Auction to benefit Woody Guthrie’s home

Associated Press

TULSA, Okla.

At least two of eight custom-made Gibson guitars crafted with wood salvaged from the childhood home of folk legend Woody Guthrie will be auctioned off to the public this week.

All proceeds will go toward the Woody Guthrie Home Reconstruction Project, a $600,000 rebuild of the 1860s-era property in Okemah. Project organizers hope the special-edition guitars — which were donated by Gibson — fetch six figures apiece when bidding begins today on eBay.

The handmade, Woody Guthrie London House Model Southern Jumbo guitars feature fingerboards and bridges fashioned from the salvaged white oak-floor joists of Guthrie’s boyhood home, which was so dilapidated that authorities ordered it be torn down in the 1970s. Nashville, Tenn.-based Gibson Brands sifted through bundles of wood to select planks free of termites or nails, and it took about two weeks to assemble each guitar.

“Woody Guthrie is an American icon; he is Americana,” said Peter Leinheiser, Gibson’s senior director of entertainment relations.

Best known for the song “This Land is Your Land,” Guthrie was born in 1912, came of age during the Great Depression and later embraced left-wing politics, union organizing and, for a time, some tenets of communism. He died in 1967. Though once shunned by his hometown and state, Guthrie has enjoyed a renaissance in Oklahoma in recent years as a new generation has been introduced to his songs and activism.

The auction comes two weeks before the May 15 groundbreaking at the same site where the childhood home, called the London House, stood. Today, the only traces of the structure are a few blocks of sandstone foundation.

A local businessman who bought the property saved the lumber for the day when others would recognize Guthrie’s importance.