"Woody Guthrie at 100!": PBS's Truncated Showing of a 10th Birthday Concert Celebrating America's Great Topical Folksinger
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Saturday, July 18) KPBS aired a tribute show to singer Woody Guthrie called Woody Guthrie at 100! , filmed at a concert at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts on October 14, 2012 (though Guthrie’s actual birthdate was July 14, 1912). This was before the Kennedy Center was traduced and forced, at least for a while, to bear the name of another President, a man Woody Guthrie would have hated – especially since Guthrie’s path actually crossed that of Donald Trump’s notoriously racist father, Fred Trump. In the early 1950’s Guthrie moved into a building owned by Fred Trump, only to learn that Trump’s company had a systematic and out-front policy of not renting to Black people. As a matter of principle, Guthrie not only moved out of Trump’s building but wrote an extra verse to his song “I Ain’t Got No Home” explicitly denouncing Fred Trump’s racism. The concert provide...