‘We Have to Rise Above Argument and Politics’: U2 Accept Woody Guthrie Prize

If U2 is accepting an award named for folk singer Woody Guthrie, it’s a safe bet that Bono is going to use the opportunity to say a little something about music, protest, and the changing political climate. That happened Tuesday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when the U2 frontman and the Edge accepted the Woody Guthrie Prize at Cain’s Ballroom.

“We have to consciously work against history,” Bono said onstage, “lest it repeat itself.”

U2, long ago established as one of the most important sociopolitical voices in all of music, received the honor from Anna Canoni, Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter. Bono and the Edge — two of U2’s four members, along with Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. — were on hand not just to accept but to also sing for the crowd of 800 seated inside Cain’s.

After an introduction from Canoni, in which she said of U2, “They stand firmly in the belief that popular music is also a force for justice and truth,” Bono and the Edge took the stage for a 45-minute acoustic performance that covered some of U2’s best-known advocacy and protest songs, plus some of Guthrie’s.

With the Edge on guitar, Bono worked his way through standards like “Running to Stand Still,” “Mothers of the Disappeared,” and “Pride (In the Name of Love).” He took a harmonica solo during a cover of Guthrie’s “This Train Is Bound for Glory,” and led the crowd in a chant during a snippet of Guthrie’s “They Laid Jesus Christ in the Grave.”

When they played “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” the audience sang along to the chorus of “How long must we sing this song?” and the Edge took over for an extended guitar solo.

Juxtaposed against the political division in the United States, Bono and the Edge used the moment as a reminder of music’s role in affecting change.

Their set was preceded by Cady Stanton, senior director of the Woody Guthrie Center, whose welcome remarks were directed at U2: “Their voices have filled stadiums, but more importantly, they have amplified the voices of those who might have otherwise gone unheard.”

The concert and ceremony served to demonstrate the respective reaches of both U2 and Guthrie. Tulsa sits in deep-red Oklahoma, and Cain’s is the modern home of the state’s Red Dirt music scene, which has gained increasing national attention over the past half-decade. U2 played the ballroom once, in 1981, prompting Bono to muse on Tuesday that the last time he and the Edge were at Cain’s, they were too young to be served.

Since 2014, Tulsa’s Guthrie Center has awarded the prize to past honorees like Pete Seeger, Mavis Staples, Kris Kristofferson, Norman Lear, John Mellencamp, Chuck D, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Pussy Riot, and Tom Morello. It’s helped keep renewed interest in Guthrie’s cultural influence in Tulsa and his hometown of Okemah, 40 miles south.

The Guthrie Center opened in 2013 after the locally based Kaiser Family Foundation acquired Guthrie’s archives from the Woody Guthrie Foundation, headed by Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter. The museum shares a wall with the Bob Dylan Center, which opened in 2022 after the same foundation acquired Dylan’s archives. Both museums feature original lyrics, photographs, rare musical footage, and volumes of books and reference material related to Guthrie and Dylan. After the release of the 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown, which emphasized how Dylan was influenced by Guthrie, a Dylan Center exhibit showcased props from the movie. It marked a full-circle moment for both museums, which provided the bulk of source material for the movie.

During a March 2025 tour of the centers, managers from both museums explained to Rolling Stone that their aim is to expand the understanding of the influence Guthrie and Dylan have on society beyond the music for which they are best known.

“‘This Land Is Your Land’ is protest music,” says Sam Flowers, a senior manager at the Guthrie Center. “It’s not the campfire song you think it is, and Woody Guthrie is not the guy you think he is. We call him the fearless agitator under this roof. He’s definitely saying things. Woody was speaking on police brutality in 1940s America, man.”

That’s the case at the Dylan Center, too, but Dylan’s stature quickly elevated his museum to a destination for his fans. Dylan Center director Steven Jenkins says a sizable portion of its visitors are diehards who travel from around the world for a look behind the scenes at his art.

“I hope that people walk away with a fuller appreciation for Dylan in total,” Jenkins tells Rolling Stone, “as an artist who is primarily a musician, but also they will discover he is a writer and a painter and a sculptor and a thinker. We really look at him as an exemplar of fearless creativity, who has gone against the grain at every turn.”

If Dylan is the larger draw, Guthrie is the payoff. Oklahoma’s thriving Red Dirt music scene took root following Guthrie’s death in 1967, when a handful of songwriters in the state decided to collaborate, in the process centering their music around Guthrie’s blue-collar values. A few of those songwriters — Bob Childers and Tom Skinner, most notably — were instrumental in launching the career of Garth Brooks in the mid-1980s, but most of them wrote and played music in national obscurity. Their influence on other Oklahoma artists grew steadily, though, and eventually Red Dirt artists gained national attention. The Turnpike Troubadours, Cross Canadian Ragweed, and the Great Divide all credit Childers, Skinner, and other early acts like the Red Dirt Rangers and Jimmy LaFave with their own careers. Given the heavy influence of Turnpike and Ragweed on breakout stars of the scene, like Wyatt Flores and Kaitlin Butts, the connection from Guthrie to 2025 Red Dirt is a straight line.

This is put on display every July in Okemah during the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. What started in the late 1990s as a free tribute to Guthrie is now a four-day event that takes over the entire town of 3,000, filling bars, theaters, and hotel rooms.

“Red Dirt has always been a part of this festival,” says Gary Hart, an Okemah resident and Woodyfest vice president. “Naturally, you had folks — Childers, Skinner, the Rangers, Randy Crouch — coming here who were huge Woody Guthrie fans. It’s the reason why we’re here.”

“I think every single person that we book just has to pass the Woody test,” Cheyenne Felker, a member of the festival board, tells Rolling Stone. “Would he be proud of it? Are they writing things that are topical? Are they standing up for the kinds of things that Woody would be hopefully standing up for if he were still here?”

Those standards mirror the ones for the Woody Guthrie Prize, and Bono and the Edge made that apparent on Tuesday. After they finished serenading the Cain’s crowd, they sat for a half-hour conversation with T Bone Burnett in which the two connected U2 to the philosophies of Guthrie and the impression he left on Dylan.

“Bob Dylan really did bring us to a place where the song was an instrument to open another world,” Bono told Burnett. “And, the world of Woody Guthrie, I probably wouldn’t have entered — personally speaking — without Bob Dylan.”

When Burnett brought up the 1988 U2 concert at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast that is often credited as a key moment in ending the Troubles, the Edge was even more pointed, comparing U2’s platform during that time with the protest music that arose in the United States during the end of the Civil Rights Movement.

“I believe music can actually change the temperature of the room, and change the mood of the country,” he said. “We saw it in the USA in the Sixties.”

Bono interjected: “We have to rise above argument and politics. In terms of protest songs and what happened to U2, the subject we were protesting most often turned out to be ourselves and the hypocrisy of the human heart, when we saw that we really couldn’t point the finger.”

When the two men finished with Burnett, Canoni returned to the stage to officially christen U2 as the 2025 Woody Guthrie Prize recipient, and the Cain’s audience responded with a final ovation.

For a curtain call, Bono led the room in an a cappella singalong of the chorus to the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged, are available via Back Lounge Publishing.