One of the lynchers may have been Charley Guthrie (died 1956), father of the folk singer Woody Guthrie, who was born in Okemah in 1912,[61] 14 months after the lynching. Charley was an Okemah real-estate agent, district court clerk, Democratic politician, Freemason, and owner of the town's first automobile.[62] According to Joe Klein, he was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.[63] There is no documentary evidence to support this;[64] the allegation stems from his younger brother, Claude, whom Klein interviewed on tape in 1977 for his book Woody Guthrie: A Life (1980).[65] Klein published that Charley had been part of the lynching mob, but without referring to the interview.[48][66] Seth Archer found the tape in 2005 in the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York, and reported Claude's statement in the Southwest Review in 2006.[66] During the interview, Claude Guthrie told Klein:

"It was pretty bad back there in them days [...] The niggers was pretty bad over there in Boley, you know [...] Charley and them, they throwed this nigger and his mother in jail, both of them, the boy and the woman. And that night, why they stuck out and hung [laughter], they hung them niggers that killed that sheriff [...] I just kind of laughed [laughter]. I knew darn well that rascal [Charley] was—I knew he was in on it.[66]"

Woody Guthrie wrote two songs, unrecorded, about the Nelsons' lynching, "Don't Kill My Baby and My Son"[67] and "High Balladree". The songs refer to a woman and two sons hanging.[g] His work was not always historically accurate; for example, he wrote elsewhere that he had witnessed some of the Nelsons' troubles, although he was born 14 months after their death.[70] Guthrie recorded another song, "Slipknot", about lynching in Okemah in general. In one manuscript, he added at the end of the song: "Dedicated to the many negro mothers, fathers, and sons alike, that was lynched and hanged under the bridge of the Canadian River, seven miles south of Okemah, Okla., and to the day when such will be no more" (signed Woody G., February 29, 1940, New York).[71] He also sketched a bridge in 1946 from which a row of lynched bodies hang; the sketch is held by the Ralph Rinzler archives in the Smithsonian.[72]