"They Drove Woody Guthrie"

(chorus)
If you write too many songs and you side with the poor
And you refuse to be a wage slave
They will say you’re “insane”, they will put you away
Like they drove Woody Guthrie to his grave.

(verses)
He walked around the land and spoke with men and women
And wrote a thousand songs to tell the truth
The media barons, they felt he was too red
And his exclusion drove him to booze. (chorus)

He wrote a big long book which no one would publish
Because it spoke too much of love
He saw that nine-to-five was a big waste of life
But few understood what he said. (chorus)

They said he was “too old” to refuse to settle down
They ordered him to act like other men
But when he refused, they said he had “a disease”
And they locked him in a mental hospital bed. (chorus)

The capitalists got rich from the songs of the communist
Whom they kept hidden away with the insane
They marketed his legend while they took away his pen
Yes, they drove Woody Guthrie to his grave. (chorus)

The They Drove Woody Guthrie protest folk song was written in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

To listen to the They Drove Woody Guthrie protest folk song, you can click on the following links:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Biographical+Folk+Songs/They+Drove+Woody+Guthrie+to+His+Grave

or

http://www.mp3.com/artist/bobafeldman/songs/

As early as 1947, U.S. folksinger Woody Guthrie urged people to fight against the Big Media. In a May 15, 1947 letter, for instance, Guthrie wrote the following:

“We’ve got to break down this log jam, this taboo, this blacklist, this door of distribution that is locked against us. And if I sign over on the log jammers side I’d be used against everybody and everything we believe in.” (Downtown 7/27/94)

For more information about Woody Guthrie, you can check out the official Woody Guthrie website at http://www.woodyguthrie.org/ .

Next: Woody Guthrie’s FBI File