BY STEVEN LIBOWITZ
SARAH LEE GUTHRIE
AND JOHNNY IRION’S
ROOTS CONNECT
TO AMERICAN ICONS
F
or more than two years, a young family with ties to two of the most
iconic names in American literature and music have mostly made their
home in Montecito. Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion, husband-and-
wife who have been together since they met back in 1997 when she was
18 and he a decade older, have spent two of the last three school years in the village
with their two daughters, Olivia, 13, and Sophia, 8.
Guthrie is the youngest daughter of the famed folksinger Arlo Guthrie of the
original Woodstock Music Festival and “Alice’s Restaurant” fame, whose own father
was folk icon Woody Guthrie – while Irion’s aunt Gail has been married for more
than 20 years to Montecito novelist Thomas Steinbeck, son of John Steinbeck, Nobel
Prize-winning author of
Grapes of Wrath
and
East of Eden
.
In fact, it was the family connections that first brought the couple – who spent
more than a decade together as a folk-rock duo before forging separate career paths
this last year – to Montecito in the fall of 2013. But it’s been a long journey.
Right up until she hit voting age, in fact, Guthrie had little interest in music at all,
instead rebelling against the family business because she’d been too immersed in the
life of traveling troubadours as a child. But then she met Irion in Los Angeles through
mutual friend Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes, and the two forged a friendship
that quickly blossomed into romance and, not much later, a musical partnership.
“I was so young and I had no idea what I wanted,” Guthrie recalls. “I was just
hanging out and partying in Los Angeles. But when he came into the picture, the
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