The Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center in Pampa is singing the praises of one of America’s favorite folksingers. It’s a change of tune for the Panhandle town where Guthrie moved when he was 17 years old.
When Woody’s father moved his family to the town about 60 miles northeast of Amarillo, Pampa was a boomtown. “Oil was discovered around Pampa in 1925. The Guthries moved here in 1929,” says Thelma Bray. At 81 years old, Bray is dusting off the story of Guthrie’s stay in Texas.
Until a few years ago, most folks around Pampa didn’t care to mention that the Oklahoma-born kid spent seven years on the flatlands of the Panhandle. Never mind that in 1937, three years after leaving Texas, he wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” the country’s unofficial national anthem. Even though he may be the greatest folk singer ever, his image was tarnished because he supported the Communist Party and was a divorcé.
When Bray read Joe Klein’s biography of Guthrie, A Life, the world changed for her. “Pampa was mentioned all over the place in the book,” she says. “I decided it was time that Pampa recognized its connection to Guthrie.” The chamber of commerce and downtown businesses have been very supportive of Bray’s initiative.
One of the first things the dynamo of a grandmother did was establish the nonprofit organization Pampa’s Tribute to Woody Guthrie. By 2002, the group had purchased the old Harris drugstore building at 320 S. Cuyler and turned it into the Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center. They are trying to raise funds to remodel the old, red brick building that is the only building still in existence where Guthrie actually lived or worked, Bray says.
When his mother became ill, the Guthrie family moved to Pampa to be near other family members. Woody’s father worked across the street from the drugstore at a flophouse where oil field workers rented a cot to sleep and prostitutes worked in the rooms upstairs.
According to local legend, about the only medicine that the Harris drugstore sold came out of a little brown jug. Guthrie worked at the fountain as a soda jerk for five years. In his autobiography he said that he found his first guitar in the back room. “His Uncle Jeff taught him to play the guitar, and a local colored man taught him to play the harmonica,” Bray says.
Even though Pampa was booming, the country was slipping into the grips of the Great Depression. The young Woody Guthrie quit school in his senior year and did odd jobs around town, especially sign painting. In the evenings he played music in local clubs and radio stations for tips and drinks.
In 1933, Guthrie married Mary Jennings, a Pampa girl and sister of a bandmate. The couple had three children. If economic times were tough, things got worse when the fields of the Panhandle began slipping into the Great Dust Bowl in 1935.
“It was just shacks all along this side of town, tired and lonesome-looking, and lots of us wasn’t needed here no more,” Guthrie wrote about Pampa in Bound for Glory. “Sun so clear and so bright that I felt like I was leaving one of the prettiest and ugliest spots I’d ever seen.” He was off for California and his date with destiny.
In Guthrie’s hometown of Okemah, Okla., they remember his birthday with a free music festival on the July 14 weekend (www.woodyguthrie.com). In Pampa, they memorialize his life on the anniversary of his death in 1967 with a concert on the weekend of Oct. 3.
The city of Pampa has done a lot to remember the curly-headed Okie who wandered through town. Bray’s organization has gotten Highway 60 across the Panhandle designated as the Woody Guthrie Memorial Highway. Rusty Neef recognized Guthrie’s contribution to music by building a 150-foot-by-10-foot sculpture of the opening musical notes to “This Land Is Your Land” in a local park (1100 N. Hobart, TX 70). The Music Center in the old drug store is open by appointment only, but to get a feel for Guthrie’s Pampa, stop by the visitor center, 200 N. Ballard, 806/669-3241, and pick up a copy of the walking tour guide to Woody’s Pampa.
683rd in a series. Day Trips, Vol. 2, a book of Day Trips 101-200, is available for $8.95, plus $3.05 for shipping, handling, and tax. Mail to: Day Trips, PO Box 33284, South Austin, TX 78704.
This article appears in July 16 • 2004.
