The very sad news came through last night
that Ronnie Gilbert has passed away
at age 88.
Along with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and
Fred Hellerman, Ronnie was a founding
member of the Weavers, the folk
music group founded in the late-1940s that inspired and paved the way for all
who followed.
The Weavers recordings occupy a valued place
in my music library. So, too, do other recordings Ronnie made over the years in
a duo with Holly Near, and as a
member of HARP with Holly, Arlo Guthrie
and Pete.
I got to meet Ronnie and hear her perform a
number of times over the years at folk festivals. I particularly remember a delightful time
having breakfast with her at the hotel during the Winnipeg Folk Festival sometime
in the 1980s. She was very encouraging when I started the Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio show in 1994 and often responded graciously when I'd let her know that I was playing her music on the show.
The last time I saw Ronnie was September
17, 2004 when I was invited to the world premiere of the film, Isn’t This a Time! A Tribute Concert for
Harold Leventhal, at the Toronto International Folk Festival. The film was
a documentary on the tribute concert held the year before at Carnegie Hall for Harold Leventhal and told the story of Harold’s
lifetime involvement in folk music and how he defied
and masterminded the end of the McCarthy-era blacklist.
After the screening, there was a brief
concert by the surviving members of the Weavers – Ronnie, Pete, Fred and Erik Darling (who replaced Pete when he left the group in 1958) along
with Eric Weissberg, who played bass
and sang Lee’s vocal parts. A once-in-a-lifetime
occasion for me to experience the Weavers live.
Woody Guthrie, one the most important, most
influential and most inspiring folksingers and songwriters of the 20th century,
was born 100 years ago this week on July 14, 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma. It is
with good reason that all those who have followed in his footsteps – and by
that I mean virtually every singer and songwriter not bound up in navel-gazing –
are referred to as “Woody’s Children.”
For the 100th anniversary of Woody’s birth – he died October 3, 1967
after a 13-year hospitalization for Huntington’s disease – Smithsonian Folkways
is releasing Woody at 100: The
Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection, a magnificent box set with three CDs of vintage recordings,
including 21 previously unreleased performances, of which six are previously
unheard original songs, and a beautiful 150-page book with essays, photos, Woody’s
drawings, letters, original song lyrics, detailed information about each of the
tracks, and fascinating listings of much of Woody Guthrie’s commercially
available recordings and his known recording sessions. The project was
assembled by archivist Jeff Place of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and
Collections at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
and Robert Santelli, author of This Land is Your Land: Woody
Guthrie and the Journey of an American Folk Song.
My comments on the first two CDs will be
brief as all of the songs will be familiar to anyone who’s been paying
attention to Woody Guthrie over the years. Indeed, I already have all of these songs
and almost all of these recordings – including the version of “I’ve Got to
Know” which was previously released only on Bear Family’s 10-CD collection,
Songs for Political Action – in my collection.
(By the way, “I’ve Got to Know” comes from
a collection of more than 200 demos that Woody recorded for his song publisher
in 1951. Few of these recordings have ever been widely heard – I have to wonder
if there’s a future release, à la Bob Dylan’s Witmark Demos, in the pipeline.)
However, despite my familiarity, I will say
that I’ve listened and re-listened to the first two CDs with great enjoyment. Like
the My Dusty Road collection released in 2009, the sound quality on many of the
recordings is greatly improved over previous releases, and the selection and
sequencing is superbly done. Just a few of the highlights are “Jarama Valley,”
Woody’s song about the Spanish Civil War; “Better World A-Comin’, a hopeful
song that followed the defeat of fascism in World War II; “Hangknot, Slipknot,”
inspired by a KKK lynching that took place near Woody’s hometown in Oklahoma a
couple of years before he was born; “Jackhammer John”; “Pastures of Plenty”; “Hard
Travelin’; and two versions of “This Land is Your Land,” his best-known song.
Woody wrote “This Land is Your Land” as a
response or alternative to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” and the two
versions include the standard, universally-known version, and an alternate
rendition which includes one of the two politicized verses – the one about
private vs. public property; the other was about solidarity with the people waiting on breadlines
during the Great Depression – which were, early on, edited out of the standard
version.
Among the other highlights are Woody’s
versions of songs he borrowed or adapted including “Buffalo Skinners,” “Gypsy
Davy,” “Bad Lee Brown,” and “We Shall Be Free,” a 1940s folk-supergroup collaboration
between Woody, Lead Belly, Cisco Houston and Sonny Terry.
Along with the book, it is the third CD in the Woody
at 100 set which make it an essential item for Woody collectors.
The third CD begins with four songs
comprising Woody’s earliest-known recording session. The recordings, dated 1937
(although essayist Peter LaChapelle makes the case that they were probably
recorded in 1939) were made on a Presto disc-cutting machine in Los Angeles and
include two songs, “I Ain’t Got No Home” and “Do-Re-Mi,” which would later form
part of the classic Woody Guthrie canon, and two others, “Them Big City Ways”
and “Skid Row Serenade” which have never been released before in any form. All
four of these songs reflect Woody’s concerns with the exploited underclass of
migrant workers. And, in the introduction to “Them Big City Ways,” we get a
taste of the Will Rogers-influenced philosophizing what Woody was doing on the radio
in Los Angeles during this period.
Speaking of Woody on the radio, there are
recordings of several radio shows on the disc. The earliest is Woody’s 1940
guest spot on Lead Belly’s WNYC show, Folk Songs of America. Woody sings three
songs: the traditional outlaw ballads “John Hardy” and “Jesse James” and his
epic “Tom Joad,” a seven-minute encapsulation of John Stenbeck’s The Grapes of
Wrath for which Woody used the melody and structure of “John Hardy” as his
template.
The strangest of the radio shows is Woody’s
appearance on the BBC Children’s Hour which took place in 1944 when Woody was
put ashore in London when his Merchant Marine ship was torpedoed. The befuddled
host, who was obviously unprepared, announced Woody was going to do a program
of train songs. He began with “Wabash Cannonball” and “900 Miles,” which did
fit the bill, but then shifted over to a couple of outlaw ballads, “Stagger Lee”
and his own “Pretty Boy Floyd,” violent songs you might not expect to hear on a
children’s show. Just a couple of years later, Woody was writing and singing some
of the greatest kids’ songs ever heard – some of which are included in this
collection.
The other radio show was a 1945 episode of
The Ballad Gazette with Woody Guthrie on WNEW. On that show, Woody – referred to by the
announcer as the show’s “editor-in-chief” – would do 15-minute medleys of songs
on a particular theme. On this particular show, the theme was sea chanteys and
was a mixture of traditional songs, including “What Did the Deep Sea Say,” “Blow
Ye Winds” and “Blow the Man Down,” and three of Woody’s own songs: “Trouble on
the Waters,” and “Normandy was Her Name,” both of which have never been previously
released in any form, and “The Sinking of the Reuben James.”
I’m guessing that the brief “Trouble on the
Waters” was probably inspired by Woody’s experiences in the Merchant Marine
during World War II while “Normandy was Her Name” tells the story of a French ocean
liner ship that was being refitted as an American troop ship when it sunk in
New York Harbor in 1942 after a fire caused by a welder’s torch.
Another fascinating track is a nine-minute
segment recorded at a People’s Songs Hootenanny, sometime between 1945 and
1947. Woody begins with his short knock-off “Ladies Auxiliary” and then engages
in hilarious banter with former Almanac Singer and future Weaver Lee Hays before
they sing “Weaver’s Life.” Another former Almanac Singer and future Weaver,
Pete Seeger, can be heard playing banjo on the song.
The hootenanny track is followed by “Reckless
Talk,” a Woody Guthrie war song from the early-1940s that has never been
released before. This version, recorded in 1944, is a duet by Woody and Cisco
Houston.
The album ends with three, fairly obscure,
examples of the children’s songs Woody was writing after the war: “All Work
Together,” “My Little Seed” and “Goodnight Little Cathy.” Woody’s recordings of
“All Work Together” and “My Little Seed” were only previously released on a 78
rpm disc in the 1940s.
The previously-unreleased recording of the
lullaby “Goodnight Little Cathy” was written for Woody’s daughter Cathy, who died
in a tragic fire in 1947. He later remade the song as “Goodnight Little Arlo.”
I mentioned that the book and the third CD
make Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection essential for Woody
collectors. The entire set also makes for a great introduction for Woody
novices to the great folksinger and songwriter.
