Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello To Receive 2024 Woody Guthrie Prize
Morello will receive the award at the Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on September 25th. The event will also feature a Q&A with Morello and an acoustic performance.
“This prestigious award recognizes Morello’s outstanding contributions to music and activism, embodying the spirit of Woody Guthrie’s social consciousness and musical legacy,” according to a press release.
Morello said,
“Woody Guthrie was a fearless agitator, a six-string instigator, a poetic truth-teller, and a harmonizing hell-raiser. He was the original punk rocker whose life, music, art and lyrics were beacons of justice and liberation for the downtrodden and oppressed. In my own work, Woody has been an inspiration to tell it like I see it without compromise or apology and to play my songs (and his songs) on the picket line and at the barricade whenever and wherever people are taking a stand.”
Most people know Woody as the artist who wrote “This Land is Your Land,” but for those who look to him as an influence on art and activism, he is so much more. He wrote more than 3,000 songs in his lifetime — although relatively few were ever recorded — and he was a highly skilled visual artist.
Pussy Riot, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Chuck D and John Mellencamp are among the previous Woody Guthrie Prize recipients.
