In my early teenage years, I used to slip down to my older brothers’ room in the basement when they were not home and listen to their record collection, especially the Beatles’ Abbey Road, Janis Joplin’s Pearl, and, at Christmas, a record by Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass. I would search through the stack of LPs and belt out Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Our Land” and “The Farm-Labor Train,” and his son Arlo’s rendition of Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans.”

Married three times, Woody Guthrie and his wives had eight children. It was during his third marriage that his increasingly unpredictable behavior was finally diagnosed as Huntington’s disease – the same degenerative disease that had led to his mother’s institutionalization thirty years previously. He died on October 3, 1967.