Taking a look at a less-studied legend

More people have heard of Woody Guthrie than have heard Woody Guthrie, and more people have heard his songs than have heard him sing them, or know that he wrote them -- an imbalance that makes him an ideal subject for a documentary. (He wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” for starters -- a 1940 response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” -- which is enough reason to want to know more about him.) And though I would dispute biographer Joe Klein’s claim here that he’s “a good part of why American popular music has become the most popular musical art form in the history of the world” -- the global hegemony of American pop proceeds from different strains -- he surely helped shape the way the nation conceived of itself in the difficult middle years of the 20th century.

“Woody Guthrie: Ain’t Got No Home,” presented tonight as part of the PBS series “American Masters,” does a good job of laying out Guthrie’s (relatively) short, restless, tragic and astonishingly productive life, marshaling on-camera testimony from a goodly number of people who knew him (including sister Mary Jo Edgmon, first wife Mary Guthrie and fellow Almanac Singer Pete Seeger), biographers Klein and Ed Cray, and Bruce Springsteen as the celebrity voice of the artistically influenced.

Mythologized even in his time -- when his memoir “Bound for Glory” was published in 1943, the New Yorker called him “a national possession like Yellowstone or Yosemite and part of the best stuff this country has to show the world” -- Guthrie was a natural-born poet and an expressive visual artist who was nevertheless not quite the primitive he sometimes played. Klein describes Guthrie as “scrawny, petulant, hilarious, angry, free,” and he could be a difficult person even before he started feeling the destabilizing effects of Huntington’s disease -- the hereditary degenerative nerve disease that killed his mother, indirectly caused the death by fire of his sister Clara, and killed Guthrie himself at age 55. (Guthrie had lost his first child to another accidental fire, in 1947.)

Until the effects of Huntington’s overtook him, years before his death, his life was defined by a peripatetic restlessness (“I Got a Home, but I’m Never There” is perhaps a better description of his existence than “Ain’t Got No Home”) and a compulsion to express himself. He wrote voluminously -- letters, memoirs, diaries and thousands of songs, anything to turn his world into words. He passed through many groups and scenes and movements -- migrant workers, labor organizers, Communist rallies, 1940s New York Bohemia, big-time show business -- without ever being completely part of them, but was so naturally constituted as to feel a part of everything. The songs he wrote demonstrate an uncanny ability to distill the essence of an event or to personify an idea, and many have taken on the status of folk songs. Even his most topical songs have a continuing life, because of Guthrie’s ability to find the universal in the particular.

Director Peter Frumkin occasionally strays into an excessive special effect, and I still don’t quite get the fondness for dramatic re-creation used to plug holes in and/or “enliven” documentary films -- they take you out of the world that the actual documents and images and testimony establish. But these are brief potholes in what is overall a smoothly paved road through Guthrie’s life and often hard times. There are plenty of fine and rarely seen photographs here, along with lyrics written in Guthrie’s own hand, examples of his drawings and paintings, snippets of home movies (one affording a glimpse of a young Arlo Guthrie) and a generous sampling of Woody’s own recordings to make it real.

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‘American Masters: Woody Guthrie: Ain’t Got No Home’

Where: PBS

When: 9 tonight

Rating: TV-PG