Songs To Woody

Woody Guthrie was born today in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma. He needs no introduction. I imagine his music has seeped into the lives of nearly every artist I've ever featured on Carnival Saloon. So, to mark what would have been his 98th birthday, here are Woody Guthrie songs by four of my favourites.

MP3: Bob Dylan - This Land is Your Land (live)

"Woody Guthrie tore everything in his path to pieces. For me it was an epiphany,like some heavy anchor had just plunged into the waters of the harbor." That's Bob writing in Chronicles Volume One. It's part of a wonderful two pages recalling the impact hearing Woody for the first had on him. This version of Guthrie's most famous song is from a concert at the Carnegie Chapter Hall in 1961, the year before Bob's first album came out.
Find it on No Direction Home

MP3: Bruce Sprinsgteen - Riding in My Car

Bruce fans will probably know his version of This Land is Your Land that's on the Live 1975-1985 album. This is more obscure (and one of Bob Dylan's early Guthrie favourites too). It's from a 1996 concert that Ani DiFranco organised and is commemorated on the album 'Til We Outnumber Them (which also features Bruce's version of Deportees).
Find it on Til We Outnumber 'em

MP3: Tom Russell - Woodrow

When I first saw Tom Russell live, at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2006, the way this song encompasses so much of Guthrie's life, work and legacy in all its multi-faceted glory really hit me as a masterpiece.
Find it on Hotwalker

MP3: Billy Bragg & Wilco - California Stars (live)

Whenever Wilco play London I always cross my fingers in the hope that they'll invite Billy on to join them to sing one of the songs off Mermaid Avenue. Anyone who's seen the documentary Man in the Sand knows it's unlikely to ever happen. This is one of few times they have performed together, on Conan O'Brien's old show Late Night.
Find the original on Mermaid Avenue

If that's whet your appetite and you want to get back to the source there are tons of Guthrie compilations available. I'd also highly recommend Joe Klein's book Woody Guthrie: A Life.



Related Post
Doing Woody's Work Billy Bragg & Wilco's Mermaid Avenue demos

Related Links
Woody Guthrie - official site

A13, Trunk Road to the Sea

Photo © Nicobobinus @ flickr

For East Londoners the A13 is the great escape route. It runs out of the city through Essex towards the seaside towns of Southend and Shoeburyness.

I'm currently reading London Orbital, Iain Sinclair's account of his walk around the M25. Early in the book he writes that "the A13 shuffle through East London is like the credits sequence of the Mafia soap, The Sopranos; side-of-the-eye perspective, bridges, illegitimate business about to be overwhelmed by the big combos". The prose on the previous page is even better:

The A13 has got it all, New Jersey-going-on-Canvey Island: multiplex cinemas, retail parks, the Beckton Alp ski slope; fly-overs like fairground rides, three salmon-pink tower blocks on Castle Green, at the edge of Dagenham; the Ford water tower and the empty paddocks where ranks of motors used to sit waiting for the transporters. The A13 drains East London's wound, carrying you up into the sky; before throwing you back among boarded-up shops and squatted terraces. All urban life aspires to this condition; flux, a pastiche. A conveyor belt of discontinued industries. A peripatetic museum, horizon to horizon, available to anyone; self-curated.

Carnival Saloon regulars won't be surprised that when I read that passage my thoughts turned to Billy Bragg's Essex-man take on Route 66.

MP3: Billy Bragg - A13, Trunk Road to the Sea

Buy: 7digital | Amazon


The song's great appeal to me lies in its thrall to Americana (why are there no good British road songs?) combined with its absolute Englishness. Billy's put it better. Bragg's evocative essay about his revered highway, written some years before Sinclair's book, concludes, "the A13 is still there, rolling through a Springsteenesque landscape in which riverine Essex takes the place of the New Jersey shore, a tarmacadam trail to the Promised Land".

Whenever my 'American cousin' John Barner visits he arrives with a demented to-do list of things he wants to see. No Tower of London or British Museum for this tourist. Last time we took a vaguely Sinclairian jaunt out to Barking to admire the cul-de-sac named in honour of Billy Bragg. Next time I won't be shocked if we end up taking "the A road, the okay road that's the best" and "go motorin' on the A13."

Related Posts
Doing Woody's Work - MP3s of the Mermaid Avenue demos
Billy Bragg & KT Tunstall - odd gig at HMV Oxford Street last year

Related Links
Billy Bragg - official site
Iain Sinclair - official site
A13 Flickr Group - see what Sinclair and Bragg are on about

Doing Woody's Work

The Mermaid Avenue Demos



A few week's ago Wilco released a timely download of Woody Guthrie's The Jolly Banker. You can grab the track in exchange for a suggested donation to the Guthrie Foundation and Archives at the Wilco website; it's worth hearing for Nels Cline's lap steel alone.

Wilco's involvement with the Woody Guthrie Archive began in 1997 when Billy Bragg recruited them to collaborate on Mermaid Avenue, the wonderful album that put new music to Woody Guthrie's unrecorded lyrics.

Bragg became the at unlikely ringleader for this great American project after Guthrie's daughter Nora encountered him in 1992. According to Andrew Collins' biog Still Suitable for Miners, Nora was taken by the fact that Billy's song You Woke Up My Neighbourhood was named after a Guthrie painting he'd seen in the Smithsonian. Instead of asking one of the usual suspects - Dylan, Springsteen, Arlo, Seeger etc - Nora was "a bit mischievous" in inviting the Englishman to immerse himself in her father's work.

If you've not heard either of the Mermaid Avenue albums you should buy them immediately. They are like a contemporary Basement Tapes - loose, warm, collaborative, funny and a route to one of America's richest musical and sociological veins.

For those who are familiar with the records these demos offer alternate and early takes and a few tracks that aren't on the albums.

I'd also highly recommend the documentary Man In The Sand. It's much more than a making-of doc and although best known for the sometimes frosty on-screen relationship between Bragg and Tweedy (Billy loves fascist baiting; Jeff's less keen) the film is also a great introduction to the Woody Guthrie story.

I hope you enjoy these as much as I do.

Mermaid Avenue Demos

MP3: She Came Along To Me


MP3: All You Fascists


MP3: Aginst Th' Law


MP3: Aginst Th' Law (alt. take)


MP3: When The Roses Bloom Again


MP3: California Stars


MP3: Hestitaing Beauty


MP3: Greenback Dollar


MP3: My Flying Saucer


MP3: Hoodoo Voodoo


MP3: Ain't Gonna Grieve My Lord No More


MP3: Give Me A Nail


Related Links
Searchlight Magazine Interview with Nora Guthrie
DVD Talk Interview with Nora Guthrie

Buy Billy Bragg & Wilco at Amazon
Mermaid Avenue
Mermaid Avenue, Vol. 2
Man in the Sand DVD

State Songs #9: District of Columbia

Photo © Grufnik @ Flickr

Yes, I know that the District of Columbia is not a state but these songs are so great that omitting Washington, DC from our musical tour around America would be unforgivable. Unsurprisingly the majority of tracks have a political edge but don't let that put you off.

MP3: Magnetic Fields - Washington, DC

"It's the only place to be" sings Claudia Gonson on the Magnetic Fields' humorous tribute to the Nation's Capital. According to the excellent 69 Love Songs wiki Stephin Merritt has claimed the Bay City Rollers' Saturday Night as the influence on the song's brilliant cheerleader opening.
More Magnetic Fields: official site | Amazon| 7digital

MP3: The Staple Singers - Long Walk to DC

I love the Staples and their 1968 Stax debut, Soul Folk in Action, is a classic. This song has added resonance when you think that it was recorded just a few months after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
More Staple Singers: Wikipedia | Amazon | 7digital

MP3: Leadbelly - Bourgeois Blues

Leadbelly recorded this in 1938 after Alan Lomax invited him to Washington to make recordings for the Library of Congress. It's inspired by an evening that Leadbelly and his wife spent with the Lomaxes out on the town when they were kicked out of various establishments for being an interracial group. Billy Bragg laster used the song as the basis for his Bush War Blues.
More Leadbelly: Wikipedia | Amazon | 7digital

MP3: Parliament - Chocolate City

This is George Clinton relishing the fact that America's capital city has a majority black population and looking forward to when Aretha Franklin is First Lady and Richard Pryor's the Secretary for Education. Wikipedia has a good entry about the album that explores other "cultural references" to the idea of the chocolate city.
More Parliament: official site | Amazon | 7digital

By the way, if you're ever in Washingon, DC and don't know which Smithsonian museum to visit my favourite is the National Museum of American History - home to the M*A*S*H signpost, Einstein's brier pipe and Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet.

Next time we'll be slapping on the Copppertone and heading straight down I-95 to the Sunshine State - Florida.

Related Posts
State Songs - links to every post on this musical road trip

State Songs #5: California

I could post dozens of songs just about Los Angeles or San Francisco before even thinking about the rest of the state. Instead these are just a handful of my favourite California songs. By all means point out my omissions in the comments below and I'll tell you if it's a song I'd already thought of.

MP3: Tom Waits - Goin' Out West

The male version of Naomi Watts' character in Mulholland Drive. There's no way that this ex-con turned wannabe actor is ever going to make it in Hollywood whether he changes his name to Hannibal or Rex. Incidentally, you may remember Tony Franciosa from such films as Death Wish II and Across 110th Street.
More Tom Waits: Carnival Saloon | MySpace | Amazon | 7digital

MP3: The Arlenes - Going to California

Shortly after I moved to the capital 10 years ago Big Steve Arlene introduced me to North London's twang scene via his and Alan Tyler's still-going-strong Sunday afternoon club Come Down And Meet the Folks. This song was written shortly before the Family Arlene upped sticks from Camden to California. They've since moved to Nashville.
More Arlenes: official site | Amazon

MP3: Billy Bragg & Wilco - California Stars (live on Letterman)

This was the first dance at our wedding last year, beautifully played, pedal steel and all, by our friends Two Fingers of Firewater. Some trivia: The High Desert Mavericks, a minor league baseball team in Adelanto, California used the song as their theme during the 2001 season.
More Bragg & Wilco: woodyguthrie.org | Amazon | 7digital

MP3: Marlena Shaw - California Soul

I'm trying to up the soul quotient at the Carnival Saloon and Joanne suggested this track as we rifled through our CDs looking for state songs. I feel bad for not including Joni Mitchell's California for her too but we'll hear from Joni once we get to Iowa.
More Marlena: MySpace | Amazon | 7digital

MP3: Virgil Shaw - Back to Eureka

I bought Virgil Shaw's cracking album Quad Cities on a trip to Northern California so this song reminds me of Highway 1, the redwoods and Anchor Steam beer. I think I may have bought a Polaroid camera in Eureka.
More Virgil Shaw: MySpace | Amazon

MP3: Jolie Holland - Goodbye California

There are some people for whom excellent weather, an abundance of fruit and the Terminator as your state's governor aren't things to stick around for. Perhaps Jolie Holland is among their number.
More Jolie Holland: | MySpace |Amazon 7digital

MP3: Guy Clark - LA Freeway

Someone else who wanted an exit from the Golden State. Guy Clark does a wonderful intro to this on stage. Apparently the final straw was when the landlord he "couldn't stand" chopped down the fruit tree outside the Clarks' window.
More Guy Clark: official site | Amazon | 7digital

Next time you'll need to prepare for possible altitude sickness - we're heading for the mountains of Colorado.

Related Posts
State Songs #1: Alabama - Cat Power, Billie Holiday, Jim White, Joan Baez, Shelby Lynne and, of course, Lynryd Skynyrd.
State Songs #2: Alaska - Michelle Shocked, Johnny Cash, Port O'Brien, Dan Bern, The Velvet Underground
State Songs #3: Arizona - Wilco, Glen Campbell, The DeZurik Sisters, Dimitri Tiomkin and Public Enemy
State Songs #4: Arkansas - The New Lost City Ramblers, Hayes Carll, Marilyn Monroe & Jane Russell, REM, Bruce Springsteen

Billy Bragg & KT Tunstall

HMV Oxford Street, Monday 18 February

Monday's lunch hour was one of the strangest I've experienced in recent memory. I went to HMV expecting to see Billy Bragg perform a few tracks from his hearteningly well-reviewed new album Mr Love & Justice. Instead I saw Bragg and KT Tunstall tear through eight under-rehearsed cover versions that took in Cliff Ricahrd and The Human League.

The reason behind this enjoyable shambles was HMV and Q Magazine's daft poll to find
the top 50 Best Ever British Albums. Billy and KT were asked to play songs from each decade since 1958. This was the set list:

• Cliff Richard – Move It
  
• The Kinks – Waterloo Sunset
  
• David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust [KT Tunstall solo]
  
• Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) [Billy Bragg solo]
  
• Morrissey – Every Day Is Like Sunday
  
• The Verve – The Drugs Don’t Work
  
• Kaiser Chiefs – I Predict A Riot
  
• The Human League – Don’t You Want Me?
  

The Drugs Don't Work was about the only song that sounded vaguely in tune but all were fun to watch. The piece de resistance was the Human League finale. The clips below, diligently filmed on the phones of lunchtime shoppers, give some impression of the event.

The Drugs Don't Work

I Predict A Riot

Don't You Want Me?