On Music

...Now director Hal Ashby has made the book into a motion picture, with David Carradine as Woody, and it should attract thousands more to the Guthrie romance...

...Informed by a strong social conscience, they nevertheless were seldom polemical, like the old IWW songs: Woody be-lived in bringing folks together, not in driving them apart...

...These songs say something about our hard traveling, something about our hard luck, our hard get-by, but the songs say we'll come through all of these in pretty good shape, and we'll be all right, we'll work, make ourselves useful, if only the telegram to build the dam would come in from Washington...

...And when I say two thousand, take a look down off across these three little hills...

...This sense of mission carried an obscure, itinerant picker directly into the national limelight, and kept him there until his death in 1967...

...Guthrie was one of a few thousand people who had come to work on the Kenneth Dam construction project near Redding, in northern California...

...Riding in boxcars and hitchhiking he traveled across the country, looking for a job or a handout...

...Three or four times, watching the procession of performers marching on and off the stage, I felt the same electric current that used to snap and sizzle excitingly in the heyday of folk...

...The troubador of the New Left committed suicide last April, but far from being a grim occasion, the evening was very pleasant...

...There is, for instance, a strong rock feeling to much of the album...

...When he saw the power music could have, he realized what his calling was...

...The day is past when a young man could un-sling his guitar, balefully sing "Blowin' in the Wind" or "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore," and communicate profoundly and immediately with thousands of listeners...

...One by one, an army of pickers and singers—including Pete Seeger, Eric Darling, Oscar Brand, Odetta, Peter Yarrow, and Eric Anderson?moved into the spotlight...

...Yet it was the music and some of the people who played and sang it that most marked the night...

...Most of all, Arlo Guthrie is comfortable—in the songs he writes and the way he sings them—and he should be around for years establishing his individual voice...

...They spoke of hard times ("I Ain't Gonna Be Treated This A-Way"), memorialized disasters ("Reuben James"), celebrated folk heroes ("Pretty Boy Floyd"), and inspired the country as much as the myth of his life did...

...Woody was right...

...Each is one of Woody's Children...

...It was obviously written under a compulsion to get everything in, to realize and relive the life he knew at 19...

...For he was an authentic in a period when young middle-class Americans hungered after authenticity...

...The best known of these, of course, was Bob Dylan...

...It was never a best seller, but it has been in print almost continuously and has had an underground following: passed from hand to hand, urged by one friend on another...

...Thus even as an invalid, the victim of a grotesque nervous disorder that left him unable to hold a guitar or sing, Guthrie effected a minor revolution in American music...

...During the '60s the protest music of Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs identified itself with this tradition and proved remarkably persuasive politically...

...He did not take his music very seriously, however, until an evening in 1938...

...For him, that was when the people were the best, the girls the prettiest and most willing, the booze the tastiest, and the fellowship the grandest...

...The mood was lightened in no small part by Ochs himself: Movies, slides, tapes, and records of him, as well as the spoken tributes, made his presence almost palpable...

...Still, this is Arlo, not Woody, and his new record, Amigo (Reprise MS 2239), should go far toward helping him achieve his own musical identity...

...As a child, he lived in fairly comfortable circumstances in Okemah, Oklahoma...

...Woody's Children," he called the young minstrels who played and hung out at Gerde's Folk City and half a dozen other Greenwich Village nightspots...

...It should not be surprising that of all Woody's Children, the one who has most truly reproduced his spirit and style is his son, Arlo...

...He became a sign painter, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, gathered up his guitar and paint brushes and hit the road...

...then bad luck and his mother's own lengthy bout with the hereditary Huntington's Disease reduced the family to poverty...

...Guthrie did much to create his own myth in Bound for Glory, a baggy bildungsroman of an autobiography published in 1943...

...It was, as Guthrie describes it, an essentially political moment...

...This label has been applied no less indiscriminately than others: Folk music today is not merely those few hundred ballads and musical mongrels, mostly of anonymous origin, that have come to us from the British Isles and 19th-century America...

...Although the old master was already bedridden with Huntington's Disease, Dylan was only one of a whole coterie of disciples who would visit Woody in the hospital and stay for entire afternoons...

...The sizeable manuscript, found among his papers, has now been published as Seeds of Man (Dut-ton, 401 pp., $11.95...

...his rhythms and rhymes reflected the red Oklahoma landscape that produced him...

...Along the way he began collecting songs and writing little ditties about the hard times all around him...

...In 1961 he came to New York City from Hib-bing, Minnesota, specifically to meet Guthrie, to sit at his feet and learn from him...

...A few of Guthrie's progeny were so profoundly influenced by him that in addition to singing his songs and writing their own versions of them, they carefully emulated his rambling manner, especially imitating the nasal Oklahoma intonation...

...As they waved their guitars and raised their voices on high together, the audience joined in and waves of good feeling swelled through the hall...

...But it all seems to have happened such a long time ago...

...The cowboy balladeers, the country rockers, the Village folkies such as Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs—they are alike in a single respect...

...The occasion I remember most vividly occurred at the end of the first half of the program...

...It was first heard on his marvelous talking blues, "Alice's Restaurant," that slightly surrealistic chronicle of garbage disposal in western Massachusetts, and it appears on nearly every track of his new effort...

...Bound for Glory tells a not uncommon story for American males of Guthrie's generation (he was born in 1912...

...He was, after all, a country singer...

...His friends' reminiscences also caught the desperate, dopey self-deprecation that characterized his humor...

...Not a one of them is talking above a whisper these two little girls are telling about all of that trouble, and everybody knows it's helping...

...That is not to suggest that Woody Guthrie's influence on the American song is bound to be exhausted in the forseeable future...

...It seemed like the perfect folk moment, perhaps in large part because of the song everyone was singing: Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," the unofficial modern folk anthem...

...And Ochs was at his most extroverted before a camera or microphone...

...And his songs were much better poetry...

...Seeds of Man reads a bit like unprocessed poetry—the kind of praise of youth his songs never attempted...

...Guthrie recalls the effect: "Two little girls were making two thousand working people feel like I felt, rest like I rested...

...the book does need work?cutting, pruning, shaping...

...For despite the spottiness of the performances, they constituted a celebration of that broad category called "folk...

...Or so I thought until the Phil Ochs Memorial Concert, where that ethos, that shared attitude toward life, that sense of community which distinguishes folk music managed briefly to surface...

...Guthrie went to the state hospital, the older brothers and sisters scattered off on their own, and Woody settled with his father in the oil-boom town of Pampa, Texas...

...It was an autobiographical account of the search for a lost silver mine in the Big Bend country of Texas that he, his father, his uncle, and a friend undertook in the early '30s...

...A After Bound for Glory appeared, Guthrie struggled long and hard with another manuscript...

...An album released a little over a year ago, Together in Concert (Reprise 2R 2214), paired him with Pete Seeger, and the disc is so close to what you might expect to have heard at one of the Pete and Woody concerts of the '40s, it is as if an act of audio reincarnation has been accomplished...

...Amigo is characterized, too, by Arlo's unique sense of humor...

...They were camped out on three hillsides, all of them listening to two girls singing an old, familiar song?It Takes a Worried Man...

...It includes original songs that seek with studied simplicity to affect and inspire contemporary audiences in the same way the old folk songs touched theirs...

...It was there, one Sunday, that Dylan first sang "Song for Woody," subsequently recorded on his initial album in 1962...

...Pete Seeger once quite rightly said that Guthrie was the father of the entire movement...

...Woody wrote and rewrote, but he never satisfied himself and finally gave up the project in 1948...

...Woody's hand is just beginning to be felt by such country singer-songwriters as Tom T. Hall, James Talley, Merle Haggard, and Willie Nelson...

...like many shy people he was happiest when performing...