Woody Guthrie was a solo artist originally from Okemah, Oklahoma. After relocating to Pampa, Texas in 1929, he spent most of his time learning songs by doing street performances on the streets. He regularly played at dances with his father's half-brother Jeff Guthrie, a fiddle player.
During the Dust Bowl period, Guthrie joined the thousands of Okies and others who migrated to California to look for work, leaving his wife and children in Texas. Many of his songs are concerned with the conditions faced by working-class people.
During the latter part of that decade, he achieved fame with radio partner Maxine "Lefty Lou" Crissman as a broadcast performer of commercial hillbilly music and traditional folk music. Guthrie was making enough money to send for his family to join him from Texas. While appearing on the radio station KFVD, owned by a populist-minded New Deal Democrat, Frank W. Burke, Guthrie began to write and perform some of the protest songs that he eventually released on his album Dust Bowl Ballads.
Discography[]
- 78s
- Tom Joad (1940)
- Ranger's Command / Gypsy Davy (1945)
- Talking Sailor / Coolee Dam (1945)
- Studio Albums
- Dust Bowl Ballads (1940)
- Songs to Grow on, Volume One: Nursery Days (1951)
- Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child (1956)
- Live Albums
- The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949 (2007)
- Compilations
- Bound for Glory (1956)
- Ballads of Sacco & Vanzetti (1960)
- Woody Guthrie Sings Folk Songs (1962)
- Hard Travelin' (1964)
- Library of Congress Recordings (1964)
- Columbia River Ballads (1987)
- This Land is Your Land: The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1 (1997)
- Muleskinner Blues: The Asch Recordings, Vol. 2 (1997)
- Hard Travelin': The Asch Recordings, Vol. 3 (1998)
- Buffalo Skinners: The Asch Recordings, Vol. 4 (1999)
- My Dusty Road (2009)
- Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection (2012)