Woody Guthrie grew up in Okemah, Oklahoma, in a family that fell apart slowly under the twin pressures of the Dust Bowl and his mother’s progressive illness. By the early 1930s, he was drifting — playing guitar on street corners, riding freight trains, showing up in places where transient workers gathered and playing whatever people wanted to hear.
He drove and hitched along Route 66 multiple times in the 1930s, going west with the migration, coming back east, going west again. What he was doing on those trips was collecting material. The people he met on the road — the Okies in their overloaded cars, the farm workers in California, the men gathered around fires at the edge of labor camps — became the population of his songs.
This Land Is Your Land, his most famous composition, was written in 1940 as an argument with God Bless America, which Guthrie found insufferably optimistic given the actual state of the country. He drove the same roads he described in the song — the redwood forests and ribbon highways — and the song has a traveler’s specific quality, a person-moving-through-landscape quality, that comes from the fact that he actually moved through them.
Guthrie understood Route 66 not as a tourist attraction or a symbol of freedom but as a labor migration corridor — the road that connected desperate people to inadequate work. His politics were radical, his talent enormous, and his influence on American music permanent.
Bob Dylan drove to New York to meet him in 1961, when Guthrie was dying of Huntington’s disease in a New Jersey hospital. The road that Guthrie had traveled kept generating artists long after he stopped traveling it.
We are offering licences for ROUTE 66® Beer in specific territories. An invitation to others to become part of this story. To carry a piece of the road with them and to contribute to the story. We will share a percentage of royalties with Route 66 associations to keep the story alive.
The journey continues. This story is brought to you by ROUTE 66® BEER. Find us at ROUTE66BEER.COM
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