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“... of the American Dream: you don’t have to be Gramsci to recognise cultural hegemony at work here. Woody Guthrie wrote ‘This Land Is Your Land’ – originally titled ‘God Blessed America’ – in February 1940, in response to the sentiments of Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’: Let us all be grateful for a land so fair, As we raise our ...”

“... three artists who feature extensively in Songs for Political Action – the Dust Bowl troubadour Woody Guthrie, the cabaret bluesman Josh White and the self-invented folk bard Pete Seeger. The Oklahoma-born Guthrie, the most enduring of the three, was the culmination of those country protest singers – the Jim ...”

“... the songs with their singer. As he wrote in the sleevenotes to The Times They Are A-Changin’, ‘Woody Guthrie was my last idol . . . because he . . . taught me/face to face/that men are men/shatterin’ even himself/as an idol.’ Or in Chronicles: a song ‘might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends ...”

“... has been a driving force in his creative life. He recently contributed to an album commemorating Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, both acknowledged precursors. Of Guthrie he has said: ‘There was a time when I did nothing but his songs. I mean ... he’s written so many (laughs). I knew them all. I was like a ...”

“... The album’s best-known track is ‘House of the Risin’ Sun’, a traditional song recorded by Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly among others, here performed in a version he learned from Dave van Ronk (the folk singer lightly fictionalised in the Coen Brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis). It’s a haunting song, and it came back to haunt him in the summer ...”

“... any previous verses’ (it’s preceded by a harmonica solo, which also helps). And in ‘Song to Woody’, ‘the first time, the only time, then, that a rhyme has returned’ is in the last verse: ‘This is an arc completed, not a feeling vacated.’ ‘Rhymes and rhythms and cadences,’ Ricks writes, alluding to the album title Bringing It All Back ...”

“... Lincoln; Greenwich Village cafés of the 1950s and 1960s, full of the apostles and understudies of Woody Guthrie and Dave Von Ronk; quiz shows and sit-coms; the recently extinct chess clubs of MacDougal and Thompson Streets; the New York Mets. At its best, the collagist method captures historical moods with a powerful compactness: a late sequence manages ...”

“... to New York, hastily typed out some opening chapters and a plot summary, and with the help of Woody Guthrie, sold Now and on Earth in 1941. But despite a few good reviews – and two more books published over the next decade – Thompson didn’t hit his novelistic stride until the early Fifties. Again, in a burst of activity. Between September 1952 ...”

“... really took off, and became codified as an act of social solidarity. Purkis’s touchstone here is Woody Guthrie, whose Dust Bowl Ballads addressed the new itinerant dispossessed: the anthem ‘This Land Is Your Land’, written after his transcontinental hitchhiking trip in 1940, talks of a ‘freedom highway’ crossing a land that ‘was made for you ...”

“... run away from home at 12; he’d joined a carnival, worked as a farmhand, had played out West with Woody Guthrie, with Gene Vincent, with Blind Lemon Jefferson ... He was soon even mythologising his own early days in New York, claiming to Shelton, who swallowed the story whole, that he spent his first two months in the big city hustling around Times ...”

“... an independent bookstore, restaurants and a museum celebrating the life of the (white) songwriter Woody Guthrie – harbingers, perhaps, of impending gentrification. It has also perhaps the only public space in the nation named for a Black historian, the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park.Reconciliation, however, remains hard to come by. The Riot ...”

“... cows. A hawk glides over the Boone Creek Baptist church. We’re crossing the Ozarks, listening to Woody Guthrie: Hitler wrote to Lindy, said ‘Do your very worst,’ Lindy started an outfit that he called America First In Washington, in Washington. We pull into the Super 8 in Springfield, Missouri. We ask the woman behind the desk if there’s a place ...”

“... parents would bail me out if I got too deep into trouble. So it wasn’t exactly like Kerouac or Woody Guthrie but I was, nonetheless, on the road. Or more precisely, flying the friendly skies. When I located my cousins Tommy and Nora Lynch – brother and sister, bachelor and spinster – they lived in a thatched house on the west coast of Clare, in ...”

“... an opinionated troubadour. A folk instrument was required to channel the judgment of nature. When Woody Guthrie wrote a slogan on his guitar in the 1940s – ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ – the really surprising word was ‘machine’. The piano, though acoustic, is not a folk instrument. Not being portable, it isn’t a free agent. It bespeaks the ...”

“... in 1927; he had Mob ties and flagrantly discriminated against blacks when renting out housing. Woody Guthrie, his most famous tenant, wrote about his landlord in the first literary work on a Trump, ‘Old Man Trump’:I supposeOld Man Trump knowsJust how muchRacial hatehe stirred upIn the bloodpot of human heartsWhen he drawedThat colour lineHere at ...”