SOUTH KINGSTOWN — In the 1930s, Woody Guthrie was the balladeer of the Great Depression and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. In the 1940s, he was the voice of anti-fascist movement. By the 1950s, the folksinger and political activist had become a tribune of the labor union movement, the Cold war peace movement and the battle for women’s rights.

Tuesday evening at the University of Rhode Island, Guthrie’s career was celebrated in dance, music and film at the final session of URI’s fall honors colloquium on the “Songs of Social Justice: The Rhetoric of Music.”

More than 500 Guthrie fans jammed Edwards Auditorium for an evening that included music and dance by the Vanaver Caravan and a tribute to her father by Nora Guthrie.

It was a reminder of the rich folk music heritage inspired by the Depression and such writers as John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos. Guthrie’s wide influence was honored with a medley of song and dance numbers that evoked his concerns for the rural poor, urban workers and his collaboration with his second wife, Marjorie Mazia, who was a dancer with the New York City-based Martha Graham Dance Company.

The Vanaver Caravan, based in New Paltz, N.Y., presented a number of energetic dance routines that touched on such traditions as Irish step dancing, Appalachian clog dancing, western square dancing, New York’s Lindy Hop, Virginia reels and modern dance.

Dancers dressed as Rosie the Riveter reminded the audience of Guthrie’s World War II service in the merchant marine and Army, and dancers garbed in the peasant dresses of Dust Bowl women evoked Guthrie’s songs of the Depression.

The performance began with a film testimonial to Guthrie’s career. Among the performers who said their work was informed by Guthrie were Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Billy Bragg, Ani DiFranco, Bono and naturally, Guthrie’s son, western Massachusetts-based folksinger Arlo Guthrie of “Alice’s Restaurant” fame.

Woody Guthrie was born in 1912 in the tiny Oklahoma hamlet of Okemah. His father was a cowboy, speculator and local political figure. His mother was mentally ill and eventually institutionalized. The death of his older sister, Clara, when he was young, haunted him throughout his life. Guthrie himself was afflicted with Huntington’s chorea, the degenerative disease that killed his mother and from which Guthrie would die, in New York, in 1967.

Besides being a lifelong wanderer — during the Depression he often walked or hitchhiked from town to town in the Southwest and California — Guthrie was comfortable with ordinary folks. His love for the road was often celebrated in his songs.

Early in his career, Guthrie received both praise and criticism for appearing with black and leftist musicians, including Lead Belly, Sony Terry, Brownie McGhee, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, and Bess Hawes. At a time when the American South was an apartheid region, appearances with black musicians and dancers were far outside the mainstream.

In the late 1940s, Guthrie hooked up with the Almanac singers, a politically radical group, some of whose members would become the Weavers, a group which achieved a measure of commercial success unusual in the mainstream entertainment industry.

But Guthrie became upset with the New York-based entertainment and radio industry and donned his traveling shoes once again. At the time he wrote, “I got sick of the whole sissified and nervous rules of censorship on all my songs and ballads and drove off down the road across the southern states again.”

The crowd yesterday had a sprinkling of undergraduates but consisted mostly of people old enough to remember Dwight Eisenhower’s administration and precisely where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

So it came as no surprise that many in the audience joined the Vanaver Caravan ensemble in a rousing rendition of Guthrie’s signature song, “This Land is Your Land.” The crowd filed out to the familiar words of America’s unofficial national anthem, “This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York Island, from the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me.”