GUTHRIE, ARLO DAVY

GUTHRIE, ARLO DAVY (1947– ), U.S. folk singer. Guthrie was born in Coney Island, New York, to legendary song-writer and singer Woody Guthrie and Marjorie (Mazia), a professional dancer with the Martha Graham Company whose parents were Isidore and Aliza Greenblatt. Aliza was a Yiddish poet and songwriter, and took to her new son-in-law and became close with her grandson Arlo. "We would go to her home on Friday night for Shabbat dinner and she was a great cook," Guthrie said in a 2004 interview. "Nobody ever came close to her blintzes." In preparation for Guthrie's "hootenanny bar mitzvah" in 1960, his parents hired a "sweet young rabbi" as a tutor, Guthrie recalled, named meir kahane , later the founder of the Jewish Defense League and the Kach political party in Israel. Surrounded by his father's musician friends, including Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, and Jewish folk musician Ramblin' Jack Elliott (Elliot Adnopoz), and then by the burgeoning New York folk-rock crowd of bob dylan , Joan Baez, and phil ochs , Guthrie learned to play the guitar at age six and grew up naturally influenced toward a musical career. In December 1967, two months after his father died, Guthrie released the album Alice's Restaurant Massacre, an 18-minute 20-second narrative song about his getting arrested for littering on Thanksgiving Day two years earlier, and how his police record and court appearance for dumping garbage in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, prevented him from being drafted by the army. The album was the only one of 19 he produced that went gold. Guthrie went on to star in the 1969 film version of Alice's Restaurant, which was released a week after he appeared at the Woodstock Music Festival on August 15. At Woodstock, he sang and subsequently released a recording of "Coming into Los Angeles," about smuggling marijuana, which became another hit. His other noteworthy songs were a 1972 cover version of Jewish country-folksinger Steve Goodman's song "City of New Orleans," Guthrie's only hit single, and "The Motorcycle Song." Like his father, Guthrie carved out a career as a folk-singer and songwriter with a social conscience, touring 10 months of the year and working for causes such as environmentalism. Guthrie launched his own record label, Rising Son Records, in 1983. He has also acted, and wrote successful children's books. In 1991, Guthrie bought the church building that served as the centerpiece of Alice's Restaurant and converted it to the Guthrie Center and the Guthrie Foundation, named for his parents. It is an interfaith foundation and meeting place that provides a wide range of local and international services. Guthrie also performed Hanukkah, Holocaust, and Jewish children's songs that were written by his father and discovered after his death, and were set to music by the Klezmatics. (Elli Wohlgelernter (2nd ed.)