# Woody Guthrie **Woodrow Wilson Guthrie** (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) is the origin point of the American political-song tradition this vault tracks under [[Protest Songs in America]]. He matters here not as a musician but as the figure who established that popular song could be deliberate political infrastructure — written to organize, not to comment — and as the author of the anthem that anti-authoritarian movements still reach for nearly a century later. Born in Okemah, Oklahoma, he came of age in the [[Great Depression]] and the Dust Bowl migrations, travelling with displaced farm families to California and writing the songs that became *Dust Bowl Ballads* (1940). He served in the U.S. Merchant Marine from 1943 to 1945 — his ship the *Sea Porpoise* was torpedoed off Utah Beach on July 5, 1944 — and was drafted into the Army in 1945. He died at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens Village, New York, of complications of Huntington's disease. --- ## "This Land Is Your Land" Written in **February 1940** and first recorded in April 1944, the song was composed as a direct answer to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," which Guthrie had grown tired of hearing. Its argument is a claim of ownership: the country belongs to the people who work it, "from California to the New York islands / from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters." The verses usually taught in American schools are the pastoral ones. Guthrie also wrote verses about a wall with a "private property" sign and about standing hungry by the relief office asking whether this land was made for him. Those are the ones that get cut, and restoring them is itself a political act — at the [[Power to the People Festival (October 2026)]], held on the anniversary of Guthrie's death, [[Tom Morello]] sang the relief-office verse before the full cast closed the show with the anthem. --- ## "This Machine Kills Fascists" Guthrie stencilled the phrase on his guitars. He took it from World War II machinists and defense workers who stuck the same slogan on their heavy equipment to mark their stake in the war effort; Guthrie's claim was that a song could do the work a lathe or a rifle did. The phrase is now the most quoted formulation of the idea that culture is a front in the fight against authoritarianism, and it is why this page sits in the [[Artists]] ecosystem rather than only in a music subject folder. --- ## Lineage Guthrie's direct line runs through Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers to the 1960s folk revival, to Bob Dylan — who sought him out at his hospital bedside — and forward to [[Bruce Springsteen]], who has treated the Guthrie catalogue as a working text rather than a historical one. "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)," Guthrie's 1948 lyric about Mexican farm workers killed in a plane crash and buried unnamed, is the piece of his catalogue that has had the most 2020s afterlife, for reasons the vault's immigration-enforcement pages make obvious. See [[ICE Minneapolis Killings]]. --- ## See Also - [[Protest Songs in America]] · [[Music in Politics Hub]] · [[Artists]] · [[Artists vs. Trump]] - [[Tom Morello]] · [[Bruce Springsteen]] - [[Power to the People Festival (October 2026)]] · [[Great Depression]] · [[Labor Movement]]