Site of Woody Guthrie's childhood home

At the southwest corner of West Birch Street and South 1st Street in Okemah, Oklahoma, stands the site where Woody Guthrie's childhood home once stood — a two-storey, six-room house known as the London House, or the Stokes-Guthrie house, where the future folk legend grew up in the 1910s and early 1920s. It was an ordinary Oklahoma house in an ordinary Oklahoma town, but it shaped the man who would write "This Land Is Your Land", "Pastures of Plenty", and a thousand other songs that put American working people into the American songbook.

Guthrie's Okemah years were marked by tragedy. His sister Clara died in a fire in 1919 — an event that scarred the family irreparably. His mother Nora was institutionalised with Huntington's disease, a degenerative neurological illness that would eventually claim Woody himself decades later. His father, once a moderately successful real estate speculator, was ruined financially. The family was periodically broke, the house was lost, and Woody eventually drifted west into the Depression landscape that became his subject matter.

But Okemah was always the origin point. The flat, red-dirt, small-town Oklahoma world from which everything else followed. Guthrie's empathy for dispossessed people — Dust Bowl migrants, striking workers, families sleeping in their cars — came directly from having lived through dispossession himself. By the time he reached California in the late 1930s and began writing the songs that would define American folk music, he was drawing on memories of a childhood that had already taught him what it meant to lose everything.

The original house was torn down in the late 1970s, though the lumber was saved with plans to eventually reconstruct it. Today a carved wooden tree stands at the corner as a memorial, and a historical marker acknowledges the site. The reconstruction project, estimated at $500,000, has been periodically revived but not yet completed.

Okemah holds an annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival each July, drawing musicians and fans from around the world. The town's relationship with its most famous son has been complicated — Guthrie's politics were radical, and rural Oklahoma has not always been comfortable with that legacy — but the festival and the memorial at the homesite represent a growing acknowledgment that what began here changed American music forever.