Dec 14

Woody Guthrie

Highly Appreciated

WOODY GUTHRIE

 
Woody Guthrie  (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) was an American singer-songwriter and musician whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children’s songs, ballads and improvised works.  His best-known song is “This Land Is Your Land”.  Many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress.  Many of his songs are about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression when Guthrie traveled with displaced farmers from Oklahoma to California and learned their traditional folk and blues songs, earning him the nickname the “Dust Bowl Troubadour”.  Guthrie was married three times and fathered eight children, including American folk musician Arlo Guthrie.  During his later years, in spite of his illness, Guthrie served as a figurehead in the folk movement, providing inspiration to a generation of new folk musicians, including mentor relationships with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Two of his songs (Ron Franklin writes all of his own material) basically quote Bob Dylan.  The other is “We Ain’t Got No Home”, which has a title and some lyrics that are virtually the same as Woody Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home”.  In the very beginning, Dylan was described as being just one among a host of Guthrie wannabes; but “I Ain’t Got No Home” is one of the very few Guthrie songs that Dylan recorded, even before he did much songwriting – I speak as someone owning dozens of Dylan bootleg albums as well as virtually all of his Columbia and Asylum releases. 
 
(January 2012)
 
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Arlo Guthrie suffers not only from the long shadow cast by his legendary father Woody Guthrie, but also by the fear that Huntington’s Disease might claim him as it did Woody.  
 
(May 2012)
 
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Plagiarizing music is not so straightforward to spot as, say, plagiarizing a term paper.  There were any number of bands aping the Beatles and the Byrds and the Zombies during the 1960’s; Bob Dylan for instance started out as a Woody Guthrie wannabe after all.  
 
 (August 2012)
 
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I was rather surprised years later to hear my home town come up again as I played one of the songs on the two excellent Mermaid Avenue CD’s, consisting of a set of performances of the lyrics to several of literally hundreds of unrecorded songs by Woody Guthrie that were set to music by the American rock band Wilco and the English singer-songwriter Billy Bragg.  One of the songs, “Aginst th’ Law” goes on and on about all of these illegalities – “It’s against the law to talk, and it’s against the law to walk”, etc. – and later in the song, there is the lyric:  “Everything in Winston-Salem is against the law!” 

 

(March 2013)

 
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In conclusion, I am not trying to say that Bob Dylan didn’t perform protest songs; clearly he did, in the broadest sense of the term at least.  However, Dylan never vented his outrage in the way that you expected, and he never went after the easy targets.  While I am certainly no expert, from what I know of Woody Guthrie – Bob Dylan’s direct inspiration and even his mentor to a limited extent – much the same could be said of his music as well. 

 

(May 2013)

 

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In 2010, Nina Hagen released an album called Personal Jesus that is described by James Christopher Monger in Allmusic as:  “German punk icon Nina Hagen’s first collection of new music in nearly four years features 13 faith-based tracks that dutifully blend rock, blues, soul, and gospel into a sound that’s distinctly hers.”  The album includes covers of the Depeche Mode title song, “Personal Jesus”, several traditional gospel songs, a Larry Gatlin number called “Help Me”, and a Woody Guthrie song called “All You Fascists Bound to Lose”. 

 

(November 2014)

 

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The entry on the Carter Family in Allmusic (by David Vinopal) includes:  “Comprised of a gaunt, shy gospel quartet member named Alvin P. Carter and two reserved country girls – his wife, Sara [Dougherty Carter], and their sister-in-law, Maybelle [Addington Carter] – the Carter Family sang a pure, simple harmony that influenced not only the numerous other family groups of the ’30s and the ’40s, but folk, bluegrass, and rock musicians like Woody Guthrie, Bill Monroe, the Kingston Trio, Doc Watson, Bob Dylan, and Emmylou Harris, to mention just a few.  It’s unlikely that bluegrass music would have existed without the Carter Family.” 

 

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But that was just the beginning.  One of the A. P. Carter songs on The Famous Carter Family is so timeless that it is hard to imagine anyone writing it:  “Keep on the Sunny Side”.  There are three bonafide classic gospel songs:  “Can the Circle be Unbroken”, “Lonesome Valley”, and “Gospel Ship”.  Another song was one I knew as a Woody Guthrie number, “Worried Man Blues”.  The other songs I was not familiar with but quickly learned to love as much as the others.  I gathered up a few more Carter Family albums and learned what I could about them. 

 

(February 2015)

 

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But solo songwriting is a lonely profession, and success is far from guaranteed.  Bob Dylan’s first album, Bob Dylan did not particularly showcase Dylan’s songwriting talent; there were only two original songs on the album. and the tunes to both had similarities with his mentor Woody Guthrie’s songs.  In fact, says Wikipedia:  “Mitch Miller, Columbia [Records]’s chief of A&R at the time, said U.S. sales totaled about 2,500 copies.  Bob Dylan remains Dylan’s only release not to chart at all in the US, though it eventually reached #13 in the UK charts in 1965.  Despite the album’s poor performance, financially it was not disastrous because the album was very cheap to record.”  Bob Dylan was one of the first Dylan albums that I purchased, and I am astounded that this album never made the charts.  

 

(March 2015)

 

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In my last post, I was mostly talking about solo songwriters like Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, but writing songs is primarily a collaborative profession.  In many cases, the music and the lyrics would be written separately.  Richard Rodgers was a towering figure in writing music for Broadway shows and other productions; he primarily worked with two different lyricists over the years, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. 

 

(April 2015/1)

 

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Arlo Guthrie’s father Woody Guthrie has been in the news lately; among other notes along the same lines, a reworking of one of his best known songs, “I Ain’t Got No Home” came to light in his papers that included a scathing indictment as a racist of “old man Trump”, that is, Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump. Guthrie had signed a lease in December 1950 at one of the elder Trump’s apartment complexes near Coney Island, called Beach Haven and began noticing the lily-white neighborhood where it was located. 
Arlo Guthrie was quoted about this in our local newspaper, the Sun Herald: “Maybe the biggest difference between my father and I is that I was able to live a little longer than he did and was able to learn from my experience in ways he could not. He was hospitalized when he was only 40 years old and passed away at 55 in 1967. . . . [A]s I aged I became less judgmental of individuals and began instead writing about the things I liked or didn’t like, and stopped writing about the people themselves. My father didn’t have the luxury of living long enough to make that kind of change regardless of whether he would or would not have.” 
(March 2016)
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Several of Bob Dylan’s early songs were in the “talking blues” form that was pioneered in the 1920’s and popularized by Dylan’s idol Woody Guthrie in the 1940’s.  Typically these songs have "Talking" or “Talkin’” somewhere in the title, such as “Talkin’ New York” on his debut album, Bob Dylan; many though were not released on his Columbia albums and often have bizarre titles, such as “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”, “Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues”, and “Talkin’ Hava Negeilah Blues”.  These talking blues numbers are among Dylan’s funniest songs, albeit often with black humor.
 
(September 2016)
 
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Great White Wonder opened up a whole world for me.  To me, many of these songs are now as familiar and as solidly in the Bob Dylan canon as anything that I have heard on the Columbia Records studio albums released in the 1960’s, “The Death of Emmett Till” (a great old-school protest song), “Only a Hobo” (my favorite song on Great White Wonder and one of the earliest songs by anyone about the plight of the homeless), “Black Cross”, “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)”, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Got to Stay All Night)”, “Poor Lazarus”, “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Open the Door, Homer”, “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “I Ain’t Got No Home”, and “(As I Go) Ramblin’ ’Round” (the last two being Woody Guthrie songs) among them. 
 
(September 2017)
 
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Since I am down to a quarterly schedule rather than a monthly schedule, my annual list is a lot shorter, so I will try listing all of the people that I have discussed in some depth rather than just the Under Appreciated Rock Band and the Story of the Month. They are all punk rock bands of one kind or another this year (2015-2016), and the most recent post includes my overview of the early rap/hip hop scene that an old friend, George Konstantinow challenged me to write – probably so long ago that he might have forgotten.
(Year 7 Review)
Last edited: March 22, 2021