They Drove Woody Guthrie

Bob A. Feldman

< 1K plays < 1K downloads
Released Jul 03, 2026
Plays 188
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They Drove Woody Guthrie by Bob A. Feldman is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License.
Track info
Description

A biographical folk song, written in the 1980s, about political repression and legacy mass media censorship, during the McCarthy Era of the late 1940s and the 1950s in the USA.

Lyrics

(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
And 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)

Instrumental No
AI generated? No