Why Woody Guthrie's 'Dust Bowl Ballads' landmark record 'could not be more relevant'

Woody Guthrie is America’s songwriter.

The Oklahoma-born bard spent much of the first half of the 20th century working and rambling across this land of ours, singing the stories of the downtrodden, the oppressed and the hard-hit from California to the New York island.

But the sound that Guthrie is known for? That’s pure Jersey.

“Dust Bowl Ballads,” his landmark 1940 LP, was recorded in the spring of that year at Victor Records’ Camden studios.

" 'Dust Bowl Ballads' is the Jersey record. It's the Jersey ballads," Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, told the Asbury Park Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, in 2014. "I keep telling Bruce (Springsteen), 'You're not the only Jersey boy, you know.'"

Springsteen covered a pair of “Dust Bowl Ballads” songs, “I Ain’t Got No Home” and “Vigilante Man,” for the 1988 album and accompanying documentary “Folkways: A Vision Shared — A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly.”

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“Dust Bowl Ballads” cast a long shadow from Camden out through history. “Blowin’ Down This Road (I Ain’t Going to Be Treated This Way)” entered the Grateful Dead’s repertoire as “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad” in 1970, and the rhythm and cadence of “Talkin’ Dust Bowl Blues” were borrowed by Bob Dylan for “Talkin’ World War III Blues” on 1963’s “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”

Songs from the album have been performed by Ani DiFranco, Billy Bragg and plenty of others in the 82 years since its release, and last year saw the release of “Home in This World: Woody Gurthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads,” a track-for-track tribute featuring artists such as Chris Thile, the Felice Brothers and Shovels & Rope.

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The album could be re-recorded in its entirety nearly a century later because, according to Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. Vice President Anna Canoni, it “could not be more relevant to today.”

In a dozen songs spread across 13 tracks (the “Grapes of Wrath”-inspired “Tom Joad” was long enough to require two parts), Guthrie weaves an American tapestry of economic turmoil, environmental devastation and the day-to-day struggles of the working class.

It’s an album that feels like it could have been written yesterday.

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“The similarities are so depressing, so real,” said Canoni, granddaughter of Woody and daughter of Nora, who is president of Woody Guthrie Publications Inc.

In the album’s original 1940 liner notes, Woody said the songs of “Dust Bowl Ballads” transcended autobiography.

"They are ‘Oakie’ songs, ‘Dust Bowl’ songs, ‘Migratious’ songs, about my folks and my relative, about a jillion of ‘em, that got hit by the drought, the dust, the wind, the banker, and the landlord, and the police, all at the same time,” he wrote.

So much of the beauty of Woody’s writing, Canoni said, was in his ability to empathetically convey the experiences of others in song.

“He says ‘a song ain’t nothing but a conversation,’ ” she explained, “and so it has to capture an experience and make it singable, (which) makes it more accessible to others who didn’t have that experience.”

This land was their land

Born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1912, Woody Guthrie married into New Jersey life. He met Marjorie Greenblatt, an Atlantic City native and member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, in 1942. They married in 1945 and had four children, including Nora and Arlo, the future folk singer/actor of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” fame.

Woody and Marjorie can be heard sharing songs, stories and conversation in the live album "The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance in 1949." Released in 2007, the performance was recorded in December of 1949 at the YM-YWHA's Fuld Hall in Newark, New Jersey, and went on to win the Best Historical Album Grammy.

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Nora said in 2014 that her mother, who grew up in an apartment on the Atlantic City Boardwalk in New Jersey, frequently took the family to her hometown, with chocolate-coated molasses lollipops from Fralinger's being a particularly fond memory.

"Every single year, the family would go to Atlantic City to see my great-grandmother. My dad came as well in the early days, before he was hospitalized, and we would get these lollipops on the boardwalk," Guthrie recalled.

Woody suffered from the hereditary degenerative brain disorder Huntington's disease, and was a patient at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey from 1956 to 1961. The molasses lollipops from Fralinger’s, Nora said, were a source of comfort even then.

"My mother would buy two or three boxes, because my dad needed a lot of high calories," she said. "With Huntington's, you're moving all of the time, so you burn off a lot of calories. In the hospital, he couldn't always control getting the food to his mouth, so he would lose a lot of weight every week. And my mother would bring him home (on weekends) and feed him high, high-calorie stuff.”

Arlo Guthrie, speaking with the Asbury Park Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, in 2016 ahead of New Jersey concerts, looked back affectionately at his time visiting his father in Greystone.

“Visiting my father when he was in Greystone (the psychiatric hospital) are some of the earliest and fondest memories of being in New Jersey,” Arlo said.

While a patient at the psychiatric hospital , Woody would be taken for occasional weekend visits to the homes of friends Bob and Sidsel Gleason, where in 1961 he would spend time with Dylan, then an acolyte and up-and-coming songwriter.

"Bob would bring him cartons of cigarettes, notepads, pencils, necessities," Nora Guthrie said.

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Woody was transferred to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens in 1966, and died in 1967 at the age of 55.

His family, with a truly Jersey candor, has never shied away from Huntington’s as part of his history and legacy.

Marjorie Mazia Guthrie founded the Committee to Combat Huntington's Disease, later re-named the Huntington's Disease Society of America, in 1967. She died in 1983 at the age of 65.

"She was like a lioness, you know,” said Nora. “And she just went out there, the first person to ever go out there in the world and say, 'There is this disease called Huntington's, and we've got to do something about it.' And that's what she did for the rest of her life.”

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Woody’s years in Morris Plains, New Jersey were examined in the 2013 book "Woody Guthrie's Wardy Forty: Greystone Park State Hospital Revisited" by photographer and New Milford native Phil Buehler and released by Woody Guthrie Publications Inc.

Before the hospital’s main building was demolished in 2015, Canoni and Buehler toured the site. They took a public announcement system speaker from the walls of the hospital, an artifact now on display at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Why a PA speaker, of all things? After years of using work such as “Dust Bowl Ballads” to bear witness to the hard-scrabble stories of his fellow Americans, it was within the walls of Greystone that Guthrie’s music allowed others to see him for who he was.

“When Woody was first hospitalized with Huntington’s, his admission form said one of his symptoms was delusions of grandeur,” Canoni said. “He said he’d written thousands of songs and stories, so they thought he had delusions of grandeur. … Nobody knew who he was, nobody believed him.”

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That is, until one fateful encounter with a nurse who happened to be a folk music fan.

“One day, a nurse caught up to him and said, ‘Mr. Guthrie, I just want you to know I know who you are. I listened to your ‘Dust Bowl Ballads,’ and with your permission, I’d like to share it with all these other patients here,’ and he said, ‘That would be so great,’” Canoni recounted.

“And then she played ‘Dust Bowl Ballads’ over the PA system and said, ‘Excuse me, I want you to know we have a special guest in our ward, his name is Woody Guthrie and here is an album he recorded right here in New Jersey.’”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Woody Guthrie's 'Dust Bowl Ballads' record relevancy, New Jersey roots