Arlo
Davy Guthrie (born July 10,
1947) is an American retired folk singer-songwriter. He is known for singing songs of protest against social injustice, and storytelling while performing songs, following the
tradition of his father Woody Guthrie. Guthrie's best-known work is his debut piece,
"Alice's Restaurant
Massacree", a satirical talking blues song about 18 minutes in length that has
since become a Thanksgiving anthem. His only top-40 hit was a cover of Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans".
His song "Massachusetts"
was named the official folk song of the state in which he
has lived most of his adult life. Guthrie has also made several acting
appearances. He is the father of four children, who have also had careers as
musicians. Guthrie was born in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, the son of the folk singer and composer Woody Guthrie and dancer Marjorie Mazia Guthrie. He is the fifth, and oldest surviving,
of Woody Guthrie's eight children; two older sisters died of Huntington's disease (which
also killed Woody in 1967), an older brother died in a train accident and a
third sister died in childhood. His sister is the record producer Nora Guthrie. His mother was a professional dancer with
the Martha Graham Company and
founder of what is now the Huntington's Disease Society of America. Arlo's
father was from a Protestant family and his mother was Jewish. His maternal grandmother was Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt. Guthrie
received religious training for his bar mitzvah from Rabbi Meir Kahane, who would go on to form the Jewish Defense League.
"Rabbi Kahane was a really nice, patient teacher," Guthrie later
recalled, "but shortly after he started giving me my lessons, he started
going haywire. Maybe I was responsible." Guthrie converted to Catholicism in 1977, before embracing interfaith beliefs later in
his life. "I firmly believe that different religious
traditions can reside in one person, or one nation or even one world,"
Guthrie said in 2015. In 2020, following his retirement, Guthrie
expressed a philosophical affinity for gospel music, noting: "Gospel music to me is the biggest
genre of protest music. If this world ain’t doing it for you, and your hopes
are in the next one — you can’t get more protest than that." Guthrie
attended Woodward School in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn,
from first through eighth grades and later graduated from the Stockbridge School,
in Stockbridge,
Massachusetts, in 1965. He spent the summer of 1965 in London, eventually
meeting Karl Dallas, who connected
Guthrie with London's folk rock scene and became a lifelong friend of his.[9] He briefly attended Rocky Mountain College,
in Billings, Montana. He
received an honorary doctorate from Siena College in 1981 and from Westfield State College in
2008. As a singer, songwriter and lifelong political activist, Guthrie carries
on the legacy of his father. He was awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of
Conscience award on September 26, 1992. On November 26, 1965, while in Stockbridge,
Massachusetts, during Thanksgiving break
from his brief stint in college, 18-year-old Guthrie and his friend, Richard
Robbins, were arrested for illegally dumping on private property what Guthrie
described as "a half-ton of garbage" from the home of his friends, teachers Ray
and Alice Brock, after he discovered the local landfill was closed for the holiday. Guthrie and Robbins
appeared in court, pled guilty to the charges, were levied a nominal fine and
picked up the garbage that weekend. This littering charge would soon
serve as the basis for Guthrie's most famous work, "Alice's Restaurant
Massacree", a talking blues song that lasts 18 minutes and 34 seconds
in its original recorded version. In 1997, Guthrie pointed out that this was
also the exact length of one of the infamous gaps in Richard Nixon's Watergate tapes, and that
Nixon owned a copy of the record. The Alice in the song is Alice Brock, who had been a librarian at Arlo's boarding
school in the town before opening her restaurant. She later opened an art
studio in Provincetown,
Massachusetts. The
song lampoons the Vietnam War draft. However, Guthrie has stated in multiple interviews that
the song is more an "anti-stupidity" song than an anti-war song,
adding that it is based on a true incident. In the song, Guthrie is called
up for a draft examination and rejected as unfit for military service as a result of a criminal record
consisting solely of one conviction for the aforementioned littering. Alice and her restaurant are the subjects of the
refrain, but are generally mentioned only incidentally in the story (early
drafts of the song explained that the restaurant was a place to hide from the
police). Though her presence is implied at certain points in the story, Alice
herself is described explicitly in the tale only briefly when she bails Guthrie
and a friend out of jail. On the DVD commentary for the 1969 movie, Guthrie
stated that the events presented in the song all actually happened (others,
such as the arresting officer, William Obanhein, disputed some of the song's details, but
generally verified the truth of the overall story). "Alice's
Restaurant" was the song that earned Guthrie his first recording contract,
after counterculture radio
host Bob Fass began playing a tape recording of one of
Guthrie's live performances of the song repeatedly one night in 1967. A
performance at the Newport Folk Festival on
July 17, 1967, was also very well received. Soon afterward, Guthrie recorded
the song in front of a studio audience in New York City and released it as side
one of the album, Alice's Restaurant. By the end of the decade,
Guthrie had gone from playing coffee houses and small venues to playing massive
and prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Woodstock Festival. For
a short period after its release in October 1967, "Alice's
Restaurant" was heavily played on U.S. college and counterculture radio
stations. It became a symbol of the late 1960s, and for many it defined an
attitude and lifestyle that were lived out across the country in the ensuing
years. Its leisurely finger-picking acoustic guitar and rambling lyrics were
widely memorized and played by irreverent youth. Many stations in the United
States have a Thanksgiving Day tradition of playing "Alice's
Restaurant". A 1969 film, directed and co-written by Arthur Penn, was based on the true story told in the song, but
with the addition of a large number of fictional scenes. This film, also
called Alice's Restaurant,
featured Guthrie and several other figures in the song portraying themselves.
The part of his father Woody Guthrie, who had died in 1967, was played by actor
Joseph Boley; Alice, who made a cameo appearance as an extra, was also recast, with
actress Pat Quinn in the
title role (Alice Brock later disowned the film's portrayal of her).
Despite its popularity, the song "Alice's Restaurant Massacree"
is not always featured on the setlist of any given Guthrie performance. Since
putting it back into his setlist in 1984, he has performed the song every ten
years, stating in a 2014 interview that the Vietnam War had ended by the 1970s
and that everyone who was attending his concerts had likely already heard the
song anyway. So, after a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he
replaced the monologue with a fictional one involving "multicolored
rainbow roaches", he decided to do it only on special occasions from that
point forward.