Woody Goes Punk

In his documentary about country music, Ken Burns quoted Johnny Cash saying something like, "Whenever country music loses its way, all it has to do is get back to Emmy Lou Harris." Cash may have been right, but he might have missed and opportunity. Hr could have said the same thing about Hank Williams, Jimmy Rogers, and his family, the Carters.

I'll go one step further. Whenever the country loses its way, all it has to do is get back to Woody Guthrie. Thanks to the efforts of his daughter, Nora Guthrie, artists have been to Woody's legacy by releasing versions of some of the thousands of pages of lyrics he left unrecorded, or if they were recorded, no copy exists. I mentioned most of those artists in my previous post.

The latest addition to the songs of Woody Guthrie comes by way of the Boston-based band Dropkick Murphys. Their 11th studio album This Machine Still Kills Fascists is not my first encounter with the Murphys, but I've only listened to them on streaming and YouTube. This collection of Guthrie lyrics convinced me to drop some coin on them, and I'm glad I did.

The songs the Murphys chose to put their mark on cover the gamut of who Guthrie was as a songwriter. From the union organizer, Hitler hating American who stood up for the working class and the downtrodden to the man who was sometimes in trouble with the law and alcohol, Guthrie is present on every cut.

The Murphys's raucous punk rock reputation is fitting for the message of most of the tracks. The subtle, but evident, rage against the injustices that Guthrie was adept at observing, comes across in the constant driving beat and rhythm of tracks like "Ten Times More" and "All You Fonies." "Fonies" offers the same surety and hope that the oppressors, be it the Fascists (as in the Billy Bragg version of "All You Fascists" on the Mermaid Avenue album) or rich union busting company owners, are going to eventually lose.

Although I love the pro working class anti Fascist message of a large portion of the selections, I found the deeply personal "Never Git Drunk No More" a quite satisfying reminder that alcohol is just as addicting, if not more so, as any other drug.  The song features Nikki Lane offering what is perhaps the most powerful counterpoint to a guy asking forgiveness for his drinking. She just simply says, "Don't wanna make love to a bottle, I wanna make love to my man!"

The album concludes with a pleasant surprise. Most of the lyrics for which Nora Guthrie has invited artists to write music are just that, lyrics. The beauty of Woody's words are the opportunity to make them more accessible to the modern audience be it through punk as the Murphys have done or through other genres of the music world. For the most part, the artists have no idea what Guthrie intended for a melody, but in "Dig a Hole" we get a glimpse. The last cut of the album features Woody's voice telling Hitler where he's gonna end up. 

If you're a Dropkick Murphys fan, you won't be disappointed. They remain true to their musical spirit. More important is that they remain true to Woody's spirit. 

Definitely recommend it.

Available at Amazon in CD or Vinyl or Streaming 

Woody Runs Through Us

This Machine Still Kill Fascists by the Boston punk rock band Drop Kick Murphys arrives tomorrow. (I’ll get a review out soon.) The title comes from the famous picture of Woody Guthrie and his guitar. They are, however, not the only group to pay homage to Guthrie in recent years. 

Woody was a writer of songs of course, a lot of them. His son, Arlo, used to say people could wall paper their apartments with the amount of scraps that his father put ink and pencil to.

Woody's daughter, Nora, has invited numerous artists to view the volumes of material that Guthrie has left behind, most of which has never been set to music let alone recorded. Arlo and countless other artists have covered Woody's more famous and popular works. Nearly every kid in the United States knows "This Land is Your Land" thanks to it being part a thousands of elementary school choir concerts. But, there's more to Guthrie than just that, and more artists are discovering and have discovered that for themselves and, thankfully, for the rest of us.

Most people are aware of the work of Jeff Tweedy, his band Wilco, and Billy Bragg, the three volume collection Mermaid Avenue named after the area in New York where Guthrie lived with his family.

Both Bragg and Wilco recognized how much Guthrie has meant, not just to folk music but music is general. He is in the fabric of rock, punk, country, and pop. 

And they are not the only ones. Mermaid Avenue introduced people to forty-seven new songs by Guthrie. New Multitudes (Deluxe Edition) by Jay Farrar, Will Johnson, Anders Parker, and Yim Yames (AKA as Jim James of My Morning Jacket gave us another twenty-three pieces that reveals the depth of Guthrie's skills to make highly personal observations and well as social commentary.

He could also write poignant and touching love songs as evidenced in The Works by Jonatha Brooke.

The clearest connection to American music that Guthrie has, as Pete Seeger properly recognized, is folk. More accurately, probably, is the connection to country, the music of the folk. Not the sanitized pablum of today's Nashville sound, but, rather, the Oklahoma dustbowl country, the stuff of the Carter family to which his mother listened. The sound of cowpokes and Appalachia, the sound of bluegrass. The sound of Guthrie's folk of his day.

That's captured in Del & Woody by the Del McCoury Band. The song "The New York Trains" was nominated for a Grammy as Best American Roots Song in 2014.

Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen and others have sung Guthrie's songs. Some of them while Guthrie was still alive.

These new songs are by artists whose careers hadn't even started by the time Guthrie's was ending. Heck, some of the artists I mentioned here weren't even alive when he died in 1968. 

That's how good he was.

These 100 or so new pieces are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Thousands of pages of Guthrie's writing sit waiting at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. One can hope that Nora Guthrie can find more artists to take a look at his words and make us listen to him again.

Buddy Guy Still Working the Blues

David Letterman used to say that Buddy Guy was the hardest working guy in show business. He's 86 years old and still touring and recording. His latest album, The Blues Don't Lie, (RCA Records) is a genuine masterful presentation of Guy's skills. Say what you will about other guitarists, few can come close to matching Guy's clear precision with his BG Signature Strat. Guy's response to anybody who might question his ability, "I Let My Guitar Do the Talking," leads off the album.

"We Go Back" featuring Mavis Staples is a touching examination of two friends reflecting on their shared experiences during a troubled national history. "Gunsmoke Blues" with Jason Isbel is an interesting commentary on gun violence in our nation. Guy gets a little more overtly political with "Follow the Money" featuring James Taylor.

Guy gets back to maybe a tongue in cheek mood with Elvis Costello on "Symptoms of Love." The collaboration of "House Party" with Wendy Moten is by far the peppiest, and most humorous song of the bunch. It had me dancing down the street, which surprised some of the people who saw me on my daily walk.

The other eleven songs are Buddy Guy and the blues at their best. Guy pays tribute to Sonny Boy Williamson and the genre itself in the title track. He doesn't forget that the blues has always had some undertones of sex and double entendre. With Bobby Rush, the two discuss their desires and simply ask, "What's Wrong with That?" Guy shows his understanding of the history of the blues with his soul bared in an acoustic version of the blues standard, "King Bee."

Produced by Tom Hambridge who also wrote or co wrote most of the songs on the album.

At 86 years old, Guy doesn't show any signs of slowing down. Why should he? He still got some talking to do.

Available in CD, Vinyl, and streaming at Amazon

Daley's Gone. Elizabeth, Too - Long Runs Mean Something

 

During her long reign, Queen Elizabeth II visited the United States six times. Her first occurred in 1959. Part of that 45 day tour, mostly in Canada, she stopped for 14 hours in my home town of Chicago.

I was only 11 at the time and don't remember it. The only thing I remember from that year are my good friends, the White Sox losing the World Series, the Cubs losing as always, and the mayor, Richard J. Daley.

They did a lot of things in those 14 hours including a ritzy formal dinner as well as the obligatory parade stuff.

Richard J Daley was born in 1902 and died December 20, 1976

He was the mayor of Chicago from 1955 until the day of his death. He was a force of nature, bombastic at his worst and a true lover of his city at his best. For many people, he was Chicago as much as columnist Mike Royko and radio personality Studs Terkel. For all his faults and foibles, he was the city. Love him or hate him, he was part of the soul of Chicago.

For over 20 years, the better parts of three different decades, Daley was the power in the city. To a much greater extent Elizabeth was the power in England. For 70 years, parts of eight decades, she ruled the British Commonwealth with, by all accounts, dignity and integrity. Daley dedicated his life to service of his city. Elizabeth dedicated her life to service of her country. 

This is a true story in my life:

My first wife and I were driving our usual route into the city from Wisconsin to visit my parents who lived on the northwest side in the Belmont-Cragin area. It was Christmas Day, just a few days after his death.

As we hit the city limits on I-94. A felt something. It was a sense of loss. I didn’t say anything. A few minutes later, my wife said, “Something’s wrong. Something is missing.”

Although she had never lived in Chicago, and hadn’t ever lived in the state, she felt what I have felt. It was indeed something missing. It was a sense of mourning that the entire city was feeling. I said, "You're right. Daley's gone. It's three million people grieving."

I think I told my former students that story a number of times when we talked on English things and Queen Victoria and Elizabeth came up in class discussions. This is not to say that Elizabeth was like Daley or that Daley was as important as Elizabeth. There is, however, a collective consciousness that cities and countries have. It is a common feeling a sense of being connected and effected by one another’s similar experiences.

I know what I felt on that December day,  that sense of loss and sorrow, I can only imagine what England is feeling together today.

Don't Let Us Look Away

Something has to change.

Emmett Till’s mother was courageous. She wanted the world of 1955 to see what it had done to her son. So she insisted that his casket be left open. And the world changed a little. 

John Lewis marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 and met a night stick in the hands of a cop. And the world changed a little more.

Civil rights activists met fire hoses and snarling dogs. And world changed even more.

The world can change when it is confronted with its own evil and can see its evil for what it is. Jet Magazine and the Chicago Defender published the photos of the mutilated body of 14 year old Till.

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Charles Moore photographed children sprayed by fire hoses, black men bitten by German Shepherds, and John Lewis’s skull cracked open. Most of those Moore photos were published in the widest read publication of the time, Life Magazine. The pictures, and other news coverage, helped change the minds of people. The world saw and changed.

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The same thing happened in the Vietnam era. Nobody really cared about a small country in Southeast Asia. Nobody really cared even when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed and then President Lyndon Johnson eventually sent in the Marines and started bombing the hell out of the place. People protested the American involvement, but met opposition and derision from the supposedly patriotic “America right or wrong” crowd. 

Then the photos came.  A naked girl running after having her clothes burned off her by the napalm U.S. bombers dropped. A Saigon officer shooting a VietCong in the head with a pistol. Pictures of bloody American soldiers, pictures of flagged draped coffins, and constant network news coverage of the war and the daily body counts.

America couldn’t change to the other channel or stream something else. Minds began to change against the war. They changed even more when the pictures of Kent State came to the headlines. Now it wasn’t just some Southeast Asians getting killed. Now it was Americans being killed. In America, By Americans. By American forces that were supposed to be fighting for freedom. 

The tide of public opinion turned to the side of protest. The world saw and changed.

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And now we are faced with more evil, the evil of guns and gun violence. Yes, you read that right. The evil of guns. Guns, contrary to the claims of the lovers of the 2nd amendment, have always been meant to kill and to kill more effectively than the enemy. Yes, they are useful tools in hunting whether for sport or actual food, but they are meant to kill. Their purpose is to kill other human beings. 

The Second Amendment is not an unlimited right. Even one of the patron saints of the gun loving Republican Party, Anthony Scalia, said as much in a Supreme Court decision. Yet, just like the public being blind to the problem in Vietnam and the inequality in the country, a large portion remains blind to the problem with guns and gun violence. 

The truth of Emmett Till’s lynching was apparent in his open casket. The truth of inequality was apparent in John Lewis’s cracked skull. The truth of the immorality of war was apparent in the burned skin of a small girl. The world saw the images and changed.

We are the only country where this gun slaughter happens with regularity. Columbine, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, the Pulse nightclub in Miami, a supermarket in Buffalo, a church in Charleston. 

Maybe the world needs to understand, if not actually see, the real damage these beloved guns cause. Not just a body count and wringing of hands and images of cops standing around police tape barriers. Maybe the world needs to understand a body so damaged that parents have to give DNA samples to identify the bodies. The undertakers had to call in reconstruction experts to make the children somewhat recognizable to their parents. In many cases it wasn’t possible. The only way the parents could tell it was their child was by the shoes they were wearing that day.  

Maybe those images would make it apparent that guns are indeed the problem. The states with more guns per capita have more gun deaths and higher gun deaths rates. Maybe that statistic of body count should be blasted hourly of every television channel. Maybe police carrying body bags instead of standing around would be a more effective image to drive home the point.

Maybe a parent with the courage of Emmett Till’s mother to have an open casket and stations courageous enough to broadcast it and websites bold enough to post photos would move the recalcitrant public to change. 

Nobody is saying that all guns needed to be taken away. They and the violence they cause, however,  can and must be curtailed. Human courage and responsible reporting changed the world before. Maybe it can again. 

Counting Cars for Charity

Every day, weather permitting, I walk at least to the local Metra station. Depending on the route I take and how I feel any particular day, the walk is anywhere between a mile and a half to three miles round trip.

Usually when I am at the station I count how many cars are in the lot. Imagine the melody of a Paul Simon song. “Counting the cars at my town’s Metra station.”

Usually when I am at the station I count how many cars are in the lot. Imagine the melody of a Paul Simon song. “Counting the cars at my town’s Metra station.”

Before the pandemic hit, the station parking lot was usually full but I didn’t start counting the cars until Covid shut down schools and business and made downtown Chicago a ghost town. On some weekends the cars would number in the single digits at most. A couple of weekends only one lonely car sat on the asphalt.

Over time things have started to pick up. The station master and I have a running conversation about when it might get back to pre pandemic levels in ridership. With more people buying tickets online or through an app, his ticket sales are not an indicator. Vehicles parked in the lot is more indicative.

Some trends are that Tuesday usually sees more cars than Monday. Wednesday usually has the most cars. Thursday is similar to Tuesday. Friday is usually the lowest numbers. Weekends so far are still abysmal, but that might pick up as summer months come and more people want to go to the city, God knows why, to see the Cubs probably lose.

I’m seeing some signs that more people are ready to use the trains again. My guess at normality is when 100 cars or more are consistent filling the spots at the station.

So, if you’re reading this, take a guess on the first day at least 100 cars will be parked in the Grayslake Tooterville Metra Station.

If you’re reading this on Facebook, comment with your guess. If you’re  reading this on Twitter, reply with your guess. 

For the person picking the right date on Facebook, I will donate $50 to the charity of their choice. Same for the person picking the right date on Twitter.

Pick dates May 17, 2022 - July 1, 2022. Please only one pick per person. If it happens, winner is the person who replied or commented first.

If no one picks the right date on either medium or if July 1 comes and the number isn’t reached, I will donate $100 to the Newport Festivals Foundation which is doing good work for music education and the musical arts.

Have some fun. Maybe make a little difference in the world.