Woody Guthrie, Some Folk, 4CD - w/48 page booklet!
$ 14.00
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Track Listing 1. Lost Train Blues 2. Railroad Blues 3. Old Joe Clark/Beaumont Rad 4. Greenback Dollar 5. Boll Weevil Song 6. So Long It's Been Good to Know You 7. Talking Dust Bowl Blues 8. Do-Re-Mi 9. Hard Times 10. Pretty Boy Floyd 11. They Laid Jesus Christ in His Grave 12. Jolly Banker 13. I Ain't Got No Home 14. Dirty Overalls 15. Chain Aound My Leg 16. Worried Man Blues 17. Goin' Down That Road Feeling Bad 18. Dust Storm Disaster 19. Foggy Mountain Top 20. Dust Pneumonia Blues 21. California Blues 22. Dust Bowl Refugee 23. Will Rogers Highway 24. Los Angeles New Year's Flood DISC 2: 1. The Great Dust Storm 2. Talkin' Dust Bowl Blues 3. Pretty Boy Floyd 4. Dusty Old Dust 5. Dust Bowl Blues 6. Blowin' Down This Road 7. Pt. 1 Tom Joad 8. Pt. 2 Tom Joad 9. Do-Re-Mi 10. Dust Bowl Refugee 11. I Ain't Got No Home 12. Vigilante Man 13. Dust Can't Kill Me 14. Dust Pneumonia Blues 15. Oregon Trail 16. Roll on Columbia 17. New Found Land 18. Talking Columbia 19. Roll Columbia Roll 20. Columbia's Waters 21. Ramblin' Blues 22. It Takes a Married Man to Sing a Worried Song 23. Hard Travelin' 24. The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done 25. Grand Coulee Dam DISC 3: 1. Song of the Coulee Dam 2. Jackhammer Blues 3. Washington Talkin' Blues 4. Ramblin' Round 5. Pastures of Plenty 6. The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done 7. End of the Line 8. I Ride an Old Paint 9. House of the Rising Sun 10. Hard Ain't It Hard 11. The Dodger Song 12. Ida Red 13. Muleskinner Blues 14. What Are We Waiting On 15. Ship in the Sky 16. The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Gone 17. Talking Sailor (Talking Merchant Marine) 18. New York Town 19. Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet 20. Chisholm Trail 21. Sowing on the Mountain 22. Sally Don't You Grieve 23. Philadelphia Lawyer 24. Little Darling (At My Window Sad and Lonely) 25. Baltimore to Washington DISC 4: 1. Bed on the Floor 2. Dead or Alive (Poor Lazarus) 3. Billy the Kid 4. Stackolee 5. Take a Whiff on Me 6. Buffalo Gals 7. Ride Around Little Doggies (I Ride an Old Paint) 8. Talking Fish Blues 9. Jesse James 10. Sinking of the Reuben James 11. When the Great Ship Went Down 12. Stepstone 13. Hobo's Lullaby 14. Slipknot (Hangknot Slipknot) 15. Go Tell Aunt Rhody 16. When the Yanks Go Marching In 17. Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy 18. Little Black Train 19. Gypsy Davy 20. Cowboy Waltz 21. 1913 Massacre 22. Ludlow Massacre 23. Ramblin' Round 24. When the Curfew Blows 25. New Found Land 26. This Land Is Your Land
Album Notes Adapter: Woody Guthrie.Personnel: Woody Guthrie (vocals, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, harmonica); Cisco Houston (vocals, guitar); Pete Seeger (vocals, banjo); Sonny Terry (vocals, harmonica); Alan Lomax (vocals); Bess Lomax Hawes (mandolin).Liner Note Author: Adam Komorowski.Recording information: Department Of The Interior Studio, Washington DC (03/21/1940-??/??/1947); Moses Asch Studio, New York, NY (03/21/1940-??/??/1947); Portland, OR (03/21/1940-??/??/1947); RCA Studio, Camden, NJ (03/21/1940-??/??/1947); Reeves Sound Studio, New York, NY (03/21/1940-??/??/1947). European law limits copyrights on recordings to 50 years, whether the recordings were made in Europe or not, which means that, for example, Woody Guthrie's recordings, made in the U.S. in the 1940s, are all in the public domain (although they continue to be claimed by American record companies). A whole host of European reissue labels exist solely for the purpose of exploiting this anomaly by assembling unlicensed albums by vintage artists mastered from old vinyl records or even current CDs. These albums range from poorly compiled and annotated ripoffs to more scholarly and thorough efforts. Britain's Proper Records leans toward the high end, putting together box sets with extensive booklets, and that's the approach the label has taken with its Guthrie collection Some Folk. In terms of length, only the legitimate album The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1-4 (Smithsonian Folkways) is in the class of this four-CD set, which contains 99 tracks and runs four hours and 42 minutes. Compiler/annotator Adam Komorowski has taken a simple chronological approach. The first disc is an abridged version of the three-disc set The Library of Congress Recordings that cuts out most of the spoken material in favor of the music. The second disc begins with the tracks from the Dust Bowl Ballads album and continues by copying the contents of The Columbia River Collection. That concludes at the start of the third disc, followed by four tracks with the Almanac Singers (one of which, "The Dodger Song," features Lee Hays on lead vocals, with Guthrie buried in the chorus), and then the rest of the third disc and all of the fourth contain excerpts from Guthrie's large catalog of casually recorded folk songs done for record company owner Moses Asch in the mid-'40s. (Among these, "Sowing on the Mountain" features Cisco Houston on lead vocals, with Guthrie singing harmony, and the version of "Sinking of the Reuben James" is actually the Almanac Singers version, with Pete Seeger on lead vocals; although Guthrie co-wrote the song, he isn't present on the track.)It's a straightforward approach, but there are reasons nobody else has done it this way. Guthrie recorded his sessions for the Library of Congress in March 1940 and made the Dust Bowl Ballads recordings for RCA Victor Records in April and May of the same year. Not surprisingly, he performed many of the same songs: "Dust Storm Disaster" (aka "The Great Dust Storm"), "Talking Dust Bowl Blues," "Pretty Boy Floyd," "So Long It's Been Good to Know You" (aka "Dusty Old Dust"), "Do-Re-Mi," "Dust Bowl Refugee," "I Ain't Got No Home," and "Dust Pneumonia Blues." So, all those songs get repeated within the first two discs of this collection. And they aren't the only songs that turn up multiple times. "I Ride an Old Paint" (aka "Ride Around Little Doggies"), "Ramblin' Round," "Worried Man Blues" (a/k/a "It Takes a Worried Man to Sing a Worried Song"), and "New Found Land" are all here twice, and "The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done" turns up three times, two of them the exact same recording. This would be less troubling if the set didn't omit some of Guthrie's important work. Except for "Ship in the Sky" (which is actually more of a World War II number), none of his children's songs appear. Ballads of Sacco & Vanzetti goes unrepresented. And (one can only hope the reader is sitting down) "This Land Is Your Land" is nowhere to be found. That's right: three spots for "The Greatest Thing That Man Has Ever Done," but none for Guthrie's most famous song. This, then, is a collection that appears thorough and comprehensive at first glance, but proves not to be upon examination. The same thing is true of Komorowski's liner notes, which take up most of the 48-page booklet. They are long, but an actual reading of them reveals that they are a rehash of information found in Joe Klein's biography Woody Guthrie: A Life, written in stilted prose sprinkled with typos, grammatical mistakes, and factual errors. ~ William Ruhlmann |
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