'lost' Woody Guthrie album

Subject: RE: 'lost' Woody Guthrie album
From: C. Ham
Date: 09 Dec 07 - 01:11 AM

He took a dim view of his
imitators. He thought that people should be who they are and not his clone.

Frank,

In those years, who else but Ramblin' Jack was imitating Woody? Dylan and his ilk came along years later. The way I've always heard Jack, and people like Arlo, tell it, Woody and Jack were close.

Subject: RE: 'lost' Woody Guthrie album
From: Stringsinger
Date: 08 Dec 07 - 03:14 PM

For a brief period in the early 1950's in Topanga Canyon California on Will Geer's ranch,, I was one of Woody's "pickin' buddies". Some of his song lyrics had tunes that he actually sang in those days, notably, "At My Window Sad and Lonely", which I never forgot.

I knew Woody at a transitional time where he was becoming more ill and we all thought it was alcohol.

One of his favorite songs was the Cajun, "Jolie Blonde".

He took a dim view of his
imitators. He thought that people should be who they are and not his clone.

Unfortunately, there is so much that is "lost" of Woody and I sense that the more he is lionized, the less we will really know about him.

These early recordings and notes are invaluable, though.

The one aspect about his performance that I take with me is that Woody was the same guy on the stage as he was off. He could meld his everyday conversation into a performance.

Sometimes, though, he didn't like to talk at all. He just wanted to communicate through music. There were periods where we didn't talk, we just picked.

He lived in a different universe where the common social amenities didn't apply. A lot of this was due to the fact that he knew what was happening to him. This gave an urgency to his expression writing piles of poems and drawings on blank accounting books, some of them mercifully saved, and the way he sang as if every song were an important performance. Woody never phoned it in around me.

Frank Hamilton

Subject: RE: 'lost' Woody Guthrie album
From: Charley Noble
Date: 08 Dec 07 - 02:27 PM

Nice update.

Charley Noble

Subject: RE: 'lost' Woody Guthrie album
From: katlaughing
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 11:11 PM

Here's the article:

By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press Writer Fri Dec 7, 3:48 PM ET

LOS ANGELES - He wrote more than a thousand songs, ranging from his "Dust Bowl" ballads to patriotic incantations like "Pastures of Plenty" to the American classic "This Land is Your Land."
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He performed them everywhere he went, from community centers to Broadway theaters to California fields filled with migrant workers. He also recorded dozens on records.

But one thing Woody Guthrie never got around to doing was recording any of his songs in front of a live audience — or so Guthrie's family thought.

Until an odd-looking package with reels of wires showed up unsolicited in the mail one day at the Woody Guthrie Archives.

Once she had assured herself it wasn't a bomb, Nora Guthrie was delighted at what she was holding.

"Basically, it's an early bootleg," says Guthrie, youngest surviving child of the legendary folk-music balladeer.

Captured on a wire recorder, the 75-minute recording was painstakingly transferred to compact disc, an effort that took more than a year. It was recently released by the archives as "Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949."

It apparently had sat for decades in the closet of the late Paul Braverman, who was a Rutgers University student when he lugged his recorder to Fuld Hall in Newark, N.J., one night for a concert by Guthrie.

"He mailed it to the archives in 2001," Guthrie's daughter says. "He was cleaning out his closet because he was moving."

Braverman, who died in 2003, didn't get what musicians would call a soundboard-quality recording, says Guthrie's oldest son, folk singer Arlo Guthrie. But what he got was surprisingly good, especially considering the circumstances. Except for some notable scratches here and there, the recording survived a half-century in Braverman's closet in surprisingly pristine shape.

"This isn't somebody who set out to record with the permission of the family or whoever was putting on the event," Guthrie notes. "This is a guy maybe holding up a microphone in the back of the room."

It took Nora Guthrie a year just to find a home-built model she could play the reel on, as Braverman's original machine had long since conked out.

After that, still more challenges lay ahead, especially for the team of audio restoration experts she called in.

"There were so many minor tragedies that happened just in the transfer process, with the wire breaking many, many, many times," she recalls during a phone interview from her New York City office, where she's director of the Guthrie Archives.

The finished result, the Guthrie family believes, will be of much interest to fans as well as to academics who continue to study Guthrie's impact on American pop culture and to musicians who continue to reinterpret his work.

"We're talking Native American, punk bands, German cabaret singers and Klezmer music players," says Arlo Guthrie, the composer of "Alice's Restaurant." "Every kind of genre you can imagine because my dad's work is so varied that it allows itself to be used in these ways."

Indeed, the Klezmatics won a Grammy earlier this year for "Wonder Wheel," a collection of Guthrie songs. Punk pioneer Billy Bragg was nominated for Grammys for his own Guthrie collections, 1998's "Mermaid Avenue" and 2000's "Mermaid Avenue, Volume II."

To Arlo Guthrie and his sister, though, the recording is more personal.

"This was the first time I had ever had a chance to hear a live performance of my dad," says Arlo Guthrie, 60. "It's not only that I hadn't heard him live, I hadn't heard many stories about him live. When I talk to friends that were with him, guys like Pete Seeger or Cisco Houston or Ramblin' Jack (Elliott), they generally would talk about their adventures. ... We never got into what a performance was like."

Guthrie, who died of Huntington's Chorea in 1967, had retired from performance years before his death because of the effects of the degenerative nerve disease.

To his son's surprise, "Live Wire" turned out to be eerily similar to an Arlo Guthrie performance: The elder Guthrie would often digress into long, comical tales about his life. He would also frequently intersperse those tales with sharp-tongued observations on the political events of the day.

"You do begin to wonder how much of this is genetic," laughs the younger Guthrie.

The album's release also raises another question: Could there be material lying around in a garage or attic somewhere that might eventually be turned into a long-lost Woody Guthrie concert film?

Arlo Guthrie is doubtful, although he notes that in an age when every bit of film seems to eventually find its way to YouTube he could be wrong.

"There is very little film on my dad," he says. "But then that's what we said of this live recording. It didn't exist. And sure enough it did."

___

http://www.woodyguthrie.org

Subject: RE: 'lost' Woody Guthrie album
From: C. Ham
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 10:58 PM

Woody Gurie

Make that "Woody Guthrie."

Subject: RE: 'lost' Woody Guthrie album
From: C. Ham
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 10:55 PM

This was released several months ago. It is amazing that the press takes so long to find the news that is right in front of them.

Mike Regenstreif wrote about the Woody Gurie "Live Wire" CD in the Montreal Gazette back in September.

Subject: RE: 'lost' Woody Guthrie album
From: WFDU - Ron Olesko
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 07:59 PM

also - it was never "lost". The owner knew where it was, the rest of us never knew it existed!

Subject: RE: 'lost' Woody Guthrie album
From: WFDU - Ron Olesko
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 07:58 PM

This was released several months ago. It is amazing that the press takes so long to find the news that is right in front of them.

The reason that it hit the news today was because it was nominated for a Grammy for historical album.

Subject: RE: 'lost' Woody Guthrie album
From: Dan Schatz
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 06:46 PM

Answered my own question - it's available now as a hardcover book with CD from www.woodyguthrie.org .

Thanks for letting us know about this, Michael!

Dan

Subject: RE: 'lost' Woody Guthrie album
From: Dan Schatz
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 06:41 PM

Wow! I'm unclear from the article - will this be released in a CD format, or something we can hear?

Dan

Subject: 'lost' Woody Guthrie album
From: Goose Gander
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 06:27 PM

'Lost' Woody Guthrie album unearthed in closet.