text: On November 16, 2018, President Donald Trump signed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018 into law, which elevated the mission of the former DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate and established the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. In fiscal year 2018, DHS was allocated a net discretionary budget of $47.716 billion.


title: United States Department of Homeland Security

text: In 2021, the Department of Justice began carrying out an investigation into white supremacy and extremism in the DHS ranks.


text: DHS also halted large-scale immigration raids at job sites, saying in October 2021 that the administration was planning "a new enforcement strategy to more effectively target employers who pay substandard wages and engage in exploitative labor practices."


text: Whereas the Department of Defense is charged with military actions abroad, the Department of Homeland Security works in the civilian sphere to protect the United States within, at, and outside its borders. Its stated goal is to prepare for, prevent, and respond to domestic emergencies, particularly terrorism. On March 1, 2003, DHS absorbed the U.S. Customs Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and assumed its duties. In doing so, it divided the enforcement and services functions into two separate and new agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Citizenship and Immigration Services. The investigative divisions and intelligence gathering units of the INS and Customs Service were merged forming Homeland Security Investigations, the primary investigative arm of DHS. Additionally, the border enforcement functions of the INS, including the U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service were consolidated into a new agency under DHS: U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The Federal Protective Service falls under the National Protection and Programs Directorate.


text: The Department of Homeland Security is headed by the Secretary of Homeland Security with the assistance of the Deputy Secretary. The department contains the components listed below.


text: Passports for U.S. citizens are issued by the U.S. Department of State, not the Department of Homeland Security.


text: In an August 5, 2002, speech, President Bush said: "We are fighting ... to secure freedom in the homeland." Prior to the creation of DHS, U.S. Presidents had referred to the U.S. as "the nation" or "the republic" and to its internal policies as "domestic". Also unprecedented was the use, from 2002, of the phrase "the homeland" by White House spokespeople.


text: In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security phased out the old Homeland Security Advisory System, replacing it with a two-level National Terrorism Advisory System. The system has two types of advisories: alerts and bulletins. NTAS bulletins permit the secretary to communicate critical terrorism information that, while not necessarily indicative of a specific threat against the United States, can reach homeland security partners or the public quickly, thereby allowing recipients to implement necessary protective measures. Alerts are issued when there is specific and credible information of a terrorist threat against the United States. Alerts have two levels: elevated and imminent. An elevated alert is issued when there is credible information about an attack but only general information about timing or a target. An Imminent Alert is issued when the threat is very specific and impending in the very near term.


text: On March 12, 2002, the Homeland Security Advisory System, a color-coded terrorism risk advisory scale, was created as the result of a Presidential Directive to provide a "comprehensive and effective means to disseminate information regarding the risk of terrorist acts to Federal, State, and local authorities and to the American people". Many procedures at government facilities are tied into the alert level; for example a facility may search all entering vehicles when the alert is above a certain level. Since January 2003, it has been administered in coordination with DHS; it has also been the target of frequent jokes and ridicule on the part of the administration's detractors about its ineffectiveness. After resigning, Tom Ridge said he did not always agree with the threat level adjustments pushed by other government agencies.


text: In January 2003, the office was merged into the Department of Homeland Security and the White House Homeland Security Council, both of which were created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The Homeland Security Council, similar in nature to the National Security Council, retains a policy coordination and advisory role and is led by the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security.


text: The seal was developed with input from senior DHS leadership, employees, and the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. The Ad Council – which partners with DHS on its Ready.gov campaign – and the consulting company Landor Associates were responsible for graphic design and maintaining heraldic integrity.


text: Since its inception, the department has had its temporary headquarters in Washington, D.C.'s Nebraska Avenue Complex, a former naval facility. The site, across from American University, has 32 buildings comprising of administrative space. In early 2007, the department submitted a $4.1 billion plan to Congress to consolidate its 60-plus Washington-area offices into a single headquarters complex at the St. Elizabeths Hospital campus in Anacostia, Southeast Washington, D.C.


text: The move was championed by District of Columbia officials because of the positive economic impact it would have on historically depressed Anacostia. The move was criticized by historic preservationists, who claimed the revitalization plans would destroy dozens of historic buildings on the campus. Community activists criticized the plans because the facility would remain walled off and have little interaction with the surrounding area.


text: In February 2015 the General Services Administration said that the site would open in 2021. DHS headquarters staff began moving to St. Elizabeths in April 2019 after the completion of the Center Building renovation.


text: During a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on the reauthorization of DHS, Deputy Secretary Elaine Duke said there is a weariness and anxiety within DHS about the repeated congressional efforts to agree to a long-term spending plan, which had resulted in several threats to shut down the federal government. "Shutdowns are disruptive", Duke said. She said the "repeated failure on a longtime spending plan resulting in short-term continuing resolutions (CRs) has caused "angst" among the department's 240,000 employees in the weeks leading up to the CRs." The uncertainty about funding hampers DHS's ability to pursue major projects and it takes away attention and manpower from important priorities. Seventy percent of DHS employees are considered essential and are not furloughed during government shutdowns.


text: Soon after formation, the department worked with the Ad Council to launch the Ready Campaign, a national public service advertising (PSA) campaign to educate and empower Americans to prepare for and respond to emergencies including natural and man-made disasters. With pro bono creative support from the Martin Agency of Richmond, Virginia, the campaign website "Ready.gov" and materials were conceived in March 2002 and launched in February 2003, just before the launch of the Iraq War. One of the first announcements that garnered widespread public attention to this campaign was one by Tom Ridge in which he stated that in the case of a chemical attack, citizens should use duct tape and plastic sheeting to build a homemade bunker, or "sheltering in place" to protect themselves. As a result, the sales of duct tape skyrocketed, and DHS was criticized for being too alarmist.


text: On March 1, 2003, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was absorbed into the DHS and in the fall of 2008 took over coordination of the campaign. The Ready Campaign and its Spanish-language version Listo.gov asks individuals to build an emergency supply kit, make a family emergency plan and be informed about the different types of emergencies that can occur and how to respond. The campaign messages have been promoted through television, radio, print, outdoor and web PSAs, as well as brochures, toll-free phone lines and the English and Spanish language websites Ready.gov and Listo.gov.


text: The general campaign aims to reach all Americans, but targeted resources are also available via "Ready Business" for small- to medium-sized business and "Ready Kids" for parents and teachers of children ages 8–12. In 2015, the campaign also launched a series of PSAs to help the whole community, people with disabilities and others with access and functional needs prepare for emergencies, which included open captioning, a certified deaf interpreter and audio descriptions for viewers who are blind or have low vision.


text: On March 1, 2004, the National Incident Management System (NIMS) was created. The stated purpose was to provide a consistent incident management approach for federal, state, local, and tribal governments. Under Homeland Security Presidential Directive-5, all federal departments were required to adopt the NIMS and to use it in their individual domestic incident management and emergency prevention, preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation program and activities.


text: In December 2004, the National Response Plan (NRP) was created, in an attempt to align federal coordination structures, capabilities, and resources into a unified, all-discipline, and all-hazards approach to domestic incident management. The NRP was built on the template of the NIMS.


text: On January 22, 2008, the National Response Framework was published in the Federal Register as an updated replacement of the NRP, effective March 22, 2008.


text: The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act directs the DHS Secretary to designate employees from throughout the department to staff a Surge Capacity Force (SCF). During a declared disaster, the DHS Secretary will determine if SCF support is necessary. The secretary will then authorize FEMA to task and deploy designated personnel from DHS components and other Federal Executive Agencies to respond to extraordinary disasters.


text: The DHS National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) is responsible for the response system, risk management program, and requirements for cyber-security in the U.S. The division is home to US-CERT operations and the National Cyber Alert System. The DHS Science and Technology Directorate helps government and private end-users transition to new cyber-security capabilities. This directorate also funds the Cyber Security Research and Development Center, which identifies and prioritizes research and development for NCSD. The center works on the Internet's routing infrastructure (the SPRI program) and Domain Name System (DNSSEC), identity theft and other online criminal activity (ITTC), Internet traffic and networks research (PREDICT datasets and the DETER testbed), Department of Defense and HSARPA exercises (Livewire and Determined Promise), and wireless security in cooperation with Canada.


text: On October 30, 2009, DHS opened the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center. The center brings together government organizations responsible for protecting computer networks and networked infrastructure.


text: In January 2017, DHS officially designated state-run election systems as critical infrastructure. The designation made it easier for state and local election officials to get cybersecurity help from the federal government. In October 2017, DHS convened a Government Coordinating Council (GCC) for the Election Infrastructure Subsection with representatives from various state and federal agencies such as the Election Assistance Commission and National Association of Secretaries of State.


text: The department has been dogged by persistent criticism over excessive bureaucracy, waste, ineffectiveness and lack of transparency. Congress estimates that the department has wasted roughly $15 billion in failed contracts (). In 2003, the department came under fire after the media revealed that Laura Callahan, Deputy Chief Information Officer at DHS with responsibilities for sensitive national security databases, had obtained her bachelor, masters, and doctorate computer science degrees through Hamilton University, a diploma mill in a small town in Wyoming. The department was blamed for up to $2 billion of waste and fraud after audits by the Government Accountability Office revealed widespread misuse of government credit cards by DHS employees, with purchases including beer brewing kits, $70,000 of plastic dog booties that were later deemed unusable, boats purchased at double the retail price (many of which later could not be found), and iPods ostensibly for use in "data storage".


text: A 2015 inspection of IT infrastructure found that the department was running over a hundred computer systems whose owners were unknown, including Secret and Top Secret databases, many with out of date security or weak passwords. Basic security reviews were absent, and the department had apparently made deliberate attempts to delay publication of information about the flaws.


text: On September 5, 2007, the Associated Press reported that the DHS had scrapped an anti-terrorism data mining tool called ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement) after the agency's internal inspector general found that pilot testing of the system had been performed using data on real people without required privacy safeguards in place. The system, in development at Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory since 2003, has cost the agency $42 million to date. Controversy over the program is not new; in March 2007, the Government Accountability Office stated that "the ADVISE tool could misidentify or erroneously associate an individual with undesirable activity such as fraud, crime or terrorism." Homeland Security's Inspector General later said that ADVISE was poorly planned, time-consuming for analysts to use, and lacked adequate justifications.


text: Fusion centers are terrorism prevention and response centers, many of which were created under a joint project between the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs between 2003 and 2007. The fusion centers gather information from government sources as well as their partners in the private sector.


text: They are designed to promote information sharing at the federal level between agencies such as the CIA, FBI, Department of Justice, U.S. military and state and local level government. , DHS recognized at least seventy-two fusion centers. Fusion centers may also be affiliated with an Emergency Operations Center that responds in the event of a disaster.


text: There are a number of documented criticisms of fusion centers, including relative ineffectiveness at counterterrorism activities, the potential to be used for secondary purposes unrelated to counterterrorism, and their links to violations of civil liberties of American citizens and others.


text: a long line of fusion center and DHS reports labeling broad swaths of the public as a threat to national security. The North Texas Fusion System labeled Muslim lobbyists as a potential threat; a DHS analyst in Wisconsin thought both pro- and anti-abortion activists were worrisome; a Pennsylvania homeland security contractor watched environmental activists, Tea Party groups, and a Second Amendment rally; the Maryland State Police put anti-death penalty and anti-war activists in a federal terrorism database; a fusion center in Missouri thought that all third-party voters and Ron Paul supporters were a threat ...


text: In 2006, MSNBC reported that Grant Goodman, "an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, received a letter from his friend in the Philippines that had been opened and resealed with a strip of dark green tape bearing the words "by Border Protection" and carrying the official Homeland Security seal." The letter was sent by a devout Catholic Filipino woman with no history of supporting Islamic terrorism. A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection "acknowledged that the agency can, will and does open mail coming to U.S. citizens that originates from a foreign country whenever it's deemed necessary":


text: All mail originating outside the United States Customs territory that is to be delivered inside the U.S. Customs territory is subject to Customs examination," says the CBP Web site. That includes personal correspondence. "All mail means 'all mail,'" said John Mohan, a CBP spokesman, emphasizing the point.


text: The department declined to outline what criteria are used to determine when a piece of personal correspondence should be opened or to say how often or in what volume Customs might be opening mail.


text: Goodman's story provoked outrage in the blogosphere, as well as in the more established media. Reacting to the incident, "Mother Jones" remarked "unlike other prying government agencies, Homeland Security wants you to know it is watching you." CNN observed "on the heels of the NSA wiretapping controversy, Goodman's letter raises more concern over the balance between privacy and security."


text: In July 2006, the Office of Personnel Management conducted a survey of federal employees in all 36 federal agencies on job satisfaction and how they felt their respective agency was headed. DHS was last or near to last in every category including;


text: The low scores were attributed to concerns about basic supervision, management and leadership within the agency. Examples from the survey reveal most concerns are about promotion and pay increase based on merit, dealing with poor performance, rewarding creativity and innovation, leadership generating high levels of motivation in the workforce, recognition for doing a good job, lack of satisfaction with various component policies and procedures and lack of information about what is going on with the organization.


text: DHS is the only large federal agency to score below 50% in overall survey rankings. It was last of large federal agencies in 2014 with 44.0% and fell even lower in 2015 at 43.1%, again last place. DHS continued to rank at the bottom in 2019, prompting congressional inquiries into the problem. High work load resulting from chronic staff shortage, particularly in Customs and Border Protection, has contributed to low morale, as have scandals and intense negative public opinion heightened by immigration policies of the Obama administration.


text: In 2009, the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) made news for targeting supporters of third party candidates (such as Ron Paul), anti-abortion activists, and conspiracy theorists as potential militia members. Anti-war activists and Islamic lobby groups were targeted in Texas, drawing criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union.


text: The Privacy Office has identified a number of risks to privacy presented by the fusion center program:


text: In the Center for Effective Government analysis of 15 federal agencies which receive the most Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, published in 2015 (using 2012 and 2013 data), the Department of Homeland Security earned a D by scoring 69 out of a possible 100 points, i.e. did not earn a satisfactory overall grade. It also had not updated its policies since the 2007 FOIA amendments.


text: In 2018, the DHS was accused of referencing the white nationalist Fourteen Words slogan in an official document, by using a similar fourteen-worded title, in relation to unlawful immigration and border control:


text: Although dismissed by the DHS as a coincidence, both the use of "88" in a document and the similarity to the slogan's phrasing ("We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children"), drew criticism and controversy from several media outlets.


text: While abolishing the DHS has been proposed since 2011, the idea was popularized when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested abolishing the DHS in light of the abuses against detained migrants by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agencies.


text: In 2020, the DHS was criticized for detaining protesters in Portland, Oregon. It even drew rebuke from the department's first secretary Tom Ridge who said, "It would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to an uninvited, unilateral intervention into one of my cities”.


text: On August 10, 2020, in an opinion article for "USA Today" by Anthony D. Romero, the ACLU called for the dismantling of DHS over the deployment of federal forces in July 2020 during the Portland protests.


text: In December 2020, ACLU filed a lawsuit against the DHS, U.S. CBP and U.S. ICE, seeking the release of their records of purchasing cellphone location data. ACLU alleges that this data was used to track U.S. citizens and immigrants and is seeking to discover the full extent of the alleged surveillance.


title: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

text: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is an upcoming action-adventure game developed by Rocksteady Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It is the fifth main installment in the "" series, taking place after the events of "", and the first not to feature Batman as the main protagonist, though the character still appears, posthumously voiced by Kevin Conroy in his final performance as Batman. Based on the DC Comics supervillain/anti-hero team the Suicide Squad, the game revolves around the titular team of super-criminals, who are assembled by Amanda Waller and sent to Metropolis to stop the alien invader Brainiac and kill the members of the Justice League who have been brainwashed by him.


title: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

text: "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League" is a genre-bending action-adventure game set in an open world based in Metropolis. The game features four playable characters: Captain Boomerang, Deadshot, Harley Quinn, and King Shark. While it can be played solo, the game also features a four-player cooperative multiplayer mode. When played solo, players can switch between characters at will, while the other characters are controlled by the AI.


title: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

text: The game is set in the universe previously established by the "" series, taking place sometime after the events of "". Amanda Waller (Debra Wilson) creates a task force known as the Suicide Squad, which is composed of Arkham Asylum inmates Harley Quinn (Tara Strong), Captain Boomerang, Deadshot and King Shark (Samoa Joe), for a covert mission in Metropolis. Only when they arrive in the city do they realize the severity of the situation: Brainiac has invaded Earth and has started brainwashing its inhabitants, including Justice League members Superman, Flash (Scott Porter), Green Lantern, and Batman (Kevin Conroy), with Wonder Woman as the only apparent member who is not under Brainiac's control. Unable to depend on any hero for help, it is up to the Suicide Squad to save the world by killing the Justice League from Brainiac's control and stopping him before he destroys Metropolis and, eventually, the world.


title: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

text: A video game based on the Suicide Squad was first announced by then DC Comics chief creative officer Geoff Johns in July 2010. In February 2012, he elaborated that the game was in development, adding that "Because of the concept, you have a game where any of the lead characters can conceivably die and it's not a stunt. Some really cool story could come out of that." The formation of the Suicide Squad was teased at the end of "" in 2013 – developed by WB Games Montreal – which featured a post-credits scene in which Deathstroke is asked by Amanda Waller to join the team, and in "", in which Deadshot and Bronze Tiger join the team with Bane under consideration. In the years since "" was released, there have been rumours suggesting that WB Games Montreal was working on a Suicide Squad game, but no official announcement was made from the development team or publisher. In December 2016, Jason Schreier from "Kotaku" revealed that the title was cancelled.


title: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

text: Rocksteady Studios announced "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League" in August 2020. Rocksteady, the creator of the "" franchise, was initially rumored to be working on a Superman-themed game, which they later debunked. The first trailer for the game premiered at DC FanDome on August 22, 2020. As the game is set in the "", plot threads established in the "Batman: Arkham" series, including the Joker's death in "" and the public revelation of Batman's identity as Bruce Wayne in "", would continue in "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League". The Los Angeles-based company Unbroken Studios are assisting Rocksteady in the developing of the game. On March 23, 2022, Rocksteady announced that the title had been delayed from its initial 2022 launch window to early 2023. At The Game Awards 2022, the release date was revealed to be May 26, along with the announcement that Batman would appear in the game, voiced by Kevin Conroy in his final performance as the character due to his death in November 2022.


title: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

text: "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League" is set to be released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S on May 26, 2023.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Road to Perdition is a 2002 American crime drama film directed by Sam Mendes. The screenplay was adapted by David Self from the graphic novel of the same name written by Max Allan Collins and illustrated by Richard Piers Rayner. The film stars Tom Hanks, Paul Newman (in his final live-action theatrical film acting role), Jude Law, and Daniel Craig. The plot takes place in 1931, during the Great Depression, following a mob enforcer and his son as they seek vengeance against a mobster who murdered the rest of their family.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Filming took place in the Chicago area. Mendes, having recently finished 1999's acclaimed "American Beauty", pursued a story that had minimal dialogue and conveyed emotion in the imagery. Cinematographer Conrad L. Hall took advantage of the environment to create symbolism for the film, for which he won several awards, including a posthumous Academy Award for Best Cinematography. The film explores several themes, including the consequence of violence and father-son relationships.


title: Road to Perdition

text: "Road to Perdition" was released on July 12, 2002, and eventually grossed over $181 million worldwide. The film was well received by critics, who mainly praised the direction and visuals, performances (particularly of Hanks, Newman, and Law), cinematography, themes and setting. In addition to Hall's win for cinematography, the film earned five Academy Awards nominations, including Best Supporting Actor for Newman.


title: Road to Perdition

text: The film begins and ends in 1931 during the Great Depression with a voiceover from Michael Sullivan, Jr., speaking about his father. Michael Sullivan, Sr. was orphaned and then raised by Irish Mob boss John Rooney in Rock Island, Illinois; he is now Rooney's most fearsome enforcer, unknown to his own children. Rooney has come to love Sullivan more than his own biological son, the rash and unpredictable Connor.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Speaking at his brother's wake, Rooney's associate Finn McGovern insinuates that Rooney is responsible for his brother's death. Rooney sends Connor and Sullivan to talk with McGovern, while 12-year-old Michael watches through a hole in the wall, after hiding in the back of the family car. McGovern steadfastly denies that his brother stole anything from the mob before implying Connor was responsible, and Connor shoots him on the spot before Sullivan shoots the other witnesses. Michael is detected and sworn to secrecy.


title: Road to Perdition

text: The next day, Rooney visits the house to intimidate the boy, and Michael soon begins misbehaving at school. At a meeting with his mob associates, Rooney pointedly humiliates Connor after he halfheartedly apologizes for McGovern's murder. Then he sends Sullivan to collect a debt from a speakeasy owner Tony Calvino. Connor, jealous and afraid, sends a letter with Sullivan for Calvino. Calvino reads it then reaches for his revolver, but Sullivan kills both Calvino and his bodyguard. The letter reads "Kill Sullivan and all debts are paid," and he rushes home. When he arrives he discovers Connor has already murdered his wife, Annie, and their younger son, Peter, but not Michael, who had arrived home late from detention.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Sullivan and Michael flee Rock Island and head to Chicago to meet Frank Nitti. He offers to work for the Chicago Outfit in exchange for permission to kill Connor, but Nitti rejects the offer. Rooney, listening next door with Connor, reluctantly allows Nitti to dispatch freelance killer Harlen Maguire, who doubles as a crime scene photographer, to kill Sullivan. Nitti suggests Michael must be killed as well to prevent him seeking revenge in the future, but Rooney refuses. However, Nitti secretly orders Maguire to kill Michael as well. Maguire tracks Sullivan to a roadside diner. The two meet and have a seemingly casual conversation while Michael hides in the car. Sensing the danger, Sullivan escapes the diner through the bathroom window and slashes Maguire's tires before driving away.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Sullivan now plots to force the Outfit to give up Connor by robbing the banks that hold its money. He teaches Michael to drive in order to become their getaway driver. Sullivan is impeded when the mob withdraws its money, so he visits Rooney's accountant Alexander Rance. Rance stalls Sullivan until Maguire enters with a shotgun, killing Rance while Sullivan escapes with Rooney's ledgers. However, during the escape, Maguire shoots Sullivan in the arm. Michael drives them to a farm after Sullivan collapses from his wound, where an elderly childless couple helps him recover. Sullivan's bond with his son grows and Michael comes to realize his father loves him.


title: Road to Perdition

text: The ledgers reveal that Connor has been embezzling from his father for years, using the names of dead men including McGovern. Believing Rooney will call off the hit on him if he knows the truth, Sullivan gifts the couple a chunk of the stolen cash and heads back to Chicago. Sullivan confronts Rooney at Mass, learning Rooney already knows about Connor and expects he will be killed – if not by Sullivan, then by Nitti's men once Rooney is dead. He still refuses to give up his son and urges Sullivan to flee with Michael and ensure he becomes a better man than either of them.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Later one night, cloaked by darkness and rain, Sullivan ambushes and kills Rooney's bodyguards with his Tommy Gun and walks up to Rooney. As Rooney mutters "I'm glad it's you", Sullivan reluctantly shoots him. Having no further reasons to protect Connor now that Rooney is dead, Nitti reveals Connor's location after Sullivan promises the feud ends with his death. Sullivan goes to the hotel where Connor is hiding and kills him in the bathtub.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Sullivan takes his son to his Aunt Sarah's beach house in Perdition, on the shore of Lake Michigan, where he is ambushed and shot by Maguire inside the house as Michael stands on the beach. As Maguire photographs the dying Sullivan, Michael appears and points a gun at Maguire but cannot bring himself to pull the trigger. As Maguire beckons to Michael to give him the gun, Sullivan fatally shoots Maguire. Sullivan tells his son he knew he couldn't do it before dying in his arms.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Michael says his father's fear was that he would follow the same road, and that he has not held a gun since his father died. Michael drives the car back to the farm, saying he grew up there, and now when he is asked if his father was a good man, he just tells them, "He was my father."


title: Road to Perdition

text: When Max Allan Collins wrote the graphic novel "Road to Perdition", his book agent saw potential in the story as a film adaptation and showed it to a film agent. By 1999, the novel had reached Dean Zanuck, who was the vice president of development at the company owned by his father, producer Richard D. Zanuck. The novel was sent to the elder Zanuck in Morocco, who was there producing "Rules of Engagement" (2000). The Zanucks agreed on the story's prospect and sent it to director-producer Steven Spielberg. Shortly afterward, Spielberg set up the project at his studio DreamWorks, though he did not pursue direction of the film due to his full slate.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Mendes sought a new project after completing "American Beauty" (1999) and explored prospects including "A Beautiful Mind", "K-PAX", "The Shipping News", and "The Lookout". DreamWorks sent Mendes "Road to Perdition" as a prospect, and Mendes was attracted to the story, considering it "narratively very simple, but thematically very complex". He specified one theme being the parents' world is inaccessible to their children. Mendes considered the story's theme to be about how children deal with violence, and whether exposure to violence would render children violent themselves. Mendes described the script as having "no moral absolutes", a factor that appealed to the director.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Spielberg first contacted screenwriter David Self to adapt the story into a feature film. Self wrote an initial draft that remained close to the source material and retained most of its dialogue. The screenplay was then rewritten by uncredited writers, distancing the script from the graphic novel and leaving the core elements of the story. Some of the harsher aspects of the story were toned down as the script became more streamlined; for example, in some early drafts of the screenplay, Sullivan became an alcoholic, but this element was ultimately absent from the final version.


title: Road to Perdition

text: The story itself is deeply informed by the "Lone Wolf and Cub" manga series. Novelist Max Allan Collins acknowledged the influence of "Lone Wolf and Cub" on his graphic novel "Road to Perdition" in an interview to the BBC, declaring that ""Road To Perdition" is 'an unabashed homage' to "Lone Wolf and Cub"".


title: Road to Perdition

text: Some of the characters' names were slightly changed from their original versions from the graphic novel: the surname of the real-life gangsters John Looney and his son Connor were changed to Rooney, and the surname of Tom Hanks' character and his family was streamlined from the original O'Sullivan to simply Sullivan. One significant addition to the script was the creation of Maguire to provide a persistent element of pursuit to the Sullivans' departure from the old world.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Hanks and cinematographer Conrad Hall requested Mendes to limit violence in the film to meaningful acts, rather than gratuitous carnage. Hanks' character, Michael Sullivan, is known as "The Angel of Death" in the graphic novel and invokes fear in those around him, but his infamy is downplayed in the film. Mendes, who described the graphic novel as "much more pulpy", sought to reduce the graphic novel's background to its essence, seeking the "nonverbal simplicity" of films like "Once Upon a Time in America" (1984), "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" (1973), and films by Akira Kurosawa that lack dialogue. Duplicate language in characters' confrontations in "Road to Perdition" was trimmed to the absolute minimum. Mendes described "Road to Perdition" as a "poetic, elegiac story, in which the pictures tell the story". An example of one such unspoken scene in the film was the piano duet between Rooney and Michael Sr., intended to convey their relationship without words. In the final 20 minutes of "Road to Perdition", the script was written to have only six lines of dialogue.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Max Allan Collins originally wanted to write the adapted screenplay, but was not given the opportunity. He chose to stay out of the scripting process out of respect for the different style of writing for a different medium, though he served as a consultant in the process. Collins praised the addition of Maguire and considered the minimalist use of dialogue to be appropriate. The author also applauded the film's version of Rooney as "more overtly a father figure" to Sullivan.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Collins opposed the profanity in the script, as the vulgar language did not fit his vision of the 1930s. He also contested the path of Sullivan's son in the film. In the graphic novel, the son kills once, and in the film, he does not kill anyone. Collins also disagreed with the narration technique of the film. In the novel, the son narrates the story as an adult, becoming a priest, while in the film, he narrates while still a young boy.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Tom Hanks was sent a copy of the graphic novel by Steven Spielberg while he was filming "Cast Away". Initially too busy to make sense of the story, he later received David Self's adapted screenplay, to which he became attached. Hanks, a father to four children, described Michael Sullivan's role, "I just got this guy. If you're a man, and you've got offspring ... emotionally, it's devastating."


title: Road to Perdition

text: Tyler Hoechlin was chosen from over 2,000 candidates to portray Michael Sullivan's son. The actor was 14 years old at the time of filming. For scenes in which Hoechlin's character assisted his father as a getaway driver, Hoechlin was trained by a driving instructor.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Paul Newman was unanimously the first choice for the role of John Rooney. The actor prepared by requesting Frank McCourt, the Irish-American author of "Angela's Ashes", to record a tape of his voice.


title: Road to Perdition

text: David Self, who created the Maguire character, explained, "He gets so jaded from exposure to this world, he steps over the line from being the storyteller to being the story maker." To capture the "seedy countenance" of the character, Jude Law was given a sallow skin tone that reflected the wear from working in a darkroom. Law's teeth also received a lower gumline and had a rotted look. He was also given a weak, thinning hairline. Maguire's apartment also displays a collection of photographs of dead bodies, some of them actual police stills from the 1930s.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Stanley Tucci was selective about roles in gangster films, believing that Hollywood stereotyped Italian-Americans as gangsters. However, attracted by the prospect of working with Mendes, the actor accepted the role of Nitti, a real-life Mob boss from Chicago.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Anthony LaPaglia was cast as Al Capone and filmed a single scene, which was omitted from the final cut, and can be found in the DVD's deleted scenes. Mendes believed that Capone was more menacing as an unseen presence. Actor Alfred Molina was approached to portray Capone, but Molina was forced to turn the role down due to scheduling conflicts with "Frida" (2002).


title: Road to Perdition

text: Mendes sought to produce a period film that would avoid clichés in the gangster genre. He chose to film "Road to Perdition" on location in Chicago, IL including downtown at the University Club of Chicago, the Chicago neighborhood of Pullman, the Charles G. Dawes House in Evanston, Illinois, as well as the far west Chicago suburb of Geneva, Illinois. General Jones Armory, the state's largest location mainstay which houses units of the Illinois National Guard, was provided to the studio by the Illinois State Film Commission. Sets were built inside the armory, including interiors of the Sullivan family's home and the Rooney mansion. The availability of an inside location provided the crew complete control over the lighting environment, which was established with the rigging of scaffoldings.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Mendes collaborated with costume designer Albert Wolsky, production designer Dennis Gassner, and cinematographer Conrad Hall to design the film's style. Wolsky designed costumes that were "very controlled, with soft outlines and very soft silhouettes". Gassner built sets that could capture the cold look of the era. Mendes sought a muted palette for the film, having dark backgrounds and sets with dark, muted greens and grays. Mendes filmed "Road to Perdition" using the Super 35 format.


title: Road to Perdition

text: The director filmed exterior scenes in Illinois in the winter and the spring of 2001, using real weather conditions such as snow, rain, and mud for the scenes. Mendes considered the usage of bleak weather conditions and the intended coldness of Gassner's exterior locations to define the characters' emotional states. Pullman became a key location to reflect this theme, having several settings, including the town's historic Florence Hotel, easily redressed by the crew for the film. Filming concluded in June 2001.


title: Road to Perdition

text: To establish the lighting of scenes in "Road to Perdition", Mendes drew from the paintings of Edward Hopper as a source of inspiration, particularly Hopper's "New York Movie" (1939). Mendes and cinematographer Conrad Hall sought to convey similar atmospheric lighting for the film's scenes, applying a "less is more" mantra. Hall also shot at wide apertures that retained one point in the depth of field sharply focused. Hall considered the technique to provide an emotional dimension to the scenes. The cinematographer also used unconventional techniques and materials to create unique lighting effects. One of Hall's methods was to use black silk in daylight exterior scenes to filter the light enough to create an in-shade look.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Hall purposely distanced the camera from Hanks' character, Michael Sullivan Sr., at the beginning of the film to establish the perspective of Sullivan's son, who is unaware of his father's true nature. Hanks's character was filmed as partially obscured and seen through doorways, and his entrances and exits took place in shadows. A wide lens was used to maintain a distance from the character.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Shots in the film were drawn directly from panels in the graphic novel, illustrated by Richard Piers Rayner. An instance of the direct influence is the scene in which Michael Jr. looks up at the Chicago skyline from the vehicle, with the skyline reflected in the vehicle's glass.


title: Road to Perdition

text: A seamless 40-second driving scene, in which Michael Sullivan and his son travel into Chicago from the countryside, was aided by visual effects. The live-action part of the scene was filmed at LaSalle Street, and due to the lack of scenery for part of the drive down LaSalle Street, the background of Balbo Drive was included with the use of visual effects.


title: Road to Perdition

text: The film's title, "Road to Perdition", is both Michael Sullivan and his son's destination town and a euphemism for Hell, a road that Sullivan desires to prevent his son from traveling. Sullivan, who chooses his violent path early on in life, considers himself irredeemable and seeks to save his son from a similar fate. Said Mendes, "[Sullivan] is in a battle for the soul of his son. Can a man who has led a bad life achieve redemption through his child?" Hanks described Sullivan as a man who achieved a comfortable status through violent means, whose likely repercussions he ignored. Sullivan is a good father and husband, but also has a job that requires him to be a violent killer. The film explores this paradoxical dichotomy. When Sullivan is faced with the consequences, Hanks says, "At the moment we're dropped into the story, it is literally the last day of that false perspective." To keep Sullivan from justifying his violent actions in the film, Mendes omitted scenes in the final cut that had Sullivan explaining his background to his son.


title: Road to Perdition

text: In the film, most of the numerous acts of violence are committed off-screen. The violent acts were also designed to be quick, reflecting the actual speed of violence in the real world. The focus was not on the direct victims of the perpetuated violence, but the impact of violence on the perpetrators or witnesses to the act.


title: Road to Perdition

text: The film also explores father-son relationships between Michael Sullivan and his son, Sullivan and his boss, John Rooney, and between Rooney and his son Connor. Sullivan simultaneously idolizes and fears Rooney, and Sullivan's son feels the same about his own father. Rooney's son, Connor, has none of Sullivan's redeeming qualities, and Rooney is conflicted about whom to protect: his biological son or his surrogate son. Connor is jealous of his father's relationship with Sullivan, which fuels his actions, ultimately causing a domino effect that drives the film.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Because Sullivan shields his background from his son, his attempt to preserve the father-son relationship is actually harmful. Tragedy brings Sullivan and his son together. Sullivan escapes from the old world with his son, and the boy finds an opportunity to strengthen the relationship with his father. Tyler Hoechlin, who portrayed Michael Jr., explained, "His dad starts to realize that Michael is all he has now and how much he's been missing. I think the journey is of a father and son getting to know each other, and also finding out who they themselves are."


title: Road to Perdition

text: Water served as a motif in the film. It was developed after researching the wake scene at the beginning of the film informed the director that corpses were kept on ice in the 1930s to keep bodies from decomposing. The notion was interwoven into the film, which linked the presence of water with death. Mendes reflected on the theme, "The linking of water with death ... speaks of the mutability of water and links it to the uncontrollability of fate. These are things that humans can't control."


title: Road to Perdition

text: With filming concluding in June 2001, the studio intended a United States release for the following Christmas. However, in September 2001, Mendes requested more time. It was rescheduled for release on July 12, 2002, an unconventional move that placed the drama among the action-oriented summer films.


title: Road to Perdition

text: "Road to Perdition" opened in 1,798 theaters in its debut weekend, competing against several other new releases including "Reign of Fire", "" and "". It ended up grossing $22.1 million, placing second to holdover "Men in Black II". It eventually grossed $104.5 million in the United States and $76.5 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $181 million.


title: Road to Perdition

text: "Road to Perdition" received positive reviews from critics, with Conrad L. Hall's cinematography, the production design, and the lead performances of Hanks and Newman being praised. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 81% based on 216 reviews, with an average rating of 7.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Somber, stately, and beautifully mounted, Sam Mendes' "Road to Perdition" is a well-crafted mob movie that explores the ties between fathers and sons." Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 72 out of 100, based on 36 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" praised Hall's cinematography and the thematic use of water. He, too, felt an emotional detachment from the characters, saying, "I knew I admired it, but I didn't know if I liked it ... It is cold and holds us outside."


title: Road to Perdition

text: Kirk Honeycutt of "The Hollywood Reporter" praised Hanks, Newman, and Craig but called Law's performance "almost cartoonish". Peter Travers of "Rolling Stone" also complimented Hanks and Newman: "[They] act together with the confidence of titans, their talents in the service of character, never star ego." Travers cited Hall's "breathtaking" cinematography and composer Thomas Newman's "evocative" score.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Paul Clinton of CNN said: "While these deeply human issues are touched upon, they're never fully explored, and that undermines the sense of greatness to which this movie obviously aspires". Clinton considered Craig's character "one-dimensional to the extreme". He found the cinematography too overpowering for the film's storyline, which he considered "weak". J. Hoberman of "The Village Voice" described the film as "grim yet soppy." He added: "The action is stilted and the tabloid energy embalmed." Stephen Hunter of "The Washington Post" thought that the script lost its path when Sullivan and his son fled their old life.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Eleanor Ringel Gillespie of "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution" enjoyed the film's cinematography and Depression-era setting, as well as the performances of Hanks and Newman. Gillespie expressed the wish that the film lasted a little longer to explore its emotional core further. Eric Harrison of the "Houston Chronicle" considered "Road to Perdition" "the most brilliant work in this [gangster] genre" since the uncut "Once Upon a Time in America" (1984). Harrison considered Self's script "so finely honed that the story can change directions in a heartbeat."


title: Road to Perdition

text: In April 2006, "Empire" recognized "Road to Perdition" as No. 6 on its list of the top 20 comic book films.


title: Road to Perdition

text: Max Allan Collins, who authored the graphic novel, was hired to write the novelization for the film adaptation. Collins initially turned in a draft that contained 90,000 words, but the licensing at DreamWorks required the author to use only the dialogue from the film and no additional dialogue. Collins reluctantly edited the novelization down to 50,000 words and later said he regretted taking on the task. In 2016, Brash Books published Collins' original version of the novelization as "Road to Perdition: The New, Expanded Edition"


title: Road to Perdition

text: "Road to Perdition" was released on DVD on February 25, 2003, in both full screen and anamorphic widescreen versions. The DVD's features included an audio commentary, deleted scenes, an HBO "Making of" documentary, and a photo gallery. Work on the DVD began on the same day the film's production began, and a collaborative effort among the director, the studio, and the DVD production crew shaped the DVD's content. Due to a limit of space on the DVD, the film's deleted scenes were chosen over a DTS soundtrack. Instead, the DVD included a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. A special edition DVD containing both DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks was also released, excluding the "Making of" documentary to fit both soundtracks.


title: Road to Perdition

text: "Road to Perdition" was released on Blu-ray Disc on August 3, 2010, featuring a widescreen transfer, a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack, and all of the features from the DVD release.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (; July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) was an American singer-songwriter, one of the most significant figures in American folk music. His work focused on themes of American socialism and anti-fascism. He has inspired several generations both politically and musically with songs such as "This Land Is Your Land", written in response to the American exceptionalist song "God Bless America".


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie wrote hundreds of country, folk, and children's songs, along with ballads and improvised works. "Dust Bowl Ballads", Guthrie's album of songs about the Dust Bowl period, was included on "Mojo" magazine's list of 100 Records That Changed The World, and many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress. Songwriters who have acknowledged Guthrie as a major influence on their work include Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, Robert Hunter, Harry Chapin, John Mellencamp, Pete Seeger, Andy Irvine, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Jeff Tweedy, Tom Paxton, Brian Fallon, Sean Bonnette, and Sixto Rodríguez . He frequently performed with the message "This machine kills fascists" displayed on his guitar.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie was brought up by middle-class parents in Okemah, Oklahoma. He married at 19, but with the advent of the dust storms that marked the Dust Bowl period, he left his wife and three children to join the thousands of Okies who were migrating to California looking for employment. He worked at Los Angeles radio station KFVD, achieving some fame from playing hillbilly music, made friends with Will Geer and John Steinbeck, and wrote a column for the communist newspaper "People's World" from May 1939 to January 1940.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Throughout his life, Guthrie was associated with United States communist groups, although he apparently did not belong to any. With the outbreak of World War II and the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact the Soviet Union had signed with Germany in 1939, the anti-Stalin owners of KFVD radio were not comfortable with Guthrie's political leanings after he wrote a song praising the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet invasion of Poland. He left the station, ending up in New York, where he wrote and recorded his 1940 album "Dust Bowl Ballads", based on his experiences during the 1930s, which earned him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Troubadour". In February 1940, he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land". He said it was a response to what he felt was the overplaying of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" on the radio.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie was married three times and fathered eight children. His son Arlo Guthrie became nationally known as a musician. Woody died in 1967 from complications of Huntington's disease. His first two daughters also died of the disease.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie was born July 14, 1912, in Okemah, a small town in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, the son of Nora Belle (née Sherman) and Charles Edward Guthrie. His parents named him after Woodrow Wilson, then Governor of New Jersey and the Democratic candidate who was elected as President of the United States in fall 1912. Charles Guthrie was an industrious businessman, owning at one time up to of land in Okfuskee County. He was actively involved in Oklahoma politics and was a conservative Democratic candidate for office in the county. Charles Guthrie was reportedly involved in the 1911 lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson. (Woody Guthrie wrote three songs about the event in the 1960s. He said that his father, Charles, became a member of the Ku Klux Klan during its revival beginning in 1915.)


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Three significant fires occurred during Guthrie's early life. In 1909, one fire caused the loss of his family's home in Okemah a month after it was completed. When Guthrie was seven, his sister Clara died after setting her clothes on fire during an argument with her mother, and, later, in 1927, their father was severely burned in a fire at home. Guthrie's mother, Nora, was afflicted with Huntington's disease, although the family did not know this at the time. What they could see was dementia and muscular degeneration.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: When Woody was 14, Nora was committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane. At the time his father Charley was living and working in Pampa, Texas, to repay debts from unsuccessful real estate deals. Woody and his siblings were on their own in Oklahoma; they relied on their eldest brother Roy for support. The 14-year-old Woody Guthrie worked odd jobs around Okemah, begging meals and sometimes sleeping at the homes of family friends.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie had a natural affinity for music, learning old ballads and traditional English and Scottish songs from the parents of friends. Guthrie befriended an African-American shoeshine boy named George, who played blues on his harmonica. After listening to George play, Guthrie bought his own harmonica and began playing along with him. He used to busk for money and food. Although Guthrie did not do well as a student and dropped out of high school in his senior year before graduation, his teachers described him as bright. He was an avid reader on a wide range of topics.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In 1929, Guthrie's father sent for Woody to join him in Texas, but little changed for the aspiring musician. Guthrie, then 18, was reluctant to attend high school classes in Pampa; he spent most of his time learning songs by busking on the streets and reading in the library at Pampa's city hall. He regularly played at dances with his father's half-brother Jeff Guthrie, a fiddle player. His mother died in 1930 of complications of Huntington's disease while still in the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: At age 19, Guthrie met and married his first wife, Mary Jennings, in Texas in 1931. They had three children together: Gwendolyn, Sue, and Bill. Bill died at age 23 as the result of an automobile accident. Each daughter died of Huntington's disease at the age of 41, in the 1970s, evidently passed on from their father, although Guthrie himself was not diagnosed with the condition until much later in life.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie and Mary divorced in 1940. He married twice more, to Marjorie Greenblatt (1945–53), and Anneke Van Kirk (1953–56), having a total of eight children.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: 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.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: 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".


title: Woody Guthrie

text: While at KFVD, Guthrie met newscaster Ed Robbin. Robbin was impressed with a song Guthrie wrote about political activist Thomas Mooney, wrongly convicted in a case that was a cause célèbre of the time. Robbin, who became Guthrie's political mentor, introduced Guthrie to socialists and Communists in Southern California, including Will Geer. (He introduced Guthrie to writer John Steinbeck.) Robbin remained Guthrie's lifelong friend, and helped Guthrie book benefit performances in the communist circles in Southern California.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Notwithstanding Guthrie's later claim that "the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party", he was never a member of the party. He was noted as a fellow traveler—an outsider who agreed with the platform of the party while avoiding party discipline. Guthrie wrote a column for the communist newspaper, "People's World". The column, titled "Woody Sez", appeared a total of 174 times from May 1939 to January 1940. "Woody Sez" was not explicitly political, but was about current events as observed by Guthrie. He wrote the columns in an exaggerated hillbilly dialect and usually included a small comic. These columns were published posthumously as a collection after Guthrie's death. Steve Earle said of Guthrie, "I don't think of Woody Guthrie as a political writer. He was a writer who lived in very political times."


title: Woody Guthrie

text: With the outbreak of World War II and publicity about the non-aggression pact the Soviet Union had signed with Germany in 1939, the owners of KFVD radio did not want its staff "spinning apologia" for the Soviet Union. It fired both Robbin and Guthrie. Without the daily radio show, Guthrie's employment chances declined, and he returned with his family to Pampa, Texas. Although Mary was happy to return to Texas, Guthrie preferred to accept Will Geer's invitation to New York City and headed east.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Arriving in New York, Guthrie, known as "the Oklahoma cowboy", was embraced by its folk music community. For a time, he slept on a couch in Will Geer's apartment. Guthrie made his first recordings—several hours of conversation and songs recorded by the folklorist Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress—as well as an album, "Dust Bowl Ballads," for Victor Records in Camden, New Jersey.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In February 1940, he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land", as a response to what he felt was an overplaying of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" on the radio. Guthrie thought the lyrics were unrealistic and complacent. He adapted the melody from an old gospel song, "Oh My Loving Brother", which had been adapted by the country group the Carter Family for their song "Little Darling Pal Of Mine". Guthrie signed the manuscript with the comment, "All you can write is what you see." Although the song was written in 1940, it was four years before he recorded it for Moses Asch in April 1944. Sheet music was produced and given to schools by Howie Richmond sometime later.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In March 1940, Guthrie was invited to play at a benefit hosted by the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Farm Workers, to raise money for migrant workers. There he met the folksinger Pete Seeger, and the two men became good friends. Seeger accompanied Guthrie back to Texas to meet other members of the Guthrie family. He recalled an awkward conversation with Mary Guthrie's mother, in which she asked for Seeger's help to persuade Guthrie to treat her daughter better.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: From April 1940, Guthrie and Seeger lived together in the Greenwich Village loft of sculptor Harold Ambellan and his fiancée. Guthrie had some success in New York at this time as a guest on CBS's radio program "Back Where I Come From" and used his influence to get a spot on the show for his friend Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter. Ledbetter's Tenth Street apartment was a gathering spot for the musician circle in New York at the time, and Guthrie and Ledbetter were good friends, as they had busked together at bars in Harlem.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In November 1941, Seeger introduced Guthrie to his friend the poet Charles Olson, then a junior editor at the fledgling magazine "Common Ground". The meeting led to Guthrie writing the article "Ear Players" in the Spring 1942 issue of the magazine. The article marked Guthrie's debut as a published writer in the mainstream media.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In September 1940, Guthrie was invited by the Model Tobacco Company to host their radio program "Pipe Smoking Time". Guthrie was paid $180 a week, an impressive salary in 1940. He was finally making enough money to send regular payments back to Mary. He also brought her and the children to New York, where the family lived briefly in an apartment on Central Park West. The reunion represented Woody's desire to be a better father and husband. He said, "I have to set real hard to think of being a dad." Guthrie quit after the seventh broadcast, claiming he had begun to feel the show was too restrictive when he was told what to sing. Disgruntled with New York, Guthrie packed up Mary and his children in a new car and headed west to California.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Choreographer Sophie Maslow developed "Folksay" as an elaborate mix of modern dance and ballet, which combined folk songs by Woody Guthrie with text from Carl Sandburg's 1936 book-length poem "The People, Yes". The premiere took place in March 1942 at the Humphrey-Weidman Studio Theatre in New York City. Guthrie provided live music for the performance, which featured Maslow and her New Dance Group. Two-and-a-half years later, Maslow brought "Folksay" to early television under the direction of Leo Hurwitz. The same group performed the ballet live in front of CBS TV cameras. The 30-minute broadcast aired on WCBW, the pioneer CBS television station in New York City (now WCBS-TV), from 8:15–8:45 pm ET on November 24, 1944. Featured were Maslow and the New Dance Group, which included among others Jane Dudley, Pearl Primus, and William Bales. Woody Guthrie and fellow folksinger Tony Kraber played guitar, sang songs, and read text from "The People, Yes". The program received positive reviews and was performed on television over WCBW a second time in early 1945.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In May 1941, after a brief stay in Los Angeles, Guthrie moved to Portland, Oregon, in the neighborhood of Lents, on the promise of a job. Gunther von Fritsch was directing a documentary about the Bonneville Power Administration's construction of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, and needed a narrator. Alan Lomax had recommended Guthrie to narrate the film and sing songs onscreen. The original project was expected to take 12 months, but as filmmakers became worried about casting such a political figure, they minimized Guthrie's role. The Department of the Interior hired him for one month to write songs about the Columbia River and the construction of the federal dams for the documentary's soundtrack. Guthrie toured the Columbia River and the Pacific Northwest. Guthrie said he "couldn't believe it, it's a paradise", which appeared to inspire him creatively. In one month Guthrie wrote 26 songs, including three of his most famous: "Roll On, Columbia, Roll On", "Pastures of Plenty", and "Grand Coulee Dam". The surviving songs were released as "Columbia River Songs". The film "Columbia" was not completed until 1949 (see below). At the conclusion of the month in Oregon and Washington, Guthrie wanted to return to New York. Tired of the continual uprooting, Mary Guthrie told him to go without her and the children. Although Guthrie would see Mary again, once on a tour through Los Angeles with the Almanac Singers, it was essentially the end of their marriage. Divorce was difficult, since Mary was a Catholic, but she reluctantly agreed in December 1943.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Following the conclusion of his work in the Northwest, Guthrie corresponded with Pete Seeger about Seeger's newly formed folk-protest group, the Almanac Singers. Guthrie returned to New York with plans to tour the country as a member of the group. The singers originally worked out of a loft in New York City hosting regular concerts called "hootenannies", a word Pete and Woody had picked up in their cross-country travels. The singers eventually outgrew the space and moved into the cooperative Almanac House in Greenwich Village.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Initially, Guthrie helped write and sing what the Almanac Singers termed "peace" songs while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, the group wrote anti-fascist songs. The members of the Almanac Singers and residents of the Almanac House were a loosely defined group of musicians, though the core members included Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell and Lee Hays. In keeping with common utopian ideals, meals, chores and rent at the Almanac House were shared. The Sunday hootenannies were good opportunities to collect donation money for rent. Songs written in the Almanac House had shared songwriting credits among all the members, although in the case of "Union Maid", members would later state that Guthrie wrote the song, ensuring that his children would receive residuals.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In the Almanac House, Guthrie added authenticity to their work, since he was a "real" working class Oklahoman. "There was the heart of America personified in Woody ... And for a New York Left that was primarily Jewish, first or second generation American, and was desperately trying to get Americanized, I think a figure like Woody was of great, great importance," a friend of the group, Irwin Silber, would say. Woody routinely emphasized his working-class image, rejected songs he felt were not in the country blues vein he was familiar with, and rarely contributed to household chores. House member Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, another Okie, would later recall that Woody "loved people to think of him as a real working class person and not an intellectual". Guthrie contributed songwriting and authenticity in much the same capacity for Pete Seeger's post-Almanac Singers project "People's Songs", a newsletter and booking organization for labor singers, founded in 1945.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie was a prolific writer, penning thousands of pages of unpublished poems and prose, many written while living in New York City. After a recording session with Alan Lomax, Lomax suggested Guthrie write an autobiography. Lomax thought Guthrie's descriptions of growing up were some of the best accounts he had read of American childhood. During this time, Guthrie met Marjorie Mazia (the professional name of Marjorie Greenblatt), a dancer in New York who would become his second wife. Mazia was an instructor at the Martha Graham Dance School, where she was assisting Sophie Maslow with her piece "Folksay". Based on the folklore and poetry collected by Carl Sandburg, "Folksay" included the adaptation of some of Guthrie's "Dust Bowl Ballads" for the dance. Guthrie continued to write songs and began work on his autobiography. The end product, "Bound for Glory", was completed with editing assistance by Mazia and was first published by E.P. Dutton in 1943. It is told in the artist's down-home dialect. The "Library Journal" complained about the "too careful reproduction of illiterate speech". However, Clifton Fadiman, reviewing the book in "The New Yorker", remarked that "Someday people are going to wake up to the fact that Woody Guthrie and the ten thousand songs that leap and tumble off the strings of his music box are a national possession, like Yellowstone and Yosemite, and part of the best stuff this country has to show the world."


title: Woody Guthrie

text: This book was the inspiration for the movie "Bound for Glory", starring David Carradine, which won the 1976 Academy Award for Original Music Score for Original Song Score and Its Adaptation or Adaptation Score, and the National Board of Review Award for Best Actor, among other accolades.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In 1944, Guthrie met Moses "Moe" Asch of Folkways Records, for whom he first recorded "This Land Is Your Land". Over the next few years, he recorded "Worried Man Blues", along with hundreds of other songs. These recordings would later be released by Folkways and Stinson Records, which had joint distribution rights. The Folkways recordings are available (through the Smithsonian Institution online shop); the most complete series of these sessions, culled from dates with Asch, is titled "The Asch Recordings".


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie believed performing his anti-fascist songs and poems in the United States was the best use of his talents.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Labor for Victory: In April 1942, "Time" magazine reported that the AFL (American Federation of Labor) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had agreed to a joint radio production, called "Labor for Victory". NBC agreed to run the weekly segment as a "public service". The AFL and CIO presidents William Green and Philip Murray agreed to let their press chiefs, Philip Pearl and Len De Caux, narrate on alternate weeks. The show ran on NBC radio on Saturdays 10:15–10:30 pm, starting on April 25, 1942. "Time" wrote, "De Caux and Pearl hope to make the Labor for Victory program popular enough for an indefinite run, using labor news, name speakers and interviews with workmen. Labor partisanship, they promise, is out." Writers for "Labor for Victory" included: Peter Lyon, a progressive journalist; Millard Lampell (born Allan Sloane), later an American movie and television screenwriter; and Morton Wishengrad, who worked for the AFL.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: For entertainment on CIO episodes, De Caux asked singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie to contribute to the show. "Personally, I would like to see a phonograph record made of your 'Girl in the Red, White, and Blue. The title appears in at least one collection of Guthrie records. Guthrie consented and performed solo two or three times on this program (among several other WWII radio shows, including "Answering You", "Labor for Victory", "Jazz in America", and "We the People"). On August 29, 1942, he performed "The Farmer-Labor Train", with lyrics he had written to the tune of "Wabash Cannonball". (In 1948, he reworked the "Wabash Cannonball" melody as "The Wallace-Taylor Train" for the 1948 Progressive National Convention, which nominated former U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace for president.) The Almanac Singers (of which Guthrie and Lampell were co-founders) appeared on "The Treasury Hour" and CBS Radio's "We the People". The latter was later produced as a television series. (Also, Marc Blitzstein's papers show that Guthrie made some contributions to four CIO episodes (dated June 20, June 27, August 1, August 15, 1948) of "Labor for Victory.") While "Labor for Victory" was a milestone in theory as a national platform, in practice it proved less so. Only 35 of 104 NBC affiliates carried the show. Episodes included the announcement that the show represented "twelve million organized men and women, united in the high resolve to rid the world of Fascism in 1942". Speakers included Donald E. Montgomery, then "consumer's counselor" at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Merchant Marine: Guthrie lobbied the United States Army to accept him as a USO performer instead of conscripting him as a soldier in the draft. When Guthrie's attempts failed, his friends Cisco Houston and Jim Longhi persuaded the singer to join the U.S. Merchant Marine in June 1943. He made several voyages aboard merchant ships SS "William B. Travis", SS "William Floyd", and SS "Sea Porpoise", while they traveled in convoys during the Battle of the Atlantic. He served as a mess man and dishwasher, and frequently sang for the crew and troops to buoy their spirits on transatlantic voyages. His first ship, "William B. Travis", hit a mine in the Mediterranean Sea, which killed one person aboard, but the ship sailed to Bizerte, Tunisia under her own power.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: His last ship, "Sea Porpoise", took troops from the United States to England and France for the D-Day invasion. Guthrie was aboard when the ship was torpedoed off Utah Beach by the German submarine U-390 on July 5, 1944, injuring 12 of the crew. Guthrie was unhurt and the ship stayed afloat; it returned to England, where it was repaired at Newcastle. In July 1944, it returned to the United States.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie was an active supporter of the National Maritime Union, one of many unions for wartime American merchant sailors. Guthrie wrote songs about his experience in the Merchant Marine but was never satisfied with them. Longhi later wrote about Guthrie's marine experiences in his book "Woody, Cisco and Me". The book offers a rare first-hand account of Guthrie during his Merchant Marine service. In 1945, the government decided that Guthrie's association with communism excluded him from further service in the Merchant Marine; he was drafted into the U.S. Army.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: While he was on from the Army, Guthrie married Marjorie. After his discharge, they moved into a house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island and over time had four children: daughters Cathy and Nora; and sons Arlo and Joady. Cathy died as a result of a fire at the age of four, and Guthrie suffered a serious depression from his grief. Arlo and Joady followed in their father's footsteps as singer-songwriters.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: When his family was young, Guthrie wrote and recorded "Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child", a collection of children's music, which includes the song "Goodnight Little Arlo (Goodnight Little Darlin')", written when Arlo was about nine years old. During 1947, he wrote "House of Earth", an historical novel containing explicit sexual material, about a couple who build a house made of clay and earth to withstand the Dust Bowl's brutal weather. He could not get it published. It was published posthumously in 2013, by Harper, under actor Johnny Depp's publishing imprint, Infinitum Nihil.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie was also a prolific sketcher and painter, his images ranging from simple, impressionistic images to free and characterful drawings, typically of the people in his songs.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In 1949, Guthrie's music was used in the documentary film "Columbia River", which explored government dams and hydroelectric projects on the river. Guthrie had been commissioned by the US Bonneville Power Administration in 1941 to write songs for the project, but it had been postponed by World War II.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: The years immediately after the war when he lived on Mermaid Avenue were among Guthrie's most productive as a writer. His extensive writings from this time were archived and maintained by Marjorie and later his estate, mostly handled by his daughter Nora. Several of the manuscripts also contain writing by a young Arlo and the other Guthrie children.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: During this time Ramblin' Jack Elliott studied extensively under Guthrie, visiting his home and observing how he wrote and performed. Elliott, like Bob Dylan later, idolized Guthrie. He was inspired by the singer's idiomatic performance style and repertoire. Because of the decline caused by Guthrie's progressive Huntington's disease, Arlo Guthrie and Bob Dylan both later said that they had learned much of Guthrie's performance style from Elliott. When asked about this, Elliott said, "I was flattered. Dylan learned from me the same way I learned from Woody. Woody didn't teach me. He just said, If you want to learn something, just steal it—that's the way I learned from Lead Belly."


title: Woody Guthrie

text: By the late 1940s, Guthrie's health was declining, and his behavior was becoming extremely erratic. He received various diagnoses (including alcoholism and schizophrenia). In 1952, it was finally determined that he was suffering from Huntington's disease, a genetic disorder inherited from his mother. Believing him to be a danger to their children because of his behavior, Marjorie suggested he return to California without her. They eventually divorced.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Upon his return to California, Guthrie lived at the Theatricum Botanicum, a summer-stock type theatre founded and owned by Will Geer. Together with singers and actors who had been blacklisted by HUAC, he waited out the anti-communist political climate.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: As his health worsened, he met and married his third wife, Anneke Van Kirk. They had a child, Lorina Lynn. The couple moved to Fruit Cove, Florida, where they briefly lived. They lived in a bus on land called Beluthahatchee, owned by his friend Stetson Kennedy. Guthrie's arm was hurt in an accident when gasoline used to start the campfire exploded. Although he regained movement in the arm, he was never able to play the guitar again. In 1954, the couple returned to New York, living in the Beach Haven apartment complex owned and operated by Fred Trump in Gravesend, Brooklyn; Guthrie composed there the song Old Man Trump. Shortly after, Anneke filed for divorce, a result of the strain of caring for Guthrie. Van Kirk left New York after arranging for friends to adopt Lorina Lynn. Lorina had no further contact with her birth parents. She died in a car accident in California in 1973 at the age of 19. After the divorce, Guthrie's second wife, Marjorie, re-entered his life and cared for him until his death.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Increasingly unable to control his muscles, Guthrie was hospitalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris County, New Jersey, from 1956 to 1961; at Brooklyn State Hospital (now Kingsboro Psychiatric Center) in East Flatbush until 1966; and finally at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens Village, New York, until his death in 1967. Marjorie and the children visited Guthrie at Greystone every Sunday. They answered fan mail and the children played on the hospital grounds. Eventually, a longtime fan of Guthrie invited the family to his nearby home for the Sunday visits. This lasted until Guthrie was moved to the Brooklyn State Hospital, which was closer to Howard Beach, New York, where Marjorie and the children then lived.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: During the final few years of his life, Guthrie had become isolated except for family. By 1965, he was unable to speak, often moving his arms or rolling his eyes to communicate. The progression of Huntington's threw Guthrie into extreme emotional states, causing him to lash out at those nearby and to damage a prized book collection of Anneke's. Huntington's symptoms include uncharacteristic aggression, emotional volatility, and social disinhibition.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie's illness was essentially untreated. In those days, the biological nature of the disease was unknown and, consequently, there were no drugs or other effective treatments, other than palliative care. Because of his professional renown, his death from this cause helped raise awareness of the disease. Marjorie helped found the Committee to Combat Huntington's Disease, which became the Huntington's Disease Society of America. None of Guthrie's three surviving children with Marjorie have developed symptoms of Huntington's.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: His son Bill with his first wife Mary Guthrie died in an auto-train accident in Pomona, California, at the age of 23. His and Mary's two daughters, Gwendolyn and Sue, both suffered from Huntington's disease. They each died at age 41.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new generation of young people were inspired by folk singers such as Guthrie. These "folk revivalists" became more politically aware in their music than those of the previous generation. The American Folk Revival was beginning to take place, focused on the issues of the day, such as the civil rights movement and Free Speech Movement. Pockets of folk singers were forming around the country in places such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. One of Guthrie's visitors at Greystone Park was the 19-year-old Bob Dylan, who idolized Guthrie. Dylan wrote of Guthrie's repertoire: "The songs themselves were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them." After learning of Guthrie's whereabouts, Dylan regularly visited him.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Woody Guthrie died at Creedmore State Hospital of complications of Huntington's disease on October 3, 1967. His remains were cremated and scattered at sea. By the time of Guthrie's death, his work had been discovered by a new audience, introduced to them through Dylan, Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, his ex-wife Marjorie and other new members of the folk revival, including his son Arlo.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie never publicly declared himself a Communist, though he was closely associated with the Party. Will Kauffman says,


title: Woody Guthrie

text: The matter of Guthrie's membership, however, remains controversial. Scholar Ronald Radosh has written:


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Similarly writer and historian Aaron J. Leonard, in an article detailing Guthrie's Party membership for the History News Network quoted Pete Seeger:


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Leonard, in his book The Folk Singers and the Bureau also documents how the FBI treated Guthrie as if he were a member, adding him to various iterations of their Security Index – and keeping him on it till well into the early 1960s.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Guthrie took an anti-war U-turn and wrote one song describing the Soviet invasion of Poland as a favor to Polish farmers and another attacking President Roosevelt's loans to Finland to help it defend against the Soviet Union's invasion in the 1939 Winter War. His attitude switched again in 1941 after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: The Woody Guthrie Foundation is a non-profit organization that serves as administrator and caretaker of the Woody Guthrie Archives. The archives house the largest collection of Guthrie material in the world. In 2013, the archives were relocated from New York City to the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after being purchased by the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Foundation. The Center officially opened on April 27, 2013. The Woody Guthrie Center features, in addition to the archives, a museum focused on the life and the influence of Guthrie through his music, writings, art, and political activities. The museum is open to the public; the archives are open only to researchers by appointment. The archives contains thousands of items related to Guthrie, including original artwork, books, correspondence, lyrics, manuscripts, media, notebooks, periodicals, personal papers, photographs, scrapbooks, and other special collections.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Guthrie's unrecorded written lyrics housed at the archives have been the starting point of several albums including the Wilco and Billy Bragg albums "Mermaid Avenue" and "Mermaid Avenue Vol. II", created in 1998 sessions at the invitation of Guthrie's daughter Nora. The Native American (Diné) trio Blackfire also interpreted previously unreleased Guthrie lyrics at Nora's invitation. Jonatha Brooke's 2008 album, "The Works", includes lyrics from the Woody Guthrie Archives set to music by Jonatha Brooke. The various artists compilation "Note of Hope: A Celebration of Woody Guthrie" was released in 2011. Nora selected Jay Farrar, Will Johnson, Anders Parker, and Yim Yames to record her father's lyrics for "New Multitudes" to honor the 100th anniversary of his birth and a was also released.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: The Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, also known as "WoodyFest", is held annually since 1998 in mid-July to commemorate Guthrie's life and music. The festival is held on the weekend closest to Guthrie's birth date (July 14) in Guthrie's hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma. Planned and implemented annually by the Woody Guthrie Coalition, a non-profit corporation, the goal is simply to ensure Guthrie's musical legacy. The Woody Guthrie Coalition commissioned a local Creek Indian sculptor to cast a full-body bronze statue of Guthrie and his guitar, complete with the guitar's well-known message reading, "This machine kills fascists". The statue, sculpted by artist Dan Brook, stands along Okemah's main street in the heart of downtown and was unveiled in 1998, the inaugural year of the festival.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Marjorie Mazia was born Marjorie Greenblatt and her mother, Aliza Greenblatt, was a well-known Yiddish poet. With her, Guthrie wrote numerous Jewish lyrics. Guthrie's Jewish lyrics can be traced to the unusual collaborative relationship he had with Aliza Greenblatt who lived across from Guthrie and his family in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Guthrie (the Oklahoma troubadour) and Greenblatt (the Jewish wordsmith) often discussed their artistic projects and critiqued each other's works, finding common ground in their shared love of culture and social justice, despite very different backgrounds. Their collaboration flourished in 1940s Brooklyn, where Jewish culture was interwoven with music, modern dance, poetry and anti-fascist, pro-labor, classic socialist activism. Guthrie was inspired to write songs that came directly out of this unlikely relationship, both personal and political; he identified the problems of Jews with those of his fellow Okies and other oppressed peoples.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: These lyrics were rediscovered by Nora Guthrie and were set to music by the Jewish Klezmer group The Klezmatics with the release of "Happy Joyous Hanukkah" on JMG Records in 2007. The Klezmatics also released "Wonder Wheel – Lyrics by Woody Guthrie", an album of spiritual lyrics put to music composed by the band. The album, produced by Danny Blume, was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Since his death, artists have paid tribute to Guthrie by covering his songs or by dedicating songs to him. On January 20, 1968, three months after Guthrie's death, Harold Leventhal produced "A Tribute to Woody Guthrie" at New York City's Carnegie Hall. Performers included Jack Elliott, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan and The Band, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, Odetta, and others. Leventhal repeated the tribute on September 12, 1970, at the Hollywood Bowl. Recordings of both concerts were eventually released as LPs and later combined into one CD. A film of the Hollywood Bowl concert was discovered recently and issued as a DVD in 2019 ['Woody Guthrie All star tribute concert 1970'-(MVD Visual. MVD2331D,2019)]


title: Woody Guthrie

text: The Irish folk singer Christy Moore was also strongly influenced by Woody Guthrie in his seminal 1972 album "Prosperous", giving renditions of "The Ludlow Massacre" and Bob Dylan's "Song to Woody". Dylan also penned the poem "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie" as a tribute. Andy Irvine—Moore's bandmate in Irish folk group Planxty and lifelong admirer of Guthrie—wrote his tribute song "" (released on the album "Rain on the Roof"), which includes the chorus from a song Guthrie recorded in March 1944: "". In 1986, Irvine also recorded both parts of Guthrie's "The Ballad of Tom Joad" together as a complete song—under the title of "Tom Joad"—on the first album released by his other band, Patrick Street. Bruce Springsteen also performed a cover of Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" on his live album "Live 1975–1985". In the introduction to the song, Springsteen referred to it as "just about one of the most beautiful songs ever written".


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In 1979, Sammy Walker's LP "Songs From Woody's Pen" was released by Folkways Records. Though the original recordings of these songs date back more than 30 years, Walker sings them in a traditional folk-revivalist manner reminiscent of Guthrie's social conscience and sense of humor. Speaking of Guthrie, Walker said: "I can't think of hardly anyone who has had as much influence on my own singing and songwriting as Woody."


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In September 1996, Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Case Western Reserve University cohosted "Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie", a 10-day conference of panel sessions, lectures, and concerts. The conference became the first in what would become the museum's annual American Music Masters Series conference. Highlights included Arlo Guthrie's keynote address, a Saturday night musical jamboree at Cleveland's Odeon Theater, and a Sunday night concert at Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra. Musicians performing over the course of the conference included Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the Indigo Girls, Ellis Paul, Jimmy LaFave, Ani DiFranco, and others. In 1999, Wesleyan University Press published a collection of essays from the conference and DiFranco's record label, Righteous Babe, released a compilation of the Severance Hall concert, "Til We Outnumber 'Em", in 2000.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: From 1999 to 2002, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service presented the traveling exhibit, "This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie". In collaboration with Nora Guthrie, the Smithsonian exhibition draws from rarely seen objects, illustrations, film footage, and recorded performances to reveal a complex man who was at once poet, musician, protester, idealist, itinerant hobo, and folk legend.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In 2003, Jimmy LaFave produced a Woody Guthrie tribute show called "Ribbon of Highway, Endless Skyway". The ensemble show toured around the country and included a rotating cast of singer-songwriters individually performing Guthrie's songs. Interspersed between songs were Guthrie's philosophical writings read by a narrator. In addition to LaFave, members of the rotating cast included Ellis Paul, Slaid Cleaves, Eliza Gilkyson, Joel Rafael, husband-wife duo Sarah Lee Guthrie (Woody Guthrie's granddaughter) and Johnny Irion, Michael Fracasso, and The Burns Sisters. Oklahoma songwriter Bob Childers, sometimes called "the Dylan of the Dust", served as narrator.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: When word spread about the tour, performers began contacting LaFave, whose only prerequisite was to have an inspirational connection to Guthrie. Each artist chose the Guthrie songs that he or she would perform as part of the tribute. LaFave said, "It works because all the performers are Guthrie enthusiasts in some form". The inaugural performance of the Ribbon of Highway tour took place on February 5, 2003 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The abbreviated show was a featured segment of "Nashville Sings Woody", yet another tribute concert to commemorate the music of Woody Guthrie held during the Folk Alliance Conference. The cast of "Nashville Sings Woody", a benefit for the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, also included Arlo Guthrie, Marty Stuart, Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Janis Ian, and others.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Woody and Marjorie Guthrie were honored at a musical celebration featuring Billy Bragg and the band Brad on October 17, 2007 at Webster Hall in New York City. Steve Earle also performed. The event was hosted by actor/activist Tim Robbins to benefit the Huntington's Disease Society of America to commemorate the organization's 40th Anniversary.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In "I'm Not There", a 2007 biographical movie about Bob Dylan, one of the characters introduced in the film as segments of Dylan's life is a young African-American boy who calls himself "Woody Guthrie". The purpose of this particular character was a reference to Dylan's youthful obsession with Guthrie. The fictional Woody also reflects the fictitious autobiographies that Dylan constructed during his early career as he established his own artistic identity. In the film there is even a scene where the fictional Woody visits the real Woody Guthrie as he lies ill and dying in a hospital in New York (a reference to the times when a nineteen-year-old Dylan would regularly visit his idol, after learning of his whereabouts, while he was hospitalized in New York in the 1960s). Later, a sketch on "Saturday Night Live" would spoof these visits, alleging that Dylan stole the line, "They'll stone you for playing your guitar!" from Guthrie.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: Pete Seeger had the Sloop "Woody Guthrie" built for an organization he founded, the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. It was launched in 1978. Now operated by the Beacon Sloop Club, it serves to educate people about sailing and the history and environs of the Hudson River.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In 1988, Woody Guthrie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and, in 2000, he was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Guthrie was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 1997. In 2006, Guthrie was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. In 1987, "Roll on Columbia" was chosen as the official Washington State Folk Song, and in 2001 Guthrie's "Oklahoma Hills" was chosen to be the official state folk song of Oklahoma.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: On June 26, 1998, as part of its Legends of American Music series, the United States Postal Service issued 45 million 32-cent stamps honoring folk musicians Huddie Ledbetter, Guthrie, Sonny Terry and Josh White. The four musicians were represented on sheets of 20 stamps.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In July 2001, CB's Gallery in New York City began hosting an annual Woody Guthrie Birthday Bash concert featuring multiple performers. This event moved to the Bowery Poetry Club in 2007 after CB's Gallery and CBGB, its parent club, closed. The final concert in the series took place on July 14, 2012, Guthrie's 100th birthday.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In January 2005, Canadian hip-hop artist Buck 65 released "This Right Here Is Buck 65". Track 8 is a cover of "Talking Fishing Blues".


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In 2006, The Klezmatics set Jewish lyrics written by Guthrie to music. The resulting album, "Wonder Wheel", won the Grammy award for best contemporary world music album.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: On February 10, 2008, "", a rare live recording released in cooperation with the Woody Guthrie Foundation, was the recipient of a Grammy Award in the category Best Historical Album. Less than two years later, Guthrie was again nominated for a Grammy in the same category with the 2009 release of "My Dusty Road" on Rounder Records.


title: Woody Guthrie

text: In the centennial year of Guthrie's birth, another album of newly composed songs on his lyrics has been released: "New Multitudes". On March 10, 2012, there was a tribute concert at the Brady Theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma. John Mellencamp, Arlo Guthrie, Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion, the Del McCoury Band and the Flaming Lips performed.