"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 provided the material for a CD and DVD release at the time containing 19 songs, but predictably the PBS version contained just 12 of the songs in the official release, including Donovan singing Guthrie’s children’s song “Riding in the Car,” which the Scottish folksinger had first recorded for one of his early Pye Records albums in the mid-1960’s. (Pye was a huge label in the United Kingdom, on a level with British Decca and the various imprints of EMI, but its international reputation suffered because it didn’t have a guaranteed distributor in the U.S. Donovan’s Pye recordings were released in the U.S. on Hickory, a label mostly devoted to country music.) One thing I noticed when I started collecting Woody Guthrie’s own recordings is that he frequently performed his songs a good deal faster than later artists covering them. I figured that was because he was singing them well before they’d become Officially Recognized Monuments of American Culture, which led other singers to slow them down radically. I thought of that when the first group on this program, the Old Crow Medicine Show, sped through Guthrie’s “Union Maid” a good deal faster than Guthrie ever played it, though with good results. The second song on the program was “Ramblin’ Reckless Hobo” by San Diego-based folksinger Joel Rafael, who’s made two tribute albums to Guthrie. According to the official Woody Guthrie Web site, https://woodyguthrie.org, “Ramblin’ Reckless Hobo” is Rafael’s own setting of a lyric Guthrie wrote but never set to music himself.

The third song on the version KPBS showed was “Pretty Boy Floyd,” Guthrie’s attempt to elevate a typical 1930’s Western outlaw into a Robin Hood figure, played in a scorching rendition by Johnny Cash’s daughter Rosanne with John Leventhal. (They also did Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home” together, but that wasn’t shown on last night’s version of the program, more’s the pity.) Yes, Rosanne Cash’s face is developing her father’s fabled cragginess, but she’s still a stunning performer. Next up was “I’ve Got to Know,” a relatively obscure Guthrie song, sung brilliantly by the a cappella Black group Sweet Honey in the Rock. After one of PBS’s typically interminable pledge breaks – which were annoying enough even before the Trump administration and the Republican Congress that is totally under his thrall abruptly canceled all federal funding for PBS a year ago – the program resumed with Tom Morello, formerly with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, singing an obscure Guthrie song called “Ease My Revolutionary Mind.” This is an oddball proclamation from Guthrie that he could only live his life with a woman who shared his revolutionary politics, and I briefly wondered if this was one of the songs on the program that wasn’t a Guthrie original but a modern-day song reflecting similar political ideals. It turned out it was a Guthrie song, though Morello tweaked the lyrics a bit to reference more recent phenomena like the Zapatistas (whom he likes) and Fox News (which he doesn’t). I liked the fact that Morello wore a baseball cap with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) logo on it. The next number was Donovan’s “Riding in the Car,” and after that was the high point of the evening: Ani DiFranco with Ry Cooder and Dan Gellert doing the song “Deportee.” It was one of Guthrie’s last songs and he only wrote the lyrics to it: the music was by Martin Hoffman and the song was occasioned by a plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California on January 28, 1948. Guthrie was particularly incensed that the newspaper coverage of the crash listed the names of the plane’s crew but wrote off the passengers as “deportees.” When Hoffman set Guthrie’s poem to music a decade later, Guthrie had already been incapacitated by Huntington’s chorea, the hereditary disease that had crippled and ultimately killed his mother, and it was Guthrie’s friend and frequent collaborator Pete Seeger who introduced the song. Ani DiFranco has always been a performer I’ve admired more than I actually enjoyed – I’ve loved the way she’s been able to build a career for herself totally outside the big music industry, but I’m not that fond of her actual music. On this occasion, though, she sang so emotionally she literally had me crying, especially since we’re hearing this song while the U.S. is under the lash of a megalomaniacal President who feels about immigrants the way Hitler felt about Jews.

After that John Mellencamp came out with “Do Re Mi,” Guthrie’s cynical song about how California seemed like the Garden of Eden to migrants from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, but if they didn’t arrive with money, they were up the proverbial dung creek. After yet another pledge break (usually they play five songs in each segment, but last night they did only four), the show returned with Jackson Browne singing “You Know the Night,” his own song based on a love letter Guthrie wrote to his second wife, Marjorie. Guthrie actually married three times, but Marjorie is the best-known because she was Arlo Guthrie’s mother. She’s also his co-narrator on a quite remarkable CD called Live Wire that was recorded in 1949 and was the only live recording Guthrie left behind. (The title stems from the fact that it was recorded on a wire recorder, a short-lived magnetic recording system that was what existed for home recordings between lacquer discs and tape.) Then The Del McCoury Band with Tim O’Brien came out for a lively version of Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.” Then came the mass numbers featuring the entire ensemble on “This Land Is Your Land,” Guthrie’s most famous song (which he intended as an answer to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”), and “This Train.” Though I can’t find a recording of Guthrie singing “This Train,” it’s a well-known part of his mythos because he drew on it for the title of his 1943 autobiography, Bound for Glory. I was particularly curious about how Guthrie might have sung “This Train” because it was originally a gospel song, and though the earliest recordi was in 1922 by the Florida Normal and Industrial Institute Quartette (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7zLFDTvrlU&list=RDd7zLFDTvrlU&start_radio=1), it’s best known in a 1939 cover by Sister Rosetta Tharpe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT9mwsruFrA&list=RDLT9mwsruFrA&start_radio=1). Tharpe’s version is quite explicit that on the titular train, “Everybody’s ridin’ in Jesus’s name,” and it would be interesting to hear how Guthrie tweaked the words to make them less openly religious. The ensemble numbers included singers whose solo contributions to the original concert had regrettably been deleted, like Judy Collins and Lucinda Williams, and while I for one didn’t miss Williams’s incredibly screechy voice, I do wish the telecast could had included Collins’s version of “Pastures of Plenty,” not only because that’s my all-time favorite Guthrie song but because the bit of Collins we got to hear on “This Land Is Your Land” shows that her remarkable voice has weathered the years exceptionally well.

My search for a Woody Guthrie version of “This Train” didn’t turn up one, but it did come up with some interesting Guthrie broadcasts, including a show that co-starred him with Leadbelly (the Black blues giant, true name Huddie Ledbetter) on a publicly owned radio station in Washington, D.C. on December 12, 1940, accessible on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW__942Wy8s&list=RDpW__942Wy8s&start_radio=1 (and given the gaseous rhetoric we’d been hearing from the pledge-break hosts about how only PBS shows music like this, it was fascinating that in 1940 it was a publicly owned station that was broadcasting this material). Leadbelly played “I Went Rowin’ and My Gal Went Too” and “Frankie and Albert,” a version of “Frankie and Johnny” that’s a good deal more complex morally than the usual one. After Frankie shoots her boyfriend Albert because she caught him with another woman and “he was doing her wrong,” she goes to Albert’s mother pleading for forgiveness – and Albert’s mom refuses to give it to her because whatever Albert was doing with Frankie (or behind her back with someone else), he’d also been supporting her financially and emotionally. Guthrie’s part of the program includes “John Hardy,” a song about a pre-Civil War outlaw in what is now West Virginia who convinced slaves that he could escort them to freedom via mining tunnels; Billy Gashade’s classic ballad “Jesse James”; and a fragment of Guthrie’s own “Tom Joad,” an adaptation of the “John Hardy” melody inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. (Guthrie admits on air that he’s never read The Grapes of Wrath but has seen John Ford’s film version three times, even though film critic Joseph McBride has referred to the movie as “John Ford’s conservative treatment of liberal material.”) The most politically weird item on this broadcast is “Jesse James,” because here one of the most Leftist and anti-racist singers of his generation is singing the praises of a man who before his outlaw career fought with William Quantrill’s guerrilla band in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. (Later Guthrie adapted Gashade’s “Jesse James” into “Jesus Christ,” a song that tried to recover Jesus’s radical legacy against the unthreatening anodyne figure official Christianity had turned him into.) I also uncovered a BBC children’s broadcast on July 7, 1944 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86e90MwKRAQ) recorded in London during Guthrie’s term in the Merchant Marine, in which he enlisted because he didn’t want to serve as just another private in the U.S. Army. On it he sings “Wabash Cannonball” and a traditional folk song called “900 Miles” that later became the basis of the Peter, Paul, and Mary hit “500 Miles” (though the most stunning performance of it I can recall was by a young Bob Dylan under the title “I Was Young When I Left Home”).