Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1912, and by the time he died in 1967 he had written hundreds of songs, country, folk, children's songs and ballads, and turned the plain folk song into a tool of conscience. In 1929, with his mother sick with Huntington's disease and institutionalized, he headed for Pampa, Texas, where his father was, and when the dust storms came he joined the Okies heading west to California. There he played hillbilly music on the Los Angeles station KFVD and fell in with Will Geer and John Steinbeck.

His politics, socialist and anti-fascist, were never hidden: his guitar carried the message "This machine kills fascists". In New York he made Dust Bowl Ballads in 1940, songs drawn from the hard times of the 1930s that earned him the name the Dust Bowl Troubadour, and that February he wrote "This Land Is Your Land", an answer to how often the radio played Irving Berlin's "God Bless America".

His voice was plain and dry and his guitar playing plainer still, and that was the point. Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg and Jeff Tweedy are among those who have named him as an influence. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in 1988, and the Grammys gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. Huntington's disease, inherited from his mother, killed him; his son Arlo Guthrie carried the family name on as a musician.

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