Woody Guthrie: A Life

In November of 2015 we visited the Woody Guthrie Museum in Tulsa. It's really amazing and you should check it out if you're ever there. Woody's life is full of breakthroughs, mistakes, and attempting to societal right wrongs. For obvious reasons, many of Woody's misdeeds were buried deep in the exhibits and it made us wonder more about the composite of his life. This book seemed to offer an unbiased account in a social context. For example, while Woody is credited as pioneering the story-song style of the 1930s, Ma Rainey and plenty of other performers and songwriters had been doing the same thing for much longer. They simply lacked the relative privileges to travel and the kind of upbringing that did not force Woody to work or support his wives and children. Still, these historical oversights are not Woody's fault and he clearly made efforts to bring Black performers to the limelight with him, albeit before society was ready. It's for all of these reasons that Guthrie became a legendary and influential American folk singer. Woody's life had no shortage of tragedies from the time his mother was institutionalized to war time service to his own bitter end, influencing generations of songwriters like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. And in this original work you can get the horns along with the haloes.