Woody Guthrie
Okemah, OK
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Woody Guthrie's 1940 song "This Land Is Your Land," written partly as a critical response to what he considered the uncritical patriotism of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," became one of the most widely known American folk songs ever written, often taught to schoolchildren without full awareness of its original, more pointed social commentary verses. His Dust Bowl-era ballads, chronicling the struggles of migrant farmworkers displaced by the 1930s drought and Great Depression, established Guthrie as folk music's most significant chronicler of working-class American hardship, and his guitar famously bore the handwritten inscription "This machine kills fascists." Guthrie's direct mentorship of a young Bob Dylan, who traveled to visit the older folk singer in the hospital during Guthrie's long decline from Huntington's disease, gave Guthrie a direct generational link to the 1960s folk revival that built substantially on his earlier work. His combination of genuinely foundational American folk songwriting and his explicit political and social consciousness established Guthrie as the single most influential figure in American folk music's development, and his influence remains foundational to virtually every subsequent generation of American singer-songwriters.
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- Top 6 Americana/Folk Artists of All Time
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