Alice Brock, who helped inspire Arlo Guthrie’s classic 'Alice's Restaurant,' dies at 83

NEW YORK — Alice Brock, whose Massachusetts-based eatery helped inspire Arlo Guthrie’s deadpan Thanksgiving standard, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” has died at age 83.

NEW YORK — Alice Brock, whose Massachusetts-based eatery helped inspire Arlo Guthrie’s deadpan Thanksgiving standard, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” has died at age 83.

Her death, just a week before Thanksgiving, was announced Friday by Guthrie on the Facebook page of his own Rising Son Records. Guthrie wrote that she died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, her residence for some 40 years, and referred to her being in failing health. Other details were not immediately available.

“This coming Thanksgiving will be the first without her,” Guthrie wrote. “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.”

Born Alice May Pelkey in New York City, Brock was a lifelong rebel who was a member of Students for a Democratic Society among other organizations. In the early 1960s, she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College, moved to Greenwich Village and married Ray Brock, a woodworker who encouraged her to leave New York and resettle in Massachusetts.

US singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie in 2019 in Bethel, N.Y.Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images fileGuthrie, son of the celebrated folk musician Woody Guthrie, first met Brock around 1962 when he was attending the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts and she was the librarian. They became friends and stayed in touch after he left school, when he would stay with her and her husband at the converted Stockbridge church that became the Brocks’ main residence.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alice-brock-arlo-guthrie-alices-restaurant-dead-rcna181486

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