The Woody Guthrie Story (CD - 2000)

Reissue producers: Rob Santos, Nora Guthrie, Glenn Korman.

Recorded in New York, New York on April 26 & May 3, 1940. Includes liner notes by Dave Marsh & Woody Guthrie.

Digitally remastered by Doug Pomeroy (Pomeroy Audio).

In 1940, RCA Victor Records signed Woody Guthrie and released two three-disc albums of 78s, Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 1 and Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 2, presenting his songs about the plight of the farmers of the Great Plains who were dispossessed by adverse weather conditions and bank foreclosures during the Great Depression and were forced to become migrants, traveling to California where they became poorly paid, much-abused seasonal workers. The songs were timely, with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath a best-seller and major motion picture. (Guthrie even encapsulated the plot of the novel in "Tom Joad, Pt. 1" and "Tom Joad, Pt. 2," a song divided due to its length, and there was a reference to Preacher Casey, one of the characters, in "Vigilante Man.") But the recordings proved to be Guthrie's only released ones for a major record label, and they eventually went out of print. After RCA rejected Guthrie's entreaty that they be reissued in 1950, he authorized Folkways Records to put out a counterfeit version called Talking Dust Bowl that RCA opted not to contest in court. With Guthrie's star in ascendance 14 years later due to the folk revival, Folkways released another version called Dust Bowl Ballads, and RCA finally decided to put its own version on LP. Going back to the original sessions, the label discovered a couple of unreleased tracks, "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Dust Bowl Blues," and re-sequenced the rest for a 14-track 12" LP. The former song didn't really fit with the Dust Bowl theme, being a fanciful account of the life of the 1930s bank robber, and "Dust Bowl Blues" (not to be confused with another of the album's songs, "Talking Dust Bowl Blues") was a minor effort compared with the rest. But the collection as a whole remained impressive, as Guthrie alternated humor and outrage at the treatment of his people, the Okies, first at home and then after they were forced to take to the road. "Dusty Old Dust (So Long It's Been Good to Know Yuh)" had gone on to become a pop hit for the Weavers (with altered lyrics) in the interim, and several of the other songs had become well known in the repertoires of such folksingers as Pete Seeger and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, making Dust Bowl Ballads much more familiar to 1964 listeners than it had been 24 years earlier. It was Guthrie's strongest overall collection of songs and performances, not to mention his best recorded. ~ William Ruhlmann

This four-CD set breaks down into two parts. The first two CDs, running about 100 minutes, contain a biography of Woody Guthrie written and read by John Garton. Garton is credited with research, and his research seems to have consisted of reading Joe Klein's 1980 biography Woody Guthrie: A Life and then sitting down to paraphrase and summarize it, adding here and there the perspective of a British socialist. He spends a great deal of time on Guthrie's early life and family and a great deal of time on Guthrie's erratic behavior in his middle age before he was diagnosed with Huntington's Chorea, a disease that largely explains that behavior. A surprisingly small amount of time is spent on Guthrie's music. Garton's political perspective finds him, for example, describing the U.S. as "a definitively right-wing country" and Senator Joseph McCarthy as "insane." His British accent and relative ignorance of his subject lead him to mispronunciations (Cisco Houston as "Whostin") and worse (Irwin Silber as if spelled "Sibler"). He gives way at one point to a lengthy excerpt from Guthrie's Library of Congress interviews with Alan Lomax and at another to a reminiscence from Guthrie associate Jimmy Longhi. The third and fourth CDs, running about two-and-a-half hours, contain 52 miscellaneous Guthrie recordings mastered from Folkways and Stinson LPs and RCA Victor's Dust Bowl Ballads. The recordings being in the public domain in Europe, they have simply been copied. Many of these tracks are rough in both performance and sound quality, and they actually feature a mixture of performers -- Lead Belly, for example -- taking lead vocals on several songs. One would be better off buying the Smithsonian Folkways and RCA recordings of these tracks and reading the Klein book than purchasing this set, unless it can be obtained cheaply. ~ William Ruhlmann

Sixty years after the recordings were first released, Woody Guthrie's odes to the Dust Bowl are presented in their third different configuration. RCA Victor Records, the only major label for which Guthrie ever recorded, issued two three-disc 78 rpm albums, Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 1 and Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 2, in July 1940, containing a total of 11 songs. ("Tom Joad" was spread across two sides of a 78 due to its length.) Twenty-four years later, with the folk revival at its height, RCA reissued the material on a single 12" LP in a new sequence and with two previously unreleased tracks, "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Dust Bowl Blues," added. Thirty-six years on, the Buddha reissue division of BMG, which owns RCA, shuffles the running order again and adds another track, this one an alternate take of "Talking Dust Bowl Blues." But whether available on 78s, LP, or CD, Dust Bowl Ballads constitutes a consistent concept album that roughly follows the outlines of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. (Indeed, "Tom Joad" is nothing less than the plot of the book set to music.) The story begins, as "The Great Dust Storm (Dust Storm Disaster)" has it, "On the fourteenth day of April of 1935," when a giant dust storm hits the Great Plains, transforming the landscape. Shortly after, the farmers pack up their families and head west, where they have been promised there is work aplenty picking fruit in the lush valleys of California. The trip is eventful, as "Talking Dust Bowl Blues" humorously shows, but the arrival is disappointing, as the Okies discover California is less than welcoming to those who don't bring along some "do[ough] re mi." Guthrie's songs go back and forth across this tale of woe, sometimes focusing on the horrors of the dust storm, sometimes on human villains, with deputy sheriffs and vigilantes providing particular trouble. In "Pretty Boy Floyd," he treats an ancillary subject, as the famous outlaw is valorized as a misunderstood Robin Hood. Guthrie treats his subject alternately with dry wit and defiance, and listeners in 1940 would have been conscious of the deliberate contrast with Jimmie Rodgers, whose music is evoked even as he is being mocked in "Dust Pneumonia Blues." Sixty years later, listeners may hear these songs through the music Guthrie influenced, particularly the folk tunes of Bob Dylan. Either way, this is powerful music, rendered simply and directly. It was devastatingly effective when first released, and it helped define all the folk music that followed it. ~ William Ruhlmann

American folk music has produced few artists as gifted and complex as Woody Guthrie. Guthrie's talents as a singer, harmonica player, and guitar player were merely ordinary, but as a songwriter, storyteller, and provocateur Guthrie had few equals. Guthrie's genius lay in his gift for seamlessly integrating his leftist political principles into his tales of common folks. Nowhere is this gift more evident than on DUST BOWL BALLADS. The fourteen-song set, originally released in 1940 on two albums of 78s, contains some of Woody Guthrie's most immediate and vibrant compositions, not surprising given that Guthrie had lived through the horrific Oklahoma dust storms of the early '30s.

DUST BOWL BALLADS benefits from its thematic cohesion, which allows it to play as a travelogue through the hard lives of Okie refugees. A number of tunes here will be instantly familiar: "I Ain't Got No Home," "Vigilante Man," "Pretty Boy Floyd," "Do Re Mi," and "So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh" are all campfire standards. The less well-known tunes here, however, are no less great. Particularly memorable are "Tom Joad" (a seven-minute Cliff Notes version of "The Grapes of Wrath"), and "Talking Dust Bowl Blues." A classic album. minimize