Distinguished scholars, musicians, and writers came together for a conference that explored Woody Guthrie’s rise to fame in Depression-era Los Angeles. They discussed Guthrie’s itinerant wanderings through California and the far West, the Dust Bowl culture he drew upon in his songs of commentary and protest, and the backdrop of Los Angeles at the dawn of the Second World War. Born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie on July 14, 1912, Woody Guthrie became the nation’s most recognizable and important folk singer before the folk revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. “This Great and Crowded City” was...