When Love Came to Town: Bono and The Edge Accept the Woody Guthrie Prize in Tulsa
By Troy Littledeer | @candyminksprings
Cain’s Ballroom was full on the night of October 24, and the occasion called for it.
Bono and The Edge of U2 accepted the 2025 Woody Guthrie Prize on that stage — an award given to musicians who have bent their art toward human dignity. The fit was not accidental.
Woody Guthrie never wrote a comfortable song. His music was moral argument dressed in melody, documentation of the dispossessed passed off as folk. “This Land Is Your Land” was not a celebration. It was a question — who does this land actually belong to, and who has been kept from it. His records of migrant workers, deported families, and people the country had chosen to forget turned private suffering into public testimony. The song’s promise was never fully kept. It was always a challenge to keep trying.
U2 built a catalog in that tradition. Bono and The Edge have aimed their platform at apartheid, debt relief, and the machinery of human rights abuse, often absorbing the political cost. Their body of work reads as both art and argument.
The evening was moderated by T Bone Burnett in a sold-out room that, from where I stood, felt closer to a revival than a ceremony. Bono recalled the last time he and The Edge stood inside Cain’s — a 1981 gig where the two of them were too young to be served at the bar. “Another of my bandmates had just turned 21, so he was served,” Bono said, “maybe even over-served.”
When the opening notes of “Pride (In the Name of Love)” reached the back of the room, the crowd took the song back. Oklahomans and visitors sang together, and the moment held.
Burnett brought the night into focus from the stage. He asked who was still fighting for human dignity if not the artists, and said plainly that politicians had not been up to the task.
The Edge answered him. “There’s a reason politicians are afraid of musicians,” he said.
Bono followed with the line that stopped the room. “Woody Guthrie had it written on his guitar, ‘This guitar kills fascists,’” he said. “We don’t want to kill any fascists tonight. But we want to kill fascism.”
The distinction is the point. Not people — the systems and the fear those systems require to survive. The Edge named what they were working against. “Fear is what we have to resist,” he said.
The Edge returned to Guthrie’s most famous song and reframed it. “‘This Land Is Your Land’ wasn’t necessarily true,” he said, “but it was a vision — an idea everyone could get behind.” Then he narrowed it to its core. “You don’t talk about the darkness. You try to make the light brighter.”
Bono closed with a meditation on the country itself. “America is the greatest song still yet to be written,” he said. “The poetry is there, but it’s still being written… Don’t imagine it will continue to be extraordinary on its own, that if you fell asleep and woke up in twenty years, the world would be fairer or freer. It won’t. That’s not the way it works.”
Burnett was right about who is doing the fighting. Artists challenge power through rhythm and witness. The work points toward something beyond itself.
The message landed personally. Faith is not only found in hymns or sanctuaries. It lives in action, in the willingness to stand in front of fear and make something anyway. What U2 brought to Cain’s that night felt like a prayer with a backbeat — a call to conscience that reminded me why I tell my sons to speak the truth even when it costs something.
Guthrie’s America was always unfinished. Bono said the song is still being written. Standing in that room in Tulsa, it sounded like someone had just found the next verse.
Troy Littledeer is a journalist and photographer based in Candy Mink Springs, Oklahoma. He is a member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians and reports on tribal governance, education, and public accountability across Indian Country and surrounding communities. His work centers primary documents and recorded statements, with a focus on tribal law and the public record. He focusing on real communities, sports and music.
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