Woody Guthrie's 1949 Prediction

 

In an April 12, 1949 letter to Mary Jo Edgmon and family, 20th-century U.S. protest folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie wrote the following:

"After you starve clean to the rim of death they call you a professional, and after you die off they call you a great genius. And when somebody steps in and buys up all of your diaries and scribblings and songs and poems they call you the greatest feller which ever lived, so's your debtors and loaners can get rich off the stink of your dead bones and yaller pages of ideas."