In his 1953 book, American Folk Songs of Protest, John Greenway recalled his late 1940s visits to U.S. protest folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie:
"When I first visited Guthrie in 1946 he was living in a crowded apartment in Coney Island with his wife and 4-year-old daughter, Cathy Ann...
"I asked if he agreed with a more famous contemporary who said that folk songs were gaining popularity because city people were bored with screen glamour and soap operas...
"He did not: `The unions started the boom,' he insisted. `The workers wanted to sing about their fight, but they couldn't borrow popular tunes because the moneymen who own the big monopoly on music would sock them with copyright laws. They had to go where they should have gone in the first place--to the old songs made by workers years ago...'
"He pushed a two-inch thick book of bound typewriter papers toward me. `Look,' he said, `there's more than 300 songs I've written, most of them to the old tunes. You won't hear the night club-orgasm girls singing these songs.'...
"Since that meeting Guthrie has been exceptionally prolific in song writing, and probably his stack of compositions now is three or four times as thick...His songs are likely to be...versified paraphrases of newspaper accounts of injustices perpetrated on individuals or groups...The inspiration and feeling of protest are still there in sufficient quantity...Of an estimated thousand songs in his manuscript collection, I found...about 140 whose basic theme was one of protest...
"...Like the IWW, which never copyrighted their songbooks, Guthrie...seems content to let them [his songs] fall into the public domain...
"...Guthrie never uses the tune of a popular song for his compositions."
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