While there's certainly no shortage of Christmas songs on the radio this time of year, dedicated Thanksgiving tunes are pretty hard to come by. In fact, most people can only think of one song that's truly considered a Thanksgiving tradition...and it's not really about the holiday at all.
Inspired by a real-life event on Thanksgiving Day, 1965, Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" (the song's full name is actually “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”) was released in 1967, and in the years since, it's become a custom for radio stations across the country to play the nearly 19-minute-long song in the middle of the day on Thanksgiving.
But the tune, which tells the hilarious, rambling tale of how a teenaged Guthrie (son of Woody Guthrie) was arrested for littering on Thanksgiving Day, making him ineligible for the Vietnam War draft, is more of an anti-war anthem than a celebration of turkey and stuffing. So how did it become a holiday favorite?
As Smithsonian Magazine reported, the "first breakthrough" for "Alice's Restaurant" came when the song made its February 1967 radio debut on New York City’s WBAI-FM.
“I'd been a big fan of WBAI. I’d been to their studios a few times and one night they asked me to perform live. I had no idea they were taping it, although it wouldn’t have stopped me from performing. I loved those guys," Guthrie explained.
By the spring, WBAI was getting so many requests to play "Alice's Restaurant" that the non-profit station used the song to raise funds.
“WBAI…would play it after they’d been pledged enough money,” Guthrie said, adding, “Eventually they were playing it so often, they took pledges to stop playing it, and…raised even more money.”
"Alice's Restaurant" found still more popularity at the historic Newport Folk Festival that same year, where an afternoon performance of the song was met with such enthusiasm that Guthrie was brought back to play during the evening, this time joined by a lineup of famous folk musicians.
“It would take a few paragraphs just to name all the artists who ended up playing with me,” Guthrie explained. “But I was simply amazed that so many of my heroes were willing to participate. I learned later, from Oscar Brand and Pete Seeger, that they were worried that I was so young and inexperienced that performing for such a large crowd could’ve become a bad situation. So, they wanted to show some support by sending out the performers who were willing to sing with me. I was thrilled.”
In the years since, "Alice's Restaurant" continues to attract new listeners, thanks to those repeated broadcasts and Guthrie playing the song at his annual Thanksgiving concerts at New York City's Carnegie Hall. In 2017, "Alice's Restaurant" was added to the National Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Sadly, last year, the woman behind the title of the song — restaurant owner Alice Brock —passed away shortly before Thanksgiving, on November 21st, 2024, at the age of 83.
“This coming Thanksgiving will be the first without her,” Guthrie wrote on Facebook at the time, per Far Out. “Alice and I spoke by phone a couple of weeks ago, and she sounded like her old self. We joked around and had a couple of good laughs even though we knew we’d never have another chance to talk together.”
While Brock will surely be missed this Thanksgiving by her friends and family, her memory will live on forever in the form of what might be the most unlikely holiday song of all time.
Related: Bob Dylan Says One Book Blew Him Away and It's the Last Thing You'd Expect
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