Okemah, Oklahoma — Woody Guthrie Birthplace

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born on 14 July 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma — a small town in the Oklahoma hill country whose name appears in one of his most celebrated songs, 'Oklahoma Hills'. Okemah was a boom town during the early oil era, and Guthrie's early childhood there was marked by a series of family catastrophes: a house fire that killed his sister, his mother's progressive mental illness (later understood to have been Huntington's disease — the same condition that would eventually kill Guthrie himself), and the economic and social upheaval that came with the boom-and-bust cycles of oil country. The town shaped the sense of transience and displacement that runs through all of his music.

Guthrie's most celebrated work came later — the Dust Bowl ballads, 'This Land Is Your Land', the hundreds of songs he wrote during and after the Depression years when he travelled with the Okies from Oklahoma to California and observed the treatment of the rural poor by landlords, bosses, and the forces of authority. His radical politics, his humanism, and his ability to translate working-class experience into song with unsentimental clarity made him the most important figure in the American folk tradition and the primary influence on Bob Dylan.

Okemah hosts an annual WoodyFest each July, celebrating Guthrie's birth and legacy with concerts, speakers, and community events. The town has a complicated historical relationship with Guthrie — for decades it was reluctant to celebrate a man whose politics it found uncomfortable — but has increasingly embraced him as its most famous son. Various markers in the town note locations associated with his childhood. Okemah is approximately 80 miles east of Oklahoma City.