Mapping Woody Guthrie

“I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-roamin’ round,” Woody Guthrie lamented in one of his most popular songs. A native of Oklahoma, he was still in his teens when he moved to Pampa, Texas, where he experienced the dust storms that would play such a crucial role in forming his identity and shaping his work. He later joined thousands of Americans who headed to California to escape the devastation of the Dust Bowl. There he entered the West Coast stronghold of the Popular Front, whose leftward influence on his thinking would continue after his move in 1940 to New York, where the American folk music renaissance began when Guthrie encountered Pete Seeger and Lead Belly. Guthrie kept moving throughout his life, making friends, soaking up influences, and writing about his experiences. Along the way, he produced more than 3,000 songs, as well as fiction, journalism, poetry, and visual art, that gave voice to the distressed and dispossessed. In this insightful book, Will Kaufman examines the