Woody Guthrie grows up in Okemah, Oklahoma, born in 1912, and becomes the traveling voice of Depression-era America, moving from town to town with a guitar and a habit of turning hard times into songs. This film traces that path through the 1930s, when Guthrie writes for and about dust bowl migrants, union men, and the rural poor, producing songs like Vigilante Man, Pastures of Plenty, and This Land Is Your Land, the last of which becomes close to an alternative national anthem. It follows him from Oklahoma through California's migrant camps and onto the folk circuits where his plainspoken style takes hold. The film places him as a direct influence on Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, artists who picked up his mix of protest and plain narrative decades later. The songs carry the argument: a guitar as a tool for describing what poverty and displacement actually looked like in that decade.