Woody Guthrie - Dust Bowl Ballads
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CD Details
Artist: Woody GuthrieEdition: Music CD
Format: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 2000-07-11
Music Label: Buddha
Soundtracks:
- The Great Dust Storm (Dust Storm Disaster)
- Talking Dust Bowl Blues
- Pretty Boy Floyd
- Dusty Old Dust (So Long It's Been Good To Know Yuh)
- Dust Bowl Blues
- Blowin' Down The Road (I Ain't Gonna To Be Treated This Way)
- Tom Joad (Part 1)
- Tom Joad (Part 2)
- Do Re Mi
- Dust Bowl Refugee
- I Ain't Got No Home
- Vigilante Man
- Dust Can't Kill Me
- Dust Pneumonia Blues
- Talkin' Dust Bowl Blues (alternate take)
Music reviews of Dust Bowl Ballads
Music Review: IF YOU AIN'T GOT THE DO RE MI
Rating: 5 Stars
This review is being used to describe several of Woody Guthrie's recordings. Although I have listened to most of his songs and recordings these represent those that best represent his life's work.
My musical tastes were formed, as were many of those of the generation of 1968, by `Rock and Roll' music exemplified by the Rolling Stones and Beatles and by the blues revival, both Delta and Chicago style. However, those forms as much as they gave pleasure were only marginally political at best. In short, these were entertainers performing material that spoke to us. In the most general sense that is all one should expect of a performer. Thus, for the most part that music need not be reviewed here. Those who thought that a new musical sensibility laid the foundations for a cultural or political revolution have long ago been proven wrong.
That said, in the early 1960's there nevertheless was another form of musical sensibility that was directly tied to radical political expression- the folk revival. This entailed a search for roots and relevancy in musical expression. While not all forms of folk music lent themselves to radical politics it is hard to see the 1960's cultural rebellion without giving a nod to such figures as Dave Van Ronk, the early Bob Dylan, Utah Phillips, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and others. Whatever entertainment value these performers provided they also spoke to and prodded our political development. They did have a message and an agenda and we responded as such. That these musicians' respective agendas proved inadequate and/or short-lived does not negate their affect on the times.
As I have noted in my review of Dave Van Ronk's work when I first heard folk music in my youth I felt unsure about whether I liked it or not. As least against my strong feelings about the Rolling Stones and my favorite blues artist such as Howling Wolf and Elmore James. Then on some late night radio folk show here in Boston I heard Dave Van Ronk singing `Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies' and that was it. From that time to the present folk music has been a staple of my musical tastes. From there I expanded my play list of folk artists with a political message.
Although I had probably heard Woody's `This Land is Your Land' at some earlier point I actually learned about his music secondhand from early Bob Dylan covers of his work. While his influence has had its ebbs and flows since that time each succeeding generation of folk singers still seems to be drawn to his simple, honest tunes about the outlaws, outcasts and the forgotten people that made this country, for good or evil what it is today. Since Woody did not have a particularly good voice nor was he an exceptional guitar player the message delivered by his songs is his real legacy.
Woody's relationship with the American Communist Party while no secret is not widely known. Even Bob Dylan, a worshipper of Woody's in his youth, was not aware of it. What is interesting is that the subjects of his songs fairly closely reflect the party line as it changed to reflect the winds blowing from Moscow. Woody's best work is reflected in the Popular Front style of ` This Land is Your Land' when the party developed its class collaborationist policy with the Rooseveltian Democratic Party and accordingly all liberals were good fellows and true. The Hitler-Stalin Pact was not good news for his style. Political differnces between us aside,listen to his recordings and learn about hard times and struggle from an eralier period.
Description of Dust Bowl Ballads
Recorded in 1940, and later reissued by Folkways Recordings in 1950, Guthrie's first album chronicles the American Dust Bowl through his prosaic style of talking blues. Using only guitar and vocals, the album follows the exodus of Midwesterners headed for California and mirrors both Guthrie's own life and John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. Along the way, characters are forced into theft, murder, and unbearable hardship against a biblical backdrop of the American West. Hugely influential, Dust Bowl Ballads has been revered by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. In Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, Steinbeck wrote of Guthrie: "Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of the people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spir"If you'll gather 'round me children, a story I will tell," sings Woody Guthrie in "Pretty Boy Floyd." Children of all ages have never stopped gathering 'round Woody Guthrie since he recorded these songs in the spring of 1940, and that most-famous line tells us a lot about his approach: his songs are for all people, simple and direct enough to be understood by young ones, irresistibly catchy, yet devilishly clever and cutting. His ability to boil down complex emotions and issues to their very core has rarely been matched. "So long it's been good to know yuh," he sings in "Dusty Old Dust," and its childlike sing-along quality only serves to reinforce his very serious points. Across these 14 songs, Guthrie recounts and relives his experience as an Okie forced from his home by the Depression and drought of the 1930s, chronicling the arduous journey in brilliant, sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying detail. The characters that inhabit his stories are sincere, sympathetic, and brutally alive. Originally released in 1940 on two albums, and again in 1964 for the benefit of salivating folk revivalists, Dust Bowl Ballads returns once again in 2000 freshly remastered, full of new photos and boasting one alternate take. If there is one album of modern American folk music that deserves to be reissued for the benefit of each generation, it is this collection. In terms of the singer-songwriter concept, it is truly the river's source; in historical terms, it's to the New Deal what the Declaration of Independence is to the American Revolution. --Marc Greilsamer
Few records hit this hard. Guthrie's theme is the Great Depression's devastation, as visited on the land and people of America's heartland. Guthrie raises the talking blues form to a new level of realism and poetry, and he charges some of his strongest story songs ("Tom Joad" and "Pretty Boy Floyd") with a vividness songwriters like Springsteen and Dylan have chased ever since. Need to decide on one Guthrie album? This is it. --Roy Francis Kasten
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