In general, two images perpetuate the Woody Guthrie legend. In the first, he is the rambling Okie troubadour, known for hopping freight trains and writing simple ditties celebrating the common people of America. In the second, he is an outspoken advocate of the so-called Old Left, the labor-centered mass movement that blossomed in response to the Great Depression, whose members ranged from FDR supporters to communists; Guthrie himself frequently spoke favorably of the latter.

This second image is far more historically accurate, and more significant. But the persistence of the first has meant that his political views and sympathies have sometimes been absorbed into American settler-colonialist myths: the trope of freedom as antisocial, inhering in the unrestricted mobility of individual white males through wide, open, fictionally uninhabited spaces. But Guthrie’s relationship with movement and travel was more complicated than that — and tied intricately to his radical and antiestablishment politics.

Guthrie did move around a lot, especially during the early years of his musical career, in the late 1930s. These travels brought him into contact with some of the nation’s most exploited victims of capitalist predation, migrant workers in particular. One factor behind this restlessness was his intimate experience of the debilitating effects of Huntington’s Disease suffered by his mother, Nora Belle Guthrie.