FOLK HERO.(Woody Guthrie as remembered by Arlo Guthrie and Bob Dylan)(Biography)

The folksinger Arlo Guthrie likes to tell a story about his father, the legendary Woody Guthrie, who died in 1967, at the age of fifty-five. When he was a toddler, Arlo says, Guthrie gave him a Gibson acoustic guitar for his birthday. Several years later, when the boy was old enough to hold it, Guthrie sat him down in the back yard of their house--they lived in Howard Beach, Queens--and taught him all the words to "This Land Is Your Land," a song that most people likely think they know in full. The lyrics had been written in anger, as a response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," which Woody Guthrie deplored as treacle. In addition to the familiar stanzas ("As I went ...