American singer-songwriter, the central figure of the American folk-music revival and the songwriter who, more than any other, gave the American left a musical vocabulary that persisted from the 1930s through the 1960s and beyond. "This Land Is Your Land," "This Train Is Bound for Glory," "Pastures of Plenty," "Deportee," "Do Re Mi" — the songs are so deeply embedded in American culture that their radical content is sometimes missed: they are songs about land ownership, migrant labor, deportation, and the proposition that the country belongs to the people who work it.
Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1912, into a family that the oil boom of the 1910s had briefly made prosperous and that the 1920s systematically destroyed: his father lost his money, his sister died in a fire, his mother was committed to an asylum with Huntington's disease (the hereditary condition that would kill Guthrie himself). He left Oklahoma in his mid-teens, drifted through Texas, married at nineteen, and in 1937, during the Dust Bowl, headed to California along the migration route that Steinbeck was documenting in prose and Lange was photographing for the FSA.
In Los Angeles he got a radio show, began writing the Dust Bowl ballads — Dust Bowl Ballads (1940, the first commercially released concept album of original folk songs) — and fell in with the Communist-adjacent left, though he never joined the Party. He moved to New York in 1940, where he became part of the circle that included Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee — the Almanac Singers and the broader folk-left network that would produce the 1950s folk revival. He wrote "This Land Is Your Land" in February 1940 in a New York flophouse, as an angry answer to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," which he found complacent; the song's original verses — the relief-office line, the "No Trespassing" sign — are sharper than the version that entered the schoolbooks.
Guthrie wrote more than a thousand songs, including the Columbia River songs commissioned by the Bonneville Power Administration in 1941 ("Roll On, Columbia," "Grand Coulee Dam") and the union songs ("Union Maid," "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos" / "Deportee"). His autobiography, Bound for Glory (1943), is one of the major American working-class memoirs. His guitar bore the label "This Machine Kills Fascists." From the early 1950s onward he was increasingly incapacitated by Huntington's disease; he spent his last thirteen years in hospitals, visited there by a young Bob Dylan, who modeled his early career on Guthrie's voice, persona, and political stance.
Guthrie is on the graph because his songs are the American left's most durable cultural inheritance — the musical counterpart to Debs's speeches and Steinbeck's fiction — and because his influence on Dylan makes him the origin point of the lineage through which folk music became a vehicle for political speech in the second half of the twentieth century.