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Smithsonian Announces A National Touring Exhibition
On the Original Songwriter Activist Woody Guthrie

“This Land is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie”
National Tour Begins June 26 at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage

The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) announces the premiere of “This Land is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie” at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles, CA on June 26.  The exhibition will be on view through Sept. 26. In collaboration with Nora Guthrie, executive director of the Woody Guthrie Archives, SITES has organized an exhibition that draws from rarely seen objects and film footage, original artifacts, folk art and illustrations to reveal the complexity of a man who has been described as poet, musician, protester, idealist, hobo, and folk legend.

Visitors to the exhibition will hear previously unreleased music and interviews from the Smithsonian Folkways collection at listening stations throughout the exhibition. Woody Guthrie is an American hero, a hero of and to the American people,” said Ms. Guthrie.  In his own lifetime, he inspired regular folks to work towards and uphold their ideals. For two generations since his death, he continues to inspire as both an artist and a social activist. Given its subject, it is fitting that this important exhibition should travel across the country as part of the Smithsonian’s outreach activities,” said Anna R. Cohn, director of SITES.  “For the first time, the public will have the opportunity to view the full breadth of work from this folk legend, and understand the many ways in which he was an artist.”  Following its premiere at the Gene Autry Museum, the exhibition is scheduled to travel to major cultural institutions in Massachusetts, Ohio and Oklahoma.  “This Land is Your Land” also will be presented at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (summer 2000).
 

 Exhibition

 “...My eyes has been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been my messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls...”
--Woody Guthrie, from Bound for Glory

“This Land is Your Land” follows Guthrie’s life through his personal history and artistic development.  The exhibition employs a minimalist design, evoking the physical landscapes of the places in which Guthrie lived and worked û such as Oklahoma, Texas, California and New York. Guthrie’s voice and those of his biographers act as counterpoints to the exhibition’s narrative. The final section of the exhibition highlights Guthrie’s legacy and features contemporary artists who have been influenced by his work.

The term "folk singer" was not commonly used when Woody Guthrie embarked on his artistic journey.  He called himself a ballad singer, one whose songs tell stories; yet something in his music made others refer to him as a folk singer, a name that embodies a social idea as much as a term for his music.
Guthrie was born in Okemah, OK in 1912.  Family tragedies and hard times led him to Texas and then to California, where he began his music career, singing songs as a Depression era Dust Bowl refugee.  Well versed in the booms and busts of land, fortunes, and hearts, Woody sang to migrant farm workers and at union rallies. His empathy for the common man infused his music with purpose and sparked a life-long dedication to social activism. Guthrie’s wanderings from Los Angeles to New York City, where he finally settled, made him an accidental traveling folklorist, collecting cowboy songs, mountain ballads, religious music, blues and work chants.  He then blended these styles into more than 1,000 original songs.

His prodigious career spanned only 17 years, until his early death in 1957 when Huntington’s Disease finally took his life.  During that time, he wrote numerous songs and poems, four novels, and hundreds of letters, essays, and newspaper columns. He drew and painted prolifically and recorded hundreds of songs, both traditional tunes and his own compositions. He sang about love, war, natural disasters, unionism, fascism and children. Literary critics have called him the Walt Whitman of the 20th century; others say he was the working man’s James Joyce. Woody Guthrie’s “ballads” echo in the music of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Billy
Bragg and many of today’s emerging songwriters. As folk artist and diarist, his voluminous drawings and autobiographical musings illustrate the world as he saw it.

Partnerships

“This Land is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie” has been organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the Woody Guthrie Archives in association with Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.  The exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of Nissan North America.  Additional support has been provided by the Smithsonian Institution Educational Outreach Fund and the Smithsonian Women’s Committee.
Contributors to this project include Jorge Arrevalo, archivist, Woody Guthrie Archives;  Ronald D. Cohen, Ph.D., professor of history, Indiana University Northwest; Pete Daniel, Ph.D., curator, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; Joe Hickerson, musicologist, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress; Harold Levanthal, executive director, Woody Guthrie Foundation; Guy Logsdon, Ph.D., folklorist, Woody Guthrie scholar and entertainer; Dave Marsh, critic and historian; Jeff Place, archivist, Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage; and Anthony Seeger, director, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

The Woody Guthrie Archives was created in 1995 to catalogue, preserve and perpetuate the artistic and personal legacy of Woody Guthrie.  The core of the collection comes from Woody’s wife, Marjorie, who saved thousands of lyrics, songbooks, diaries, essays, manuscripts, letter, artwork and photographs.   The collection was part of the Guthrie household from the 1950s through the 1980s.  In addition to preservation and research, the Archives is creating new projects that will continue to bring Woody’s unknown, unseen and unheard works back to the world and the people from which he drew his inspiration. Hundreds of Guthrie’s recordings survive today in the Folkways Archives at the Smithsonian.  The songs have been a rich resource for Folkways Recordings, which produced the
four volume series, Woody Guthrie: The Asch Recordings, in celebration of the touring exhibition.  The CDs include many previously unreleased tracks from the historic collection recorded by Folkways founder Moses Asch between 1944 and 1954.  The series has garnered wonderful reviews and has been called “one of the indispensable documents of 20th-century American music” by People Magazine. To order the CD box set, the public can call Smithsonian Folkways Mail Order at 800.410.9815.