page_title: Woody Guthrie
section_title: Tributes
hierarchical_section_title: Woody Guthrie / Musical legacy / Tributes
caption_attribution_description: English: Billy Bragg performing at South by Southwest in 2008. Photographed by Kris Krug.
context_page_description: Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was an American singer-songwriter, who is considered one of the most significant figures in American western folk music. His music, including songs such as "This Land Is Your Land", has inspired several generations both politically and musically.
  Guthrie wrote hundreds of country, folk, and children's songs, along with ballads and improvised works. His album of songs about the Dust Bowl period, Dust Bowl Ballads, 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 such as 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, and Sixto Rodríguez have acknowledged Guthrie as a major influence on their work. He frequently performed with the slogan "This machine kills fascists" displayed on his guitar.
context_section_description: 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)]
  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 "Never Tire of the Road" (released on the album Rain on the Roof), which includes the chorus from a song Guthrie recorded in March 1944: "You Fascists Are Bound to Lose". 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."
  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."
  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.
  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.
  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
caption: English anti-fascist musician Billy Bragg is one of several artists influenced by Guthrie. He and rock band Wilco recorded three albums' worth of new music containing Guthrie's previously unpublished lyrics.
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