we can only be initially what our environment and culture makes us. The point is that he was an artist and aspired to be a comet like force of originality and decency that very few other people imagined possible.

I think what I recognised in Guthrie was that same unflinching earnest desire to be an artist that you get in James Joyce.
'I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly asI can.'

It doesn't sit well in any society. I remember reading Ronnie Gilberts comments about how nasty and resentful of the middle class origins of the Seeger set , Woody was.

Its not for us to forgive or condemn Woody. We can try and understand the origins of his art, what life gave him to work with. But if you miss the fact of his genius, (something which Rommie and Pete both freely granted) you are missing the main point.