Woody Guthrie, despite his aw-shucks Okie persona, was no fool. He knew how the fame game worked -- it hasn't changed much, even since his 1940s folksinging heyday -- and he seemed to know exactly what would happen to his own musical legacy.
"The hungrier you get up here in New York, the more they run your picture," Guthrie wrote to his younger sister in 1949, inserting a photo of himself from The New York Times. "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."
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