Guthrie was born in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma in the summer of
1912. His father, a prominent businessman in the area, was
involved in the Nelson lynchings in the area the previous year,
a topic Guthrie covered three times in song, maintaining that
his father later became a member of the Ku Klux Klan. His mother
suffered from Huntington's Disease, a degenerative disorder
which affects muscle control, and was institutionalised when
Woody was 14. His father Charley abandoned the family to work in
Texas. Guthrie taught himself to play the harmonica and later
the guitar over this period, and eventually made his way to
California, where he established himself as a working musician.
Guthrie's work encompassed a range of subjects, but he is
perhaps best known for his protest songs, frequently using his
work to tell stories of poverty and unemployment, repression and
violence, but also tempering this with more hopeful and lightly
comic songs like 'The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done'.
Guthrie took his lyrical ins