Bradley Klein.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND")
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