Thelma Bray had lived in Pampa for almost 60 years when she first heard that America’s greatest folk singer, Woody Guthrie, was a resident of the former oil boom town from 1929 to 1937. Pampa is where he learned to play guitar, wrote his first songs, married a local woman, and experienced the “Great Dust Storm” of 1935. Guthrie was born in Oklahoma in 1912 but became a man in Texas.
How could Bray, a civic leader who embodies Pampa pride and promotion, not know until 1991 that a musical icon—Bob Dylan’s hero, author of singalong anthem “This Land Is Your Land”—once walked the same downtown streets she was trying to revitalize? She found out why Guthrie’s history in the community was overlooked when she proposed that the city
