Woody Guthrie the founding father of protest music

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jul/07/woody-guthrie-centenary-protest-songs
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In his centenary year, the songs of the father of protest live on in the music of Dylan and Springsteen. But his radical approach to life provides arguably an even greater legacy

In his birthplace of Okemah, Oklahoma, there will be a free festival; his son, Arlo Guthrie, plays in New York's Central Park next weekend, and Steve Earle will host Woodyfest in the same city. Earlier this year Bruce Springsteen, in a keynote address at the SXSW music industry festival in Texas, hailed Guthrie's "fatalism tempered by practical idealism", and conviction that "speaking truth to power was not futile". Events in Ireland, Germany, Austria and the length and breadth of the US testify to the power of Guthrie's legacy. There will be much poring over Bob Dylan's recollection of buying his hero cigarettes to smoke in hospital in New York and singing his old songs back to him during long afternoons by his bedside as Guthrie wasted away with Huntington's disease.

But it is at Hyde Park, London, next Saturday that the two artists who carry the mantle of Woody Guthrie's message and music combine on the same bill: Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, whose joint account of The Ghost of Tom Joad – Springsteen's homage to Woody's homage to John Steinbeck's hero – is among the most potent and electrifying performances ever.

"You throw a rock in water, and you watch the ripples," Nora Guthrie said. "I see these people singing these songs, and I'm not responsible for what happens. Each of them sees Woody through their own eyes; no one really knows who Woody was or is. I love it when I see people like Springsteen and Morello or John Fogerty together with those songs, because it all comes together in the big picture."