Guthrie Quotes

Because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind. (Bob Dylan)

I see in the papers where Roy Guthrie committed suicide. Why, I wonder?

Robert E. Howard

My big claim to fame during the three years I was at Stratford was understudying Henry V and going on without any rehearsal - and I tell that story in the show. ... Tyrone Guthrie, a great English director of that time, said to me - I was understudying Chris Plummer - and they said, "Plummer's ill. Can you go on?" And I had never rehearsed the part, never spoken the part out loud. And I went on.

William Shatner

It sounds like something from a Woody Guthrie song, but it's true; I was raised in a freight car.

Merle Haggard

Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.

Tom Morello

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song, 'Bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along Seems sick an' it's hungry, it's tired an' it's torn It looks like it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born.

Bob Dylan

Even with politics, stuff comes around again. Woody Guthrie would recognize America today.

Billy Bragg

Our enemy really isn't capitalism, it's cynicism. That's one the things I learned from Woody (Guthrie)... Not to be cynical... That cynicism... It destroys you, it rots you away from the inside. So that sense of optimism and humanity... which 20 years ago I would have called socialism but now I'll call compassion... You know, that idea is still out there and alive and if you can plug into that and encourage that it makes it all worth while.

Billy Bragg

What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays' Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it's down to us.

Jim Hightower

I can remember back as far as age 8, performing with the Boston Folk Song Society. It was a Woody Guthrie song.

Black Francis

Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn't really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me. (Fred Melamed)

I got a phone call from Douglas Campbell and from Jerome Guthrie, who offered me a job out of the blue.

Jeffrey Jones

I went to a performance of 'The Crucible' at the Guthrie when I was a sophomore in high school, and I knew right away that that's what I wanted to do.

John Hawkes

A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song.

John Mellencamp

What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.

Justin Townes Earle

when i reached the bottom, i finally understood what Guthrie meant when he shouted, "LIBERO!" It was a celebration of being alive.

Sharon Creech

Like most kids, I grew up singing 'This Land Is Your Land' in grammar school, but with the most radical verses neatly removed. This was before I knew it was a Woody Guthrie song.

Steve Earle

My musical heroes are people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie who wrote and sang real songs for real people; for everyone, old, young, and in between.

Tom Chapin

I was in my late 20s, in the process of shaping my musical outlook and what I wanted it to be about, when I first encountered Woody Guthrie.

Bruce Springsteen

I came along and was a teenager in the Depression, and nobody had jobs. So I went out hitchhiking, when I met a man named Woody Guthrie. He was the single biggest part of my education.

Pete Seeger

I have two mini huskies called Woody Guthrie and Edison Guthrie. (Dhani Harrison)