NEW YORK – Alice Brock, whose Massachusetts-based eatery inspired Arlo Guthrie’s dry Thanksgiving standard “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” has died at age 83.

Guthrie announced her death, just a week before Thanksgiving, on Friday on the Facebook page of his own label, Rising Son Records. Guthrie wrote that she died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, her home of about 40 years, citing her poor health. Further details were not immediately available.

“This coming Thanksgiving will be the first without her,” Guthrie wrote. “Alice and I spoke on the phone a few weeks ago and she sounded like herself. We joked and had a few good laughs, even though we knew we would never have the opportunity to talk to each other again.”

Born Alice May Pelkey ​​in New York City, Brock was a lifelong rebel who, among other things, was a member of Students for a Democratic Society. 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 settle in Massachusetts.

Guthrie, son of famous folk musician Woody Guthrie, first met Brock around 1962 when he attended Stockbridge School in Massachusetts and she was a librarian. They became friends and stayed in touch after he left school, when he lived with her and her husband in the converted Stockbridge church, which became the Brocks’ primary residence.

On Thanksgiving Day 1965, a simple task led to Guthrie’s arrest, his eventual avoidance of military service during the Vietnam War, and a song that has endured as a protest classic and holiday favorite. Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins helped the Brocks throw out the trash, but ended up throwing it down a hill because they couldn’t find an open dumpster. Police charged her with illegal dumping, briefly jailed her and fined her $50, a seemingly minor offense with serious consequences.

In 1966, Alice Brock was managing The Back Room restaurant in Stockbridge, Guthrie was a rising star and his breakthrough song was an 18-minute talking blues that recounted his arrest and how it left him ineligible for the draft. The chorus was a tribute to Alice — whose restaurant, Guthrie pointed out, wasn’t actually called Alice’s Restaurant — that countless fans have since memorized:

You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant / You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant / Walk in right behind the restaurant / Just half a mile from the train line / You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant you want.

Guthrie assumed his song was too long to be successful commercially, but it soon became a staple on radio and part of popular culture. “Alice’s Restaurant” was the title of his million-selling debut album and the basis of a film and cookbook of the same name. Alice Brock wrote a memoir titled “My Life as a Restaurant” and collaborated with Guthrie on a children’s book titled “Mooses Come Walking.” At the time of her death, they had been discussing an exhibit dedicated to her at her former home in Stockton, now the Guthrie Center, which serves free dinners every Thanksgiving.

Brock ran three different restaurants at different times, although she later admitted that she wasn’t particularly interested in cooking or business at first. She also cited her professional life as the cause of the breakdown of her marriage and denied rumors that she had been unfaithful to her husband. Her honor was immortalized by Guthrie, who advised late in “Alice’s Restaurant,” “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant,” “except Alice.”