Be.

I've been having some hard travel and I thought, you know, I've been I have some hard traveling way down the road.

I've been having some hard traveling, hard round and hard gambling.

I've been having some hard travel.

I've been riding.

When it comes to the genre of singer songwriters, as a genre of people who, write personal songs with a bit of social edge, all roads lead to Woody Guthrie.

I lived in a place called Old Whiskey, and I had a little girl in Hollywood.

Too often you have to see Woody Guthrie first and foremost as a lyrical pile.

It's plain to see.

Ain't nobody that can sing like me.

The think, that Woody Guthrie left behind, to me, was a sense of the poetry of ordinary lives, the way he wrote, you know, those lines, they're like, just steel rails, diamond deserts.

It's the words, it's the images.

It's beautiful.

How really revolutionary voices can slip into the song of, of, a mainstream society.

But it can sing like me.

Ain't nobody that can sing like me.

He was born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie in the summer of 1912, named for the man who would soon become president, the third child of Charlie and Nora Guthrie would be known from his first days to his last as simply Woody.

There was a big high wall there.

Woody, was a creative person.

I tell people in Oklahoma that he was Oklahoma's most creative son.

Without doubt, this land was made for you and me, 35 years after his death, and 60 years after some of his most powerful songs were written.

Singers still sing.

This land was made for you and me.

And.

I think in his death he saw idealism.

But it was realistic also.

It was.

It was real eye to eye with him.

And while the whole visual element wasn't fantasy, it was a dream.

A visual and may you may dream for more justice you know?

Less less oppression and less racism less hatred you, dude.

Oh, that shit is better than sister.

Stop.

I get a little.

I. Love.

One of the things I love about Woody’s work is that he gave voices to the people who didn't have a voice or, you know, names to people who aren’t even given names certain.

Every year, a dozen or so musicians come to the blue door near downtown Oklahoma City to sing Woody's praises, and his song.

Is you go out There to listen to everyone is Woody's sister Mary Jo a living link to the legend.

That you make to this kid who will save all your money to Labor Day.

He always wanted to listen to you.

What do you.

How are you today?

What are you doing today?

You know, what do you like?

Everybody should have a brother.

Like, Woody.

Know, the moment is where I was born.

But many of my life has turned many lives.

And I have learned.

And I feel like, you know, the of your.

belong.

Look, here he is again Woody Guthrie, Panthers death 28 Publication Club, 29 Glee club.

See, he sang in the glee club.

I was in the girls club at nearly 90.

Claribel Cole is among the last of Woody Guthrie's Okemah classmates.

But in the pages of the yearbook, she and Woody helped edit.

Their faces are forever young and the memories still fresh.

He said, remember me as OHS’s best student and as a friend.

The way I remember him black, curly hair, dark brown at least.

All nice looking.

He got the hair from his father, Charlie, and the good looks from his mother, Nora.

Unknown to anyone back then, Woody also inherited a genetic disorder from his mother called Huntington's Chorea.

It would lead both mother and son down a long, tragic path.

I wasn't in the class that John Steinbeck called the Okies because my dad, to start with, was worth about 35 or $40,000, and he had everything hunky dory.

My mother was the first lady driver.

Bob owned the first car.

They may well have been the richest family in Okfuskee County.

Then he started having a little bad luck.

In fact, our whole family had a little bit of it.

I don't know whether it's worth talking about or not.

I never do talk that much.

But then, my dad built a six room house, cost him about 7 or $8000.

And the day after he got the house built and burned down, it was right after that my, 14 year old sister either set herself a fire, or caused a fire accidentally.

That's two different stories.

Got out about it in a way.

She was doing some ironing on the old kerosene stove.

Was highly unsafe caught her a fire, and she run around the house about twice before anybody could catch her.

And the book bound for glory.

Woody tells that they came and got him because Clara had been burned, and he goes in and she called him.

Woodley they said Mr.

Woodley, don't cry.

Don't you ever cry.

Don't be like mama, papa and others.

And don't cry no matter what.

And Woody said, I'll not.

And then he emphasizes, I didn't.

Next day she died.

Her schoolteacher was there and said, Clara said, I missed class today, but the schoolteacher said, yes, but you're never absent and you're never tardy.

And Clara lying there dying from burns.

Do you think I'll pass?

And Mrs.

Thompson said, yes, you'll pass.

And Woody said, I saw my sister’s head fall to the side.

And, Mrs.

Thompson took her eye, fingers, and closed her eyes and said, yes, you will pass.

As a little kid, seeing that And my mother had lost a little bit too much for her.

Nurse or something.

I don't know exactly how it was, but anyway, my mother died in the insane asylum at Norman, Oklahoma.

Still just a teenager.

The last time Woody saw his mother, she didn't even know who he was.

I've been having some hard and I thought, you know, the Dallas kids had scattered out, and they adopted the different families.

I lived with the family, people.

There was 11 of us lived in a little two room shack.

You know how that is?

Well, he lived out of the back alleys.

He picked up scrap iron, he shined shoes.

And as he says, he cleaned spittoons, he sold newspapers.

And he lived with different families down in.

And after that, I don't know, I hit the highway to be what's called a ramblin man.

At that time, I was about 17 years old, a for, at Tennessee.

And they haven't been there for.

I will be the death of me.

Lord knows I will be the in and bar in Oklahoma somewhere in the Arkansas line that Tulsa singer Bob Jamison writes and sings the same sort of songs he grew up listening to.

It's the same music he's passing on to his daughter, Kelsey, each note solidly grounded in the familiar red dirt of home.

Like I say, when I grew up in the 60s, it, when we went to music class, most of the music we’d play was Woody Guthrie stuff, big Bob Dylan fan from way back.

And Dylan is heavily influenced by Woody Guthrie.

Hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song.

I had a funny old world that's come in a long.

For folk singers, whether Bob Dylan or Bob Jamison, the honesty of Woody Guthrie's lyrics as valid today as decades ago, when he wrote them, and most of what Woody saw and wrote about in those days was hard and sad.

Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know, and dusty, none of it was pretty all the things, but every bit it was true.

They just said, well, and this is the end.

This is the end of the world.

People ain't been living right.

Human race ain't been treating each other right and rubbing each other in different ways.

With fountain pens, guns, having war and killing each other and shooting around so time had come on.

The river was there to cross, and everybody said, well, so long it's been good to know.

You better come.

So long it's been good to know you.

So long been good to know you.

So long.

It's been good to know you.

This dusty old dusty is blowing me home.

I've got to be rolling a long play.

Hated to give up.

Thought they'd work there for for 50 years.

Been born and raised on and had their kids on and play all the bankers when they couldn't pay them.

Well, naturally, they come down for the mortgage, took their land.

So they bundled up their little belongings.

They couldn't take it all because they didn't have room and they didn't have money.

But anyway, they had heard about the land of California.

For so long, it's been good to know you so long.

Been good to know you.

So long it's been good to know you.

This dusty old dusty.

The rolling me home.

Got to be driftin.

No.

To the now.

Oh, I have no idea how long it's been gone I am a long time.

And five and one and God, we have been a long.

In some mighty hard road.

And my poor hand is home.

My poor fetus traveled a hard, dusty road in California.

Woody and the others found prosperity.

It stared at them from the other side of a fence.

Poverty plagued the chanty towns that sprang up near the vegetable fields and the fruit orchards.

It was fertile ground for woody songwriting, he wrote.

Against poverty.

He wrote against greed.

He wrote against people who loved to push others down and take advantage of them.

Woody wasn’t that way.

He defended the every day working person, slept on the ground in the light of your moon, folks, we got a real treat for you tonight.

We got an old boy from Oklahoma who not only sing songs, he writes them.

And his name is Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, but we just call him Woody California.

He became a star on a Los Angeles radio station, events that sprang to life, and MGM's Oscar winning film, bound for glory.

I'd like to dedicate a song tonight to all you folks sitting out there and them fruit picking camps, green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground, from that grand.

The people who'd come to California had found job opportunities slim and wages even slimmer.

Woody felt an entire country had turned its back.

When there ain't nobody going to get any damn jobs until you start to listen to us, you're nothing but a bunch of commies around you.

Sit down.

He started organizing for unions to give working people a voice.

Your right.

Oh, you can't hear me out.

And look at me here.

I'll make you you a new union.

Oh, you can't scare me up.

By the time he hopped a train out of California and hobo his way back east to New York, he began thinking America's style of government needed to change.

You know, I think politics, Woody Guthrie, a lot of times get in the way of the message of Woody Guthrie, and the message was to love each other and take care of each other.

That can be called populism.

That could be called socialism, whatever you want to call it.

It's the politics of love.

And that's what Woody Guthrie was about to me, John Henry, when he was a baby and man on his land.

Picked up a hammer in the right hand, and you can see at least having been there for.

He wasn’t a communist as such Now, here's Woody items, This is how Woody would do things through his research, which fills filing cabinets and covers walls in his home.

He would sell these for a quarter each in the streets in New York City.

Historian Guy Logsdon knows Woody Guthrie better than anyone.

He loved his hometown of Okemah.

He loved it dearly He loved his state, home state of Oklahoma, and he loved the United States.

He never wrote anything bad against any of this.

Land was made for you and me.

But the rumors would persist.

And in later years, the label would stick.

And Woody Guthrie was a man who fought fascists with his guitar and stood up for the rights of all would be blacklisted, even in his home town.

This land was made for you and me.

For this land is your land, and this land is my land.

From California for the New York island, the redwood forest.

I'm sad.

Sorry.

You know this.

Woody's youngest sister, Mary Jo, keeps a suitcase of treasure very deep in a whole closet.

This was a evidently a program.

From there.

There are no diamonds or gold inside.

Just paper and vinyl.

Priceless memories of a brother too seldom seen.

Let me see.

These are the original records that Woody sent me way back yonder.

And they're probably written in here.

Yeah, right there to Mary Jo Hugh and family, 1945.

As a better world to come in.

And, Lou, why, why, why there's a better world to come in.

And you why by then, times were good for Woody.

He had become a bestselling author.

There's a better world to come around.

Tell you why.

His songs were everywhere on the radio.

The world is to come and he his second wife, Marjorie.

And their daughter, Kathy lived a comfortable life on Mermaid Avenue on Coney Island.

Take me riding in the car.

Take me riding in the car.

Take you.

Run!

I'm a car girl.

Take you a new car.

Woody wrote songs for and about his little girl.

He called her Stack of bones.

They were inseparable.

Like plank opened up a door.

Girls click like open up a door, boys.

Front door, back door, clickety clack.

Then one day in 1947, Mary Jo got a letter.

Woody's letters.

It was.

It was just unbelievable.

Kathy had been critically burned at home when a spark from a short circuiting radio caught a new party dress she was wearing on fire when he told his sister the little girl had tried to sing her favorite songs right up until she died that next day.

It was Clara all over again.

He wrote the letters about his little girl cheering us up and telling us not to cry and not to grieve and not to worry.

But his heart was forever broken.

He would have three more children with Marjorie, Arlo, Jody, and Nora.

Their childhoods with their father would be much different than Kathy's.

By 52, Huntington's was moving.

And amazingly, even with Woody's family history, doctors thought his drinking was driving him insane.

They urged Marjorie to divorce him for the safety of the children, but she realized the same genetic thief that had stolen the mind.

And then the life of Woody's mother was doing the same.

Now to him, though, Woody would spend most of the last 15 years of his life in hospitals, his days of hard traveling were far from over.

His mind wandered and his body twitched and began to fail.

He wrote me letters and his you know, I would cry.

I would get his letters.

And he always said, you know, his writing was so precise.

You've read a lot of stuff.

He wrote, and I'd get his letters, and that was our main thing.

And finally, the last I would get a letter and I would have to work a week to translate, it would leave you weary.

Hobo.

Let the term read slowly but 20 years ago, and a film he made about his father, Arlo Guthrie, a star by then himself, and folk legend Pete Seeger dedicated Hobo's Lullaby to the man who wrote the lullaby.

To nothing but my room.

Carol Leventhal, Woody’s longtime manager, told the audience about the last days of a legend.

I would go out there from time to time to kind of bring them up to date of what's happening about his songs and the material, bring him my guitar and take it back, because he couldn't handle it.

Told me to bring him a typewriter, I’d bring him a typewriter.

Next visit, I'd have to take it back because he couldn't handle it.

You find peace and rest some days.

Go to feed you, weary you.

At the end, Woody could only communicate with his eyes, blinking once for yes and twice for no.

He died on October 3rd, 1967.

Oh my.

Man said by my side.

If you love me.

Do not make fun to build me of you.

Just remember that Red River valley and the cowboy that love you.

So true.

Woody Guthrie's music.

His legacy lives in the hearts and minds of everyone who sings a song.

And every one who listens.

He was the heart and soul and the voice of us all.

Of America.

Sometimes I think I'm gonna lose my mind.

And love like I ever do.

You can't help but feel that he knew he wasn't making any money when he wrote that song from living, as a musician, and he probably knew he was dying.

That's the key to the singer songwriter as a genre, the urge to express something.

However difficult, to look for is very personal in yourself.

It's just chilling to have those lyrics you need to sing dad or, But anyway, I don't know, I might go down or up or anyway.

But I feel like this scribbling will stay.

Feel like this scribbling will stay there?

We were reaching back to Woody, saying, yeah, it will stay.

It is permanent.

It does go on.

It's just really beautifully expressed sentiment.

You know don't think of me.

I hope, hopefully my words will stay around.

Hopefully the feelings I have will stay because that's what's eternal.

But as far as I go, I'm just another man done gone.

When you think of me.

Have been with you till you say, well, another man's gone, gone to say, well another man's done.

No.

Gone