Today in the NY Times Dropkick Murpyhy's singer Ken Casey talks about selecting unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics for the DKMs to perform.
"I had to put on little white gloves and get yelled at for being too rough," Mr. Casey said. "But it's not like I had to search long and hard to find the right lyrics; half the lyrics sounded like a Dropkick Murphys song as soon as I read them."
"I look at Woody as the original punk-rocker, just from the way he lived," he continued. "When you think about legendary American songwriters, not many of them rode boxcars."
The article provides a nice overview of Nora Guthrie's supercool project to produce contemporary recordings of the 2400 unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics.
But the lyrics project is actually old news. The exciting part of the article is that the only known live recording of a Woody Gutrhie performance will be released this week!
In 2001 ... Guthrie's daughter Nora received a small box that contained two black-and-yellow spools of silver wire with a note that said, "I found this in my closet and thought you might like to have it." When she reopened the boxes in January for a reporter, the strands resembled the wire you might use for hanging pictures. But the spools were recordings, an exciting discovery.
"What these are," Ms. Guthrie, 57, said, "are the only decent live recordings we've found of Woody in front of an audience. When we could finally hear them, we flipped out, because it's Woody telling jokes, laughing with the crowd and singing songs for them." This week those recordings will be released on CD as "The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949" (Woody Guthrie Publications....
Peter Braverman, a student at Rutgers, owned a wire recorder - a device, available to consumers since the end of World War II and soon to be eclipsed by tape recorders, that magnetized sound onto stainless steel wire. On a whim he lugged his equipment to Fuld Hall in Newark on a December evening in 1949 to check out a folk singer he had just heard about. With a few dozen other listeners, Mr. Braverman heard Guthrie's wife, Marjorie, lead her husband through give-and-take interviews about his childhood in the Oklahoma Territory, his Dust Bowl migration to California, his work on the Bonneville Dam project in Washington State and his current life in New York.
Along the way he sang 10 of his songs, from obscurities like "Goodbye Centralia" to favorites like "Pastures of Plenty." The performances are uneven; Guthrie seems to sleepwalk through "The Great Dust Storm" and stumbles over the lyrics on "Jesus Christ." But his droll monologue about trying to play folk songs for his wife's modern-dance troupe is hilarious, "Grand Coulee Dam" bounds with energy, and a dramatic "Tom Joad" is the best extant recording of his greatest song.
I can't wait. Presumably the CD will hit the stores on Tuesday; I'll be driving a bunch that day, so I guess I'm taking the discman and the cassette to CD adapter for the old car.
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