The facts of his life ~ Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie
Date of Birth
14 July 1912, Okemah, Oklahoma, USA
Date of Death
4 October 1967, Queens, New York, USA. (huntington's disease)
Birth Name
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie

IMDb Mini Biography By: Ed Stephan

Charley and Nora Guthrie named their son after the Democrat elected president that year. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie knew hard times as a youngster (his house burned down, his sister Clara burned to death, his father's small-town business and political careers never went anywhere, his mother suffered from undiagnosed Huntington's Disease and was declared insane), but he enjoyed performing (dancing, playing harmonica, writing songs) and learning (he read voraciously in the public library). In 1933 he married Mary Jennings, five years his junior, with whom he would have three children. In 1935 he joined the Oakies and Arkies driven to California by theDust Bowl. His songs went from describing the tragedy of the migrants to urging their unionization. Though he wrote a column for the Weekly People, he never joined the Communist Party. When Will Geer got a part in the play "Tobacco Road" he invited Woody to join him in New York where he met Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Leadbelly, Cisco Houston. He was commissioned to write songs for a never-completed documentary on Washington State's Grand Coulee Dam, and it was in the Pacific Northwest that his family left him. Back in New York in 1940, Woody joined Pete Seeger's Alamanc Singers and married Martha Graham dancer Marjorie Mazia. His autobiography, Bound for Glory, was published in 1943. He served in the Merchant Marine in World War II, and three ships were torpedoed from under him. In 1946 he and Marjorie's daughter, Cathy, was burned to death in an apartment fire. They had three more children: Arlo, Joady and Nora. In 1953 he married for a third time, to Anneke Van Kirk. They had a child, Lorinna Lynn Guthrie. Anneke solely raised her until her premature death (at age 19) in 1973, from a car accident in California.

In the 1950s he experienced bouts of irrational behavior and was often unable to play his guitar; his condition was ultimately diagnosed as Huntington's Disease. The rest of that decade and into the 1960s a new generation, notably including Bob Dylan, began to discover and play his music, adapting some of it to the new Civil Rights movement.


Spouse
Anneke Van Kirk (2 December 1953 - 1956) (divorced) 1 child
Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia (November 1945 - July 1953) (divorced) 4 children
Mary Jennings (28 October 1933 - 1940) (divorced) 3 children

Family

Father of Arlo Guthrie

He and Marjorie had four children. Cathy (died aged 4 in a fire) Arlo Guthrie, Joady (named for Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Nora.

His daughter, Nora, recently invited English singer/songwriter Billy Bragg to look through the family archives, especially all the thousands of song lyrics that Woody had left in his notebooks. Billy, together with American country band Wilco, put them to music and recorded them for the album Mermaid Avenue.
He was cremated and his ashes were scattered off Coney Island. The family scattered the ashes of Marjorie in the same place when she died.
Was featured in 1998 on a 32-cent U.S. postage stamp in the Legends of Folk Singers stamp series.
Elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (under the category Early Influences) in 1988.
February 22, 1954: daughter: Lorinna Lynn Guthrie, with Van Kirk.

Was Bob Dylan's idol and mentor. Dylan visited him many times in the hospital in the last years of his life, and modeled his own folk-writing style after Guthrie's. The first song Dylan ever wrote was 'Song to Woody', which appeared on his 1962 debut album.
He was portrayed by David Carradine in Bound for Glory (1976), an apparently faithful adaptation of Woody's life story.
His guitar was inscribed with the words, "This machine kills fascists."
Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.
Is portrayed by Garth Gilker in I'm Not There. (2007).