Arlo Guthrie

Origins and early life

Arlo Guthrie was born on 10 July 1947 in Brooklyn. His mother, Marjorie Greenblatt — Marjorie Mazia on the stage, a dancer in Martha Graham's company — was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, and her own mother, Aliza Greenblatt, was a celebrated Yiddish poet; the Jewish Women's Archive documents the line, and Arlo figures in this directory by that Jewish mother.

Work and career

His father was Woody Guthrie, the voice of America's dust-bowl and working people, who wrote Hanukkah songs for his mother-in-law that the Klezmatics would record decades later. The boy had a bar mitzvah — his Hebrew teacher, by a famous irony, was the young Meir Kahane — and grew up to become a folk singer in his own right: in 1967 the eighteen-minute talking blues Alice's Restaurant made him a voice of his generation and a film, and in 1972 his recording of Steve Goodman's City of New Orleans became an American standard; he played Woodstock in 1969.

This fiche also says plainly what he has said himself: his spiritual road later led him toward Catholicism and then toward an interfaith community of his own making, the Guthrie Center, housed in the very church of the song. He retired from touring in 2020.