{"id":4685,"date":"2013-10-22T05:30:24","date_gmt":"2013-10-22T09:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=4685"},"modified":"2017-11-30T09:19:05","modified_gmt":"2017-11-30T14:19:05","slug":"album-reviewwoody-guthrie-american-radical-patriot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2013\/10\/22\/album-reviewwoody-guthrie-american-radical-patriot\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Woody Guthrie — American Radical Patriot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most Americans know the name Woody Guthrie<\/strong>. What they know of him beyond that \u2013 and\/or their opinion on what he means to popular culture and music \u2013 varies widely. He’s an often misunderstood character, and as so often happens, human tendency toward a sort of reductionist thought tends to try and simplify him, to distill his essence down to a short wiki entry.<\/p>\n

His body of work is an inconvenient presence to that sort of approach. The man wrote at least 3001 songs (that’s how many that have been officially catalogued by his official foundation) and there were certainly more. He recorded extensively, as well. And a new compilation brings together a thematically linked set of recordings dating mostly from the 1940s and 50s. Woody Guthrie: American Radical Patriot<\/em> collects for the first time in one place all of the Library of Congress recordings Guthrie did with historian Alan Lomax<\/strong>, his Bonneville Power Administration songs; demos he did in hopes of supporting public health initiatives to combat venereal disease; and songs to support the WWII war effort. Six CD document that material, and a detailed annotation guides the listener along.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The sessions with Lomax are a rich combination of stories, songs and story-songs. In a small studio, the two men sit (with occasional sips of liquor), and Lomax \u2013 employing the polite fiction that the two had only just met \u2013 asks Guthrie to reminisce about his life as a youth in dust bowl Oklahoma, his move to California, and myriad other topics. For his part, Guthrie recounts jokes, tells heart-rending stories of death, and regales Lomax with vivid slice-of-life tales.<\/p>\n

And quite often \u2013 sometimes without prompting, sometimes with encouragement from Lomax — Gurthrie sings and plays songs. His own tunes occasionally, but as often as not, songs he learned from others. Traditional songs adapted to his style, these tunes include \u201cGreenback Dollar\u201d and \u201cThe Midnight Special\u201d (the latter written and popularized by Guthrie’s friend and another of Lomax’s session subjects, Huddie Ledbetter<\/strong> aka Lead Belly).<\/p>\n

Guthrie sings of love, of his god (\u201cJesus Christ,\u201d) of American folk heroes and antiheroes (\u201cBilly the Kid.\u201d \u201cPretty Boy Floyd\u201d), and of the struggles between the haves and have nots (\u201cThe Jolly Banker\u201d).<\/p>\n

The last of these leads toward a discussion of a question given deep coverage in the pages of American Radical Patriot<\/em>‘s stunning book: was Woody Guthrie a Communist? Evidence is presented, and in the end the reader\/listener is encouraged to make his\/her own decision, but the liner essay author (Bill Nowlin<\/strong>, though one has to look hard to find the modest author’s name or credit) clearly believes \u2013 and argues convincingly \u2013 that Guthrie was in fact a \u201ccommonist\u201d rather than a member of any sort of organized school of thought. Guthrie’s own half-jesting words on the subject: \u201cI ain’t a communist necessarily, but I have been in the red all my life.\u201d Nowlin suggests Guthrie was a sort of quasi-Christian socialist, and the songs in general support that view. More than anything else, he was a champion of the common man, of the downtrodden, the voiceless.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/center>Though amazingly plain-spoken and a voice who articulated the persona of the American common man, Guthrie was indeed complicated. His views often changed. Early on he used the N-word, until taken to task by a radio listener. (He immediately stopped using the offensive term.) His views on the glories of American frontier expansionism led him to paint a negative portrait of Native Americans in one of the songs he cut for the BPA (\u201cRoll On Columbia,\u201d) though Nowlin suggests — again, convincingly so — that had Guthrie been called out on this, he likely would have rethought and rewritten the lytic.<\/p>\n

Too, he was decidedly anti-war until the sinking of the USS Reuben James by the Germans in 1941. Guthrie went on to serve in the quasi-governmental Merchant Marines, and later the US Army. He recorded many anti-fascist songs including \u201cReuben James\u201d and \u201cWhoopy Ti-yi, Get Along, Mr. Hitler.\u201d American Radical Patriot<\/em> collects those tunes as well. While at first glance Guthrie’s populist sentiments might seem at odds with the idea of recording in the employ of the Federal government, closer inspection shows that it’s not at all inconsistent. Guthrie saw the federal government as a counterweight to some of the more anti-populist tendencies of state governance; in many ways he’s the polar opposite of the misguided, mean-spirited and short-sighted 21st<\/sup> century so-called \u201ctea party\u201d mentality.<\/p>\n

The new set also includes innumerable goodies, but here’s a rundown of the most significant among these. First, there’s a DVD including a 99-minute documentary film Roll On Columbia<\/em>; eleven of Guthrie’s songs are included. The liner notes \u2013 in a chapter entitled \u201cThe Bonneville Power Administration Recordings\u201d — tell the story of one man’s heroic stewardship of films (including Guthrie’s music) that were ordered destroyed during the dark days of McCarthyism.<\/p>\n

Though it’s of practical use to very few people, the set also includes a 10\u201d 78rpm disc. The record includes an alternate recording of \u201cThe Biggest Thing that Man Has Ever Done\u201d (originally cut for the BPA) and a flip-side recording of Bob Dylan<\/strong> covering Guthrie’s \u201cVD Blues.\u201d<\/p>\n

The physical package itself is beyond amazing. Housed in a hardcover package designed to look and feel like an old-time \u201crecord album,\u201d American Radical Patriot<\/em> may well be the \u2013 from a visual\/tactile aesthetic point of view \u2013 one of the most impressive box sets ever put together. The 60pp book (not a booklet!) bound inside is essential reading, though readers are advised against attempting to do so while listening ot the CDs. And if all that three-dimensional stuff isn’t enough, an e-book (also available on Disc One as a PDF, and in hard copy form for a nominal additional charge of about $13.50) presents a much longer and more in-depth version of the book included in the physical set.<\/p>\n

As a cultural icon, Woody Guthrie, his oral histories and his music are all exemplars of the best qualities of the American experience. That a package such as American Radical Patriot<\/em> is created to honor him is one of those why-didn’t-they-think-of-this-before things. But here it is. Simply essential.<\/p>\n

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Most Americans know the name Woody Guthrie. What they know of him beyond that \u2013 and\/or their opinion on what he means to popular culture and music \u2013 varies widely. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13756,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10,30,49,65,71],"tags":[2394],"class_list":["post-4685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-americana","category-book","category-folk","category-new-release","category-review","category-spoken-word","tag-woody-guthrie","cat-6-id","cat-10-id","cat-30-id","cat-49-id","cat-65-id","cat-71-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13757,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4685\/revisions\/13757"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}