Woody Guthrie

Guthrie left the Dust Bowl with the migrants and wrote what he saw on the road: camps, evictions, deportations, and the particular humiliation of being turned back at a state line for being poor. He wrote This Land Is Your Land in 1940 as an irritated answer to God Bless America, and its later verses — about a wall with a sign on one side and nothing on the other, about people standing hungry by the relief office — are the ones usually left out when children sing it. He wrote on his guitar that the machine kills fascists.

He was ill for the last thirteen years of his life with Huntington's disease, the inherited illness that had also taken his mother, and spent them largely in hospitals in New Jersey and New York, where a young Bob Dylan came to visit him. He wrote something like a thousand songs; many survive only as lyrics, and musicians have been setting them since. His body was cremated and the ashes were scattered at sea, so there is no grave in the ordinary sense. A marker stands for him in the cemetery at Okemah, the Oklahoma town where he was born and which spent decades unsure whether to claim him.