Singer, Social Reformer. Best-known songs include ??The Land Is Your Land,? ??Pastures of Plenty,? ??1913 Massacre,? ??Union Maid,? and ??So Long, It??s Been Good To Know You.? Guthrie grew up in Okemah, an Oklahoma oil-boom town. His experiences there gave him a keen insight into human nature and provided observations that would find their way into his songs. But so would family tragedies: the death of his sister Clara in a fire, his mother??s mental deterioration and eventual institutionalization, financial ruin in the wake of the inevitable oil-boom bust. Guthrie left Oklahoma for Texas, where he first started getting musical gigs with the Corn Cob Trio. He also married and had three children. But hard times followed Guthrie in Texas, and when the Great Dust Storm hit in 1935, he left wife and family and headed to California with the other Dust Bowl refugees, spending two years hitchhiking and riding the rails with other hobos. The prejudice he encountered against him and his fellow unfortunates solidified the themes in his songwriting in songs like ??I Ain't Got No Home,? ??Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad,? ??Talking Dust Bowl Blues,? ??Tom Joad,? ??Plane Wreck at Los Gatos,? and ??Hard Travelin'.? A two-year radio stint on KFVD, Los Angeles, and XELO (just over the border in Mexico), honed his folksy, poetic, Will Rogers-ish, but still passionate and biting style of social commentary. He married Marjorie Mazia, a dancer with the Martha Graham company, in 1945 (four children: Cathy [died young], Arlo, Joady, and Nora) and settled in Coney Island. His health slowly began to deteriorate, with wild mood swings, unpredictable behavior, and gradual loss of motor control, with diagnoses ranging from alcoholism to schizophrenia. Later it was correctly diagnosed as Huntington??s Disease (now called Huntington??s Chorea) a degenerative nerve disorder that he had inherited from his mother. Guthrie was in and out of hospitals for the last thirteen years of his life. His legacy lives through his son Arlo but also other singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
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Originally Posted by Finnegan
