#WoodyGuthrie #punk
"What or who came before Woody Guthrie?
(. . .)
It’s certainly true that long before Iggy Pop was hurling himself across stages, the Ramones were stripping rock down to two-minute blasts of speed and the Sex Pistols were making Britain panic, Guthrie was already writing for ordinary people, attacking injustice without compromise, travelling with little more than a guitar, living outside the commercial music industry and treating art as a tool for resistance, including painting 'This machine kills fascists' on the side of his guitar.
His influence can be heard throughout punk’s DNA, and nowhere more clearly than in Joe Strummer, who, before becoming the voice of The Clash, reportedly adopted the nickname ‘Woody’ as a nod to the American songwriter whose politics and drive fascinated him. While Guthrie’s acoustic ballads were a world away from the snarling urgency of the Clash’s ‘White Riot’, they shared the same conviction that songs should comfort the powerless and unsettle the powerful and never exist simply to fill silence.
So, given that Guthrie was punk before the genre had a name, it begs the question where his inspiration come from, and the answer lies not in a recording studio or a rock club, but (at least in part) in the meetings of the 1905 Chicago founded Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies, the radical labour union that sought to unite workers across trades, races and nationalities into what it called 'One Big Union'.
Gutherie’s own politics and music owed much to the Wobblies who also understood that people remember melodies long after they’ve forgotten manifesto, something politicians often overlooked, so rather than delivering dry lectures on class struggle, they rewrote hymns and popular tunes with biting new lyrics about strikes, poverty and exploitation, collecting them in the famous Little Red Songbook."
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/what-came-before-woody/
Levka
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2026-07-24 18:48:13 UTC
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"content": "#WoodyGuthrie #punk\n\n\"What or who came before Woody Guthrie?\n\n(. . .)\n\nIt’s certainly true that long before Iggy Pop was hurling himself across stages, the Ramones were stripping rock down to two-minute blasts of speed and the Sex Pistols were making Britain panic, Guthrie was already writing for ordinary people, attacking injustice without compromise, travelling with little more than a guitar, living outside the commercial music industry and treating art as a tool for resistance, including painting 'This machine kills fascists' on the side of his guitar. \n\nHis influence can be heard throughout punk’s DNA, and nowhere more clearly than in Joe Strummer, who, before becoming the voice of The Clash, reportedly adopted the nickname ‘Woody’ as a nod to the American songwriter whose politics and drive fascinated him. While Guthrie’s acoustic ballads were a world away from the snarling urgency of the Clash’s ‘White Riot’, they shared the same conviction that songs should comfort the powerless and unsettle the powerful and never exist simply to fill silence.\n\nSo, given that Guthrie was punk before the genre had a name, it begs the question where his inspiration come from, and the answer lies not in a recording studio or a rock club, but (at least in part) in the meetings of the 1905 Chicago founded Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies, the radical labour union that sought to unite workers across trades, races and nationalities into what it called 'One Big Union'.\n\nGutherie’s own politics and music owed much to the Wobblies who also understood that people remember melodies long after they’ve forgotten manifesto, something politicians often overlooked, so rather than delivering dry lectures on class struggle, they rewrote hymns and popular tunes with biting new lyrics about strikes, poverty and exploitation, collecting them in the famous Little Red Songbook.\"\n\nhttps://faroutmagazine.co.uk/what-came-before-woody/",
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