Arlo Guthrie Caricature

Arlo Guthrie Caricature, illustrated here from the cover of his album “Amigo” in 1976, age 29.

Arlo Davy Guthrie 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 was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of the folk singer and composer Woody Guthrie and Marjorie Mazia Guthrie. His mother was a one-time professional dancer with the Martha Graham Company and founder of the Committee to Combat Huntington’s disease (later Huntington’s Disease Society of America), the illness from which Woody Guthrie died in 1967. Arlo’s father was from a Protestant family and his mother was Jewish.

Guthrie’s most famous work, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”, is a talking blues song that lasts 18 minutes and 34 seconds in its original recorded version. Guthrie has pointed out that this was also the exact length of one of the infamous gaps in 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.

“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.

For a short period after its release in October 1967, “Alice’s Restaurant” was heavily played on U.S. college and counterculture radio stations. It became a symbol of the late 1960s, and for many it defined an attitude and lifestyle that were lived out across the country in the ensuing years.

A 1969 film, directed and co-written by Arthur Penn, was based on the true story told in the song, but with the addition of a large number of fictional scenes. This film, also called Alice’s Restaurant, featured Guthrie and several other figures in the song portraying themselves.

In the fall of 1975 during a benefit concert in Massachusetts, Arlo Guthrie performed with his band, Shenandoah, in public for the first time. They continued to tour and record throughout the 1970s until the early 1990s.

Guthrie’s 1976 album “Amigo” received a five-star (highest rating) from Rolling Stone, and may be his best-received work.
A number of musicians from a variety of genres have joined Guthrie onstage, including Ry Cooder, Pete Seeger, David Bromberg, Cyril Neville, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Judy Collins, John Prine, Wesley Gray, Josh Ritter, and others.

Guthrie’s other hits: “City Of New Orleans”, “Gypsy Davy”, “The Motorcycle Song”, “Gabriel’s Mother’s Highway Ballad #16 Blues”, “Cooper’s Lament”, “Coming into Los Angeles”, “Last Train”, “Darkest Hour” and “Last to Leave”.

Guthrie has performed a concert almost every Thanksgiving weekend since he became famous at Carnegie Hall, a tradition he announced would come to an end after the 2019 concert.

Guthrie resides in the town of Washington, Massachusetts, where he and Jackie Hyde, his wife of 43 years, were long time residents.
Jackie died on October 14, 2012, shortly after being diagnosed with liver cancer. They had 4 children together.