This week in 1956, Woody Guthrie, homeless and suffering from Huntington's disease, was arrested for vagrancy in Morristown, New Jersey. He was sent to nearby Greystone Park Psychiatric hospital and spent the rest of his life in care facilities, passing away in 1967 at age 55.
Guthrie: "I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what colour, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you."
Many folk singers saw the light through Guthrie, but his most notable acolyte was Bob Dylan, who tracked down Guthrie less than a week after moving to New York in 1961. Dylan's tribute tune, "Song To Woody," was included on his first album in 1962. When Dylan's career erupted a few years later, many fans dug into his back catalog and learned about Guthrie.
As Woody's behaviour became erratic, he was incorrectly diagnosed with everything from alcoholism to schizophrenia, until he finally received the correct but devastating diagnosis, Huntington's chorea, a genetic disease that forced his mother's institutionalisation 30 years earlier.
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