I've read Klein's book (thought it was a tremendous piece of work), as well as Bound For Glory. I think it's pretty well established that Woody's public persona was part authentic, part fabrication. The same is true of Seeger, Dylan, Springsteen, and a lot of other people who have built careers in "folk music" (broadly defined; let's not quibble, okay?). Personal reinvention is part of the deal, it seems, from fictitious stories of the performer's origins to manufactured accents (Guthrie, Dylan and Springsteen have all deliberately changed their patterns of speech in a quest for authenticity). We see the same thing in black blues musicians who played up the "rural/primitive" aspect of their backgrounds to cater to the crowds of college kids who discovered their music in the 50s/60s, and (stretching the "folk" definition even further) in rock'n'roll performers, from Mick Jagger through Johnny Rotten ("punk" was the phoniest thing going), right on up to present-day performers.

However, a lot of these people were/are really good, and convey really important messages. Rather than dismiss them as phonies (which would perhaps be a reasonable response), maybe we should revise our expectations. The fact that Guthrie's famiily may have had money at one time, or that Seeger came from a very comfortable New York family, or that Dylan was originally a middle-class Jewish kid from Minnesota, does not diminish their work, in my opinion. These performers tapped into something deeper than the surface, were drawn to it, and actively sought to make it part of who they were and are. I don't see anything wrong with that; in fact I think it is admirable. I think these sorts of discussions, and the kind of moral hand-wringing that accompanies them, say more about us -- our expectations, our fears and insecurities -- than it does about any of the musicians we're discussing.