The man who wrote the song about redwood forests and Gulf Stream waters was monitored by the FBI, lived in a socialist commune, and played a guitar labeled “this machine kills fascists.” This deep dive strips away the folklore to trace Woody Guthrie’s life from his 1912 birth in Okemah, Oklahoma, through a childhood scarred by fires, his father’s reported ties to a lynching and the Ku Klux Klan, and his mother’s undiagnosed Huntington’s disease.

We follow Guthrie through the Dust Bowl migration to California, his radio career and Woody Sez newspaper column, his firing over his stance on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, his rebuttal to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America, the Almanac Singers, wartime service in the Merchant Marine, and his long decline from Huntington’s disease, when a young Bob Dylan visited him in the hospital. It is the story of a flawed radical whose songs still shape American music.

• How busking and street life in Oklahoma blended blues and traditional ballads into his musical identity
• The exaggerated hillbilly persona he adopted for urban political audiences in Los Angeles
• Why he walked away from a lucrative tobacco-sponsored radio show and how his lifestyle broke his first marriage
• Writing 26 songs in 30 days for the Bonneville Power Administration and surviving ships hit by a mine and a torpedo
• His Huntington’s diagnosis, the family tragedies that followed, and the legacy carried on by Marjorie, Dylan, Wilco and others