Woody Guthrie

With the feistiness of a bantamweight merchant mariner (which he was), Woody Guthrie personified a breed of patriot now virtually extinct. A radical socialist who’d seen as many people robbed by banks as by guns during the Depression, he celebrated America’s beauty and doggedly exposed its flaws. Ironically, Guthrie’s best-known tune is almost never heard all the way through. “This Land Is Your Land” was composed as a sort of warts-and-all antidote to Irving Berlin’s sentimental “God Bless America.” It helped earn Guthrie a two-inch-thick F.B.I. dossier (check out verses five and six), but it still rings true more than half-a-century later.

While Guthrie detested bureaucrats and the trappings of government, he was happy to take the Man’s money, giving him incredible value in return. Hired by the Department of the Interior (for ten bucks a song!) to write propaganda for a hydro-power documentary, Guthrie launched into a month-long, 26-song writing frenzy known as the Columbia River Ballads, declaring the Grand Coulee Dam the world’s “greatest wonder” and “The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done.” The Eisenhower Administration later ordered the films and their soundtracks destroyed, owing to Guthrie’s Communist ties, but a disobedient employee saved these national treasures from oblivion.

Gifted as he was at depicting America’s natural wonders, Guthrie really excelled at standing up for the little guy. He serves as history’s witness to the tragic consequences of union-busting goons’ murderous tactics in “Ludlow Massacre” and “1913 Massacre,” and calls on his audience to “every day find some ways to fight/on the union side for workers’ rights” in “Two Good Men (Sacco and Vanzetti),” the story of Italian immigrants railroaded into the electric chair due to their political beliefs.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, all-American boy from the Okie dust bowl, had a guitar emblazoned with “This Machine Kills Fascists,” a razor-edged tongue, and a radical socialist’s contempt for bureaucrats, bosses, and other blowhards. He couldn’t be seduced by glamour or silenced by authority, and that made him a dangerous man. But what makes him special — still — is his photographic ability to capture a scene, from the majesty of the Columbia River to the horror of union members murdered by management thugs at a Christmas Party. With an unblinking eye and plainspoken language, he called ’em like he saw ’em, consequences be damned. Every subsequent six-string-toting troubadour, from Johnny Cash to Ryan Adams, is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s debt.