Pho­to by Al Aumuller, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Like anoth­er famous Okie from Musko­gee, Woody Guthrie came from a part of Okla­homa that the U.S. gov­ern­ment sold dur­ing the 1889 land rush away from the Qua­paw and Osage nations, as well as the Musco­gee, a peo­ple who had been forcibly relo­cat­ed from the South­east under Andrew Jackson’s Indi­an Removal Act. By the time of Guthrie’s birth in 1912 in Okfus­kee Coun­ty, next to Musko­gee, the region was in the hands of con­ser­v­a­tive Democ­rats like Guthrie’s father Charles, a landown­er and mem­ber of the revived KKK who par­tic­i­pat­ed in a bru­tal lynch­ing the year before Guthrie was born.

Guthrie was named after pres­i­dent Woodrow Wil­son, who was high­ly sym­pa­thet­ic to Jim Crow (but per­haps not, as has been alleged, an admir­er of the Klan). While he inher­it­ed many of his father’s atti­tudes, he recon­sid­ered them to such a degree lat­er in life that he wrote a song denounc­ing the noto­ri­ous­ly racist New York land­lord Fred Trump, father of the cur­rent pres­i­dent. “By the time he moved into his new apart­ment” in Brook­lyn in 1950, writes Will Kauf­man at The Guardian, Guthrie “had trav­eled a long road from the casu­al racism of his Okla­homa youth.”

Guthrie was deeply embed­ded in the for­ma­tive racial pol­i­tics of the coun­try. While some peo­ple may con­vince them­selves that a time in the U.S. past was “great”—unmarred by class con­flict and racist vio­lence and exploita­tion, secure in the hands of a benev­o­lent white majority—Guthrie’s life tells a much more com­plex sto­ry. Many Indige­nous peo­ple feel with good rea­son that Guthrie’s most famous song, “The Land is Your Land,” has con­tributed to nation­al­ist mythol­o­gy. Oth­ers have viewed the song as a Marx­ist anthem. Like much else about Guthrie, and the coun­try, it’s com­pli­cat­ed.

Con­sid­ered by many, Stephen Petrus writes, “to be the alter­na­tive nation­al anthem,” the song “to many peo­ple… rep­re­sents America’s best pro­gres­sive and demo­c­ra­t­ic tra­di­tions.” Guthrie turned the song into a hymn for the strug­gle against fas­cism and for the nascent Civ­il Rights move­ment. Writ­ten in New York in 1940 and first record­ed for Moe Asch’s Folk­ways Records in 1944, “This Land is Your Land” evolved over time, drop­ping vers­es protest­ing pri­vate prop­er­ty and pover­ty after the war in favor of a far more patri­ot­ic tone. It was a long evo­lu­tion from embit­tered par­o­dy of “God Bless Amer­i­ca” to “This land was made for you and me.”

But whether social­ist or pop­ulist in nature, Guthrie’s patri­o­tism was always sub­ver­sive. “By 1940,” writes John Pietaro, he had “joined forces with Pete Seeger in the Almanac Singers,” who “as a group, joined the Com­mu­nist Par­ty. Woody’s gui­tar had, by then, been adorned with the hand-paint­ed epi­taph, THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.” (Guthrie had at least two gui­tars with the slo­gan scrawled on them, one on a stick­er and one with ragged hand-let­ter­ing.) The phrase, claims music crit­ic Jon­ny White­side, was orig­i­nal­ly “a morale-boost­ing WWII gov­ern­ment slo­gan print­ed on stick­ers that were hand­ed out to defense plant work­ers.” Guthrie reclaimed the pro­pa­gan­da for folk music’s role in the cul­ture. As Pietaro tells it:

In this time he also found­ed an inter-racial quar­tet with Lead­bel­ly, Son­ny Ter­ry and Cis­co Hous­ton, a ver­i­ta­ble super-group he named the Head­line Singers. This group, sad­ly, nev­er record­ed. The mate­r­i­al must have stood as the height of protest song—he’d named it in oppo­si­tion to a pro­duc­er who advised Woody to “stop try­ing to sing the head­lines.” Woody told us that all you can write is what you see.

You can hear The Head­line Singers above, minus Lead Bel­ly and fea­tur­ing Pete Seeger, in the ear­ly 1940’s radio broad­cast of “All You Fas­cists Bound to Lose.” “I’m gonna tell you fas­cists,” sings Woody, “you may be sur­prised, peo­ple in this world are get­ting orga­nized.” Upon join­ing the Mer­chant Marines, Guthrie fought against seg­re­ga­tion in the mil­i­tary. After the war, he “stood shoul­der to shoul­der with Paul Robe­son, Howard Fast, and Pete Seeger” against vio­lent racist mobs in Peek­skill, New York. Both of Guthrie’s anti-fas­cist gui­tars have seem­ing­ly dis­ap­peared. As Robert San­tel­li writes, “Guthrie didn’t care for his instru­ments with much love.” But dur­ing the decade of the 1940’s he was nev­er seen with­out the slo­gan on his pri­ma­ry instru­ment.

“This Machine Kills Fas­cists” has since, writes Moth­er­board, become Guthrie’s “trade­mark slo­gan… still ref­er­enced in pop cul­ture and beyond” and pro­vid­ing an impor­tant point of ref­er­ence for the anti-fas­cist punk move­ment. You can see anoth­er of Guthrie’s anti-fas­cist slo­gans above, which he scrawled on a col­lec­tion of his sheet music: “Fas­cism fought indoors and out, good & bad weath­er.” Guthrie’s long-lived broth­er-in-arms Pete Seeger, car­ried on in the tra­di­tion of anti-fas­cism and anti-racism after Woody suc­cumbed in the last two decades of his life to Huntington’s dis­ease. Like Guthrie, Seeger paint­ed a slo­gan around the rim of his instru­ment of choice, the ban­jo, a mes­sage both play­ful and mil­i­tant: “This machine sur­rounds hate and forces it to sur­ren­der.”

Pho­to by “Jim, the Pho­tog­ra­ph­er”

Seeger car­ried the mes­sage from his days play­ing and singing with Guthrie, to his Civ­il Rights and anti-war orga­niz­ing and protest in the 50s and 60s, and all the way into the 21st cen­tu­ry at Occu­py Wall Street in Man­hat­tan in 2011. At the 2009 inau­gu­ra­tion of Barack Oba­ma, Seeger sang “This Land is Your Land” onstage with Bruce Spring­steen and his son, Tao-Rodriquez Singer. In rehearsals, he insist­ed on singing the two vers­es Guthrie had omit­ted from the song after the war. “So it was,” writes John Nichols at The Nation, “that the new­ly elect­ed pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States began his inau­gur­al cel­e­bra­tion by singing and clap­ping along with an old lefty who remem­bered the Depres­sion-era ref­er­ences of a song that took a class-con­scious swipe at those whose ‘Pri­vate Prop­er­ty’ signs turned away union orga­niz­ers, hobos and ban­jo pick­ers.”

Both Guthrie and Seeger drew direct con­nec­tions between the fas­cism and racism they fought and cap­i­tal­is­m’s out­sized, destruc­tive obses­sion with land and mon­ey. They felt so strong­ly about the bat­tle that they wore their mes­sages fig­u­ra­tive­ly on their sleeves and lit­er­al­ly on their instru­ments. Pete Seeger’s famous ban­jo has out­lived its own­er, and the col­or­ful leg­end around it has been mass-pro­duced by Deer­ing Ban­jos. Where Guthrie’s anti-fas­cist gui­tars went off to is any­one’s guess, but if one of them were ever dis­cov­ered, Robert San­tel­li writes, “it sure­ly would become one of Amer­i­ca’s most val­ued folk instru­ments.” Or one of its most val­ued instru­ments in gen­er­al.

Pho­to by “Jim, the Pho­tog­ra­ph­er”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bruce Spring­steen Won’t Back Down: Per­forms “Streets of Min­neapo­lis” Live in Min­neapo­lis

Hear Two Leg­ends, Lead Bel­ly & Woody Guthrie, Per­form­ing on the Same Radio Show (1940)

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.