Dispatch From Woody Guthrie’s Hometown
Source: Mother Jones
It’s hard to imagine a quiet town like Okemah spawning a rabble-rousing, labor-loving, leftist. But then, once you walk around for a bit, it’s also really hard to imagine Woodrow Wilson Guthrie coming from anywhere else.
The legendary folk singer’s childhood home in Okfuskee County sits halfway up a hill (“the hill,” if you ask for directions in town), one block south of the public library, roughly equidistant from Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and the surface of the sun (about an hour each way, I think).* If you drove 14,000 miles to see the home of a folk hero, it’d be more than a little dispiriting to discover it’d been turned into a McMansion with a swimming pool for the poodle and quarters for the servants. But don’t worry; Woody Guthrie’s childhood home is totally the mess you’d hope it’d be.