Arlo Guthrie

Arlo Davy Guthrie (born July 10, 1947) is an American folk singer-songwriter.

He is known for singing songs of protest against social injustice, and storytelling while performing songs, following the tradition of his father, Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie's best-known work is his debut piece, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree", a satirical talking blues song about 18 minutes in length that has since become a Thanksgiving anthem.

His only top-40 hit was a cover of Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans".

His song "Massachusetts" was named the official folk song of the state, in which he has lived most of his adult life.

Guthrie has also made several acting appearances.

He is the father of four children, who have also had careers as musicians.

Guthrie was born in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, the son of the folk singer and composer Woody Guthrie and dancer Marjorie Mazia Guthrie.

Guthrie attended Woodward School in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, from first through eighth grades and later graduated from the Stockbridge School, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1965.

He spent the summer of 1965 in London, eventually meeting Karl Dallas, who connected Guthrie with London's folk rock scene and became a lifelong friend of his.

He briefly attended Rocky Mountain College, in Billings, Montana.

On November 26, 1965, while in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, during Thanksgiving break from his brief stint in college, 18-year-old Guthrie and his friend, Richard Robbins, were arrested for illegally dumping on private property what Guthrie described as "a half-ton of garbage" from the home of his friends, teachers Ray and Alice Brock, after he discovered that the local landfill was closed for the holiday.

Guthrie and Robbins appeared in court, pled guilty to the charges, were levied a nominal fine and picked up the garbage that weekend.

This littering charge served as the basis for Guthrie's most famous work, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree", a talking blues song that runs 18 minutes and 34 seconds in its original recorded version.

He is the fifth, and oldest surviving, of Woody Guthrie's eight children; two older half-sisters died of Huntington's disease (of which Woody also died in 1967), an older half-brother died in a train accident, another half sister died in a car accident, and a fourth sister died in childhood.

His sister is the record producer Nora Guthrie.

His mother was a professional dancer with the Martha Graham Company and founder of what is now the Huntington's Disease Society of America.

Arlo's father was from a Baptist family of English and Scottish descent; and his mother was Jewish, the daughter of immigrants from Ukraine.

His maternal grandmother was Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt, and country/western singer Jack Guthrie, who died when Arlo was an infant, was Arlo's cousin once removed.

Guthrie received religious training for his bar mitzvah from Rabbi Meir Kahane, who formed the Jewish Defense League.

"Rabbi Kahane was a really nice, patient teacher," Guthrie later recalled, "but shortly after he started giving me my lessons, he started going haywire. Maybe I was responsible."

"Alice's Restaurant" was the song that earned Guthrie his first recording contract, after counterculture radio host Bob Fass began playing a tape recording of one of Guthrie's live performances of the song repeatedly one night in 1967.

A performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 17, 1967, was also very well received.

Soon afterward, Guthrie recorded the song in front of a studio audience in New York City and released it as side one of the album, Alice's Restaurant.

By the end of the decade, Guthrie had gone from playing coffee houses and small venues to playing massive and prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Woodstock Festival.

On the DVD commentary for the 1969 movie, Guthrie stated that the events presented in the song all actually happened (others, such as the arresting officer, William Obanhein, disputed some of the song's details, but generally verified the truth of the overall story).

Guthrie converted to Catholicism in 1977, before embracing interfaith beliefs later in his life.

He received an honorary doctorate from Siena College in 1981 and from Westfield State College in 2008.

As a singer, songwriter and lifelong political activist, Guthrie carries on the legacy of his father.

He was awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience award on September 26, 1992.

In 1997, Guthrie jokingly pointed out that this was also the exact length of one of the infamous gaps in President Richard Nixon's Watergate tapes, and that Nixon owned a copy of the record.

The Alice in the song is Alice Brock, who had been a librarian at Arlo's boarding school in the town before opening her restaurant.

She later opened an art studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The song lampoons the Vietnam War draft.

However, Guthrie has stated in multiple interviews that the song is more an "anti-stupidity" song than an anti-war song, adding that it is based on a true incident.

In the song, Guthrie is called up for a draft examination and rejected as unfit for military service as a result of a criminal record consisting solely of one conviction for the aforementioned littering.

Alice and her restaurant are the subjects of the refrain, but are generally mentioned only incidentally in the story (early drafts of the song explained that the restaurant was a place to hide from the police).

Though her presence is implied at certain points in the story, Alice herself is described explicitly in the tale only briefly when she bails Guthrie and a friend out of jail.

"I firmly believe that different religious traditions can reside in one person, or one nation or even one world," Guthrie said in 2015.

In 2020, following his retirement, Guthrie expressed a philosophical affinity for gospel music, noting: "Gospel music to me is the biggest genre of protest music. If this world ain't doing it for you, and your hopes are in the next one – you can't get more protest than that."