WOODY GUTHRIE
American Radical Patriot
Rounder

www.rounder.com
 

Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie, probably the most prominent single figure in American folk music, was born on Bastille Day, 1912, and before his early death in 1967 managed to amass a legacy of over a thousand songs of all varieties, several books, hundreds of newspaper columns, stories, essays, cartoons and poems along with a rambling lifestyle that still motivates adventuresome seekers to pick up their sleeping bags and guitars, hitch up their boots and hit the back roads and byways to check out the real, often hardscrabble world at the end of the dusty highway. Jam-packed with hours of listening and viewing, this definitive Guthrie collection, limited to 5,000 copies, draws exhaustively from a substantial body of work, both in song and spoken word, all of which he either recorded for or under the auspices of the United States government and will prove revelatory to even the most diehard Guthrie fan. Several excellent Guthrie-related projects have been released recently (most notably two volumes of Mermaid Avenue, with some of the Dust Bowl Troubadour’s previously unrecorded lyrics set to music by Billy Bragg and Wilco) but only now has this ultimate treasure chest of the singer/songwriter’s earliest recordings been unlocked and shared with the wider world. Various segments of Guthrie’s five hours worth of Library of Congress sessions have been issued before, notably on Elektra, Rounder and Folkways Records, but here it’s all in one place along with a vintage film documentary about his brief period as a songwriting employee of the Department of the Interior in Washington and Oregon (where he penned three of his most famous: “Pastures Of Plenty,” “Grand Coulee Dam” and “Roll On Columbia”), five songs he composed and performed with the Almanac Singers to support the anti-Fascist effort in World War II, three efforts from Jazz America broadcasts and  two 15-minute radio dramas he helped write and perform for the Office of War Information during the Second World War as well as ten songs he composed and rendered for the U.S. Public Health Services’ anti-venereal disease campaign to fight the spread of the sexually transmitted affliction—an enclosed 78 RPM vinyl disc features Bob Dylan’s 1961 off-the-cuff recording of Guthrie’s “VD City” on one side with Guthrie’s 1951 home recording of “The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done” (a.k.a. “The Great Historical Bum”) on the other. An enclosed sixty-page booklet contains a host of previously unpublished photographs and drawings by Guthrie along with an edited version (with notes and essays by Rounder Records co-founder Bill Nowlin) of a 256 page Guthrie e-book (available from Print on Demand) that has a full transcription of all the words of all the songs, radio dramas and Woody’s “musical autobiography” as well as full details on the 78 RPM record and the one-hour documentary.

The fascinating, front-porch plain interview segments, interspersed with terrific versions of some of his finest songs, are spread out over the first four discs and feature Guthrie in candid, direct and often painfully honest conversation with enterprising folklorist Alan Lomax, covering everything from his early boyhood and fractured family life in a whistle-stop of a town called Okemah, Oklahoma to migrants leaving the Dust Bowl for the orange groves and orchards of California in the 1930s and a Los Angeles New Year’s Eve flood that took over a hundred lives. Woody got around. He also wrote the first million-selling country song, “Philadelphia Lawyer” (as performed by Rose Maddox). First and foremost, however, Guthrie had an uncanny ability to create a panoramic sketch in just a few lines, often generously soaked in a humbling humanity, a character’s life or a particular social situation he was at odds with. As his daughter Nora is often quoted as saying: “Woody always wrote in the key of you.” Favorites here include some of his Dust Bowl classics (“Do Re Mi,” “So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You,” “Talking Dust Bowl” and “Dust Pneumonia Blues”), outlaw songs like “Billy The Kid” and “Pretty Boy Floyd,” and clever adaptations of classics like “Gypsy Davy,” “Stewball,” “Stagger Lee” and “Nine Hundred Miles.” The fifth disc comprises the fore-mentioned Bonneville Power Administration titles (in surprisingly good shape) along with a trio of “War Effort” songs, highlighted by the true-to-life tale of the “Sinking Of The Reuben James.” Disc six begins with additional “War Effort” material (“Whoopy Ti-Yi, Get Along, Mr. Hitler,” from a Jazz In America broadcast is a crack-up), his anti-venereal disease efforts and his Lonesome Traveler radio play that is bookended by renditions of “The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done.”  The set closing DVD, an absorbing documentary  titled “Roll On Columbia,” was produced by the University of Oregon in 2000, features telling interview segments with the likes of Studs Terkel, Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Guthrie’s first wife Mary, among others, that illuminate the details behind probably the most productive period in Guthrie’s life (he wrote 26 songs during the month of May, 1941) including, in addition to the three cited above, such deceptively simple, direct and poetic gems as “Hard Travelin’,” Jackhammer Blues,” “Talking Columbia,” “Oregon Trail” and ‘Ramblin’ Round” about migrant workers, the picturesque Pacific Northwest region and the cheap electricity that the “under construction” dams of the Bonneville Power Administration would bring to the depressed region. Guthrie was originally supposed to narrate and sing his songs on-camera but Pearl Harbor caused the original plan to be shelved as almost everybody involved, including Guthrie, joined the service. All things considered, the plainspoken genius and unvarnished truth-telling bard of the common man may be becoming more popular in the 21st century than he ever was in the 20th. Here he is at the peak of his powers.

— Gary von Tersch