Happy Birthday, Woody Guthrie: Covered In Folk, Redux
Woody Guthrie would have been 100 today, and the folkways are imploding a bit as they celebrate the man who practically defines 21st century folk. But we’ve gone there already: a few weeks ago, in announcing the release of Little Seed, Elizabeth Mitchell’s wonderful new tribute to his children’s songs; in a comprehensive feature on the Guthrie family legacy back in 2010; in a score of other posts, as the modern inheritors of the singer-songwriter mantle have interpreted the songs of Woody Guthrie over and over again.
Indeed, the Guthrie songbook is thick on the ground in a folkblog by definition, so covered are his songs, so beloved is his work. And the man himself wouldn’t have had it any other way: as his oft-repeated anti-copyright notice, designed to encourage reuse and modification, states: This song is Copyrighted in U.S….for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.
Still, turning 100 isn’t something that happens every day. So in honor of his birthday, we’re offering a full mix-tape sized coverfolk collection, comprised of both Woody Guthrie covers that have previously appeared on this blog and a few rarer and more recently collected covers that fill out the edges quite nicely. Unusually, our set is designed to be listened to in order; if you haven’t done so already, a quick installation of the exfm browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, or Firefox will let you stream embedded links here and elsewhere while you consider which to download for posterity’s sake. Woody would have loved it.
- Thousands of Joyous Americans: This Land Is Your Land [2009]
Aching for a bit more context? Head back in time for a deeper treatise on the Guthrie legacy and a whole mess of coverfolk links of and from various members of the Guthrie clan!
Category: Woody Guthrie One comment »
July 14th, 2012 at 9:06 pm
Hi Joshua
great collection of Woody Guthrie covers