Woody Guthrie - 3000 Unrecorded Songs

Introduction

This is from a Seven Days in piece from 2019 which taught me a lot more about Woody Guthrie than I knew about at the time. The title "Woody Guthrie: Three Chords and The Truth " I think is perfect for such an important, influential artist.

You can hear the influence of Woody in the music of Dylan, Springsteen and so many others. His songs documented the oppression of the unmonied classes and over the pst decades that is more and more people.

One of the albums that is referenced in this piece is this excellent collection by Billy Bragg and Wilco.

Woody Guthrie - 3000 Unrecorded Songs

I've just watched the BBC documentary Woody Guthrie: Three Chords and The Truth and it reminded me of a few things and showed me a lot I didn't know about the man. Unfortunately, the documentary is no longer available on the BBC but it is worth tracking down. I didn't know that Guthrie and his father were racist and his father was involved in or facilitated lynchings. A lot of Guthrie's early writing was awash with racist wording and illustrations until ...

.. on his radio show he played a piece called "Run N*gger Run", and he used THAT word in the worst ways you could, but then he got a letter from a Negro listener, an educated guy who said up to that point the show had been excellent, but by playing that and using THAT word he was showing disrespect and race hate towards African Americans. Guthrie took this on board and vowed never to use THAT word again, he apologised on air and in a letter and became very active in pushing race equality. The problem is race inequality is still with us but Woody showed that people can change when educated by events.

This then brought me to the fact that though he was struck down by the horrifying Huntingdon's Chorea which destroys the nervous system and therefore you lose control of everything, he had been a prolific writer being inspired by everything.

After his death, there were over three thousand sets of lyrics to unrecorded songs.

A lot of these are now being picked up by artists examples of which are seen in Billy Bragg and Wilco's "Mermaid Avenue Sessions" and the wonderful take on "Old Man Trump" by Ryan Harvey (with Anne Di Franco and Tom Morello) and he remarked bout the number of songs that Woody had written.

Another remarkable one is "Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)", my favourite take on this is by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez (see here),

but this illustrates the absolute disdain there is for immigrant workers not even acknowledging them as human and the same is happening today with Trump's Wall and Brexit in the UK.

The documentary is excellent watch it, listen to Woody's songs and if you need to change yourself for the better, do it.

Conclusion

Woody Guthrie's influence is phenomenal and this contains a video of Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen covering Woody's "This Land Is Your Land" and President Obama's inauguration but if you look on YouTube and online you will find lots of Woody's music.

It's not just his music, it's the importance of his words that power the messages contained in the songs.

These are pertinent to almost everyone in society and every protest song that you hear probably owes something to Woody's legacy.

This is what Wikipedia has to say:

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was an American singer-songwriter and composer who was one of the most significant figures in American folk music.