One of My Favorite CDs Has Never Been Opened

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Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie are two giants of American music. In 1988, some top music stars gathered to pay tribute to their work and its impact on generations of musicians. Artists like U2, Bruce Springsteen, Little Richard, Sweet Honey in the Rock, John Mellencamp, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, and Pete Seeger came together to provide their own interpretations of classic songs that were written or sung by Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie.

The recording of their concert, called “Folkways: A Vision Shared” was a magical set of cover songs that won a Grammy Award.

Author photo.

This was no ordinary concert. It was a benefit to raise the money to buy the Folkways Records collection for the Smithsonian Museum. Over the years, Folkways had recorded and released more than 2,000 albums of folk, blues, and jazz music. It was a chronicle of American musical culture, a collection of roots music that was unparalleled in scope.

And at the heart of it all were two giants. Guthrie and Lead Belly were both songwriters, collectors of folk songs, and poets who stood as heroes for the Depression-era working class. Their work inspired many of the great American songwriters, such as the Beatles, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Linda Ronstadt, Muddy Waters, Pete Seeger, and Bruce Springsteen.

Lead Belly

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Public Domain images.

“No Lead Belly, No Beatles.” That’s a quote from Beatles guitarist George Harrison. Kurt Cobain later tried to buy Lead Belly’s 12-strong guitar. Even today, musicians look back in awe at the impact that this godfather of American music had on the development of folk, gospel, rhythm and blues, jazz, and rock and roll music. The so-called British invasion started out as British bands like the Beatles and Rolling Stones covering early American blues songs from Lead Belly and others.

Lead Belly, whose real name was Huddie Ledbetter (and sometimes written as one word, Leadbelly), had a deep, resonant voice, and he was also a talented songwriter and guitar player. Lead Belly’s songs included Midnight Special, Goodnight Irene, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, Cotton Fields, Bourgeois Blues, Black Betty, Easy Rider, and House of the Rising Sun. He wrote many of them, collecting and arranging others from traditional folk songs. For example, Goodnight Irene and House of the Rising Sun both were old folk songs that he collected and re-arranged. Lead Belly’s renditions of these tunes brought them broader audiences, popularizing them for future generations. The same might be said for hymns and gospel songs that he helped keep alive, including Amazing Grace.

Here are some videos (actually audio recordings) of Lead Belly singing.

Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (later covered by Nirvana)

Gallows Pole (later covered by Led Zeppelin)

Woody Guthrie

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Public Domain images.

Guthrie is best known for writing This Land is Your Land, an alternative national anthem that is one of the most famous American songs ever written. In a 2014 vote to choose the Smithsonian’s “most iconic item”, Guthrie’s handwritten This Land is Your Land came in third place, ahead of George Washington’s portrait and just behind the original Star Spangled Banner and Bao Bao the Panda. Many of his songs were written during the Dust Bowl, a period of severe drought and dust storms that displaced thousands of farmers. Guthrie travelled with families in search of work, learning their traditional folk music along the way.

Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph of a migrant mother in 1936 goes hand in hand with Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballads.

Public Domain

His music gave a voice to the underdog at a time of rapid industrialization and great human suffering. He later spent time in New York’s growing folk scene, collaborating with Jewish musicians, and in the Pacific Northwest, writing songs to promote the dams on rivers there. Later, Guthrie wrote anti-fascist songs during World War II. If you study some of his music closely and listen to later songwriters and musicians such as Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, you can even hear them copying Guthrie’s guitar work; many have paid tribute to him as a major influence.

Guthrie’s best songs included This Land is Your Land,, The Ludlow Massacre, Pretty Boy Floyd, Hard Travelin, Union Maid, Do-Re-Mi, So Long (It’s Been Good to Know You), and The Ballad of Tom Joad (Parts I and II).

Here are some original recordings of his music.

This Land is Your Land:

Do-Re-Mi:

The Folkways Tribute Concert

At the Lead Belly-Guthrie tribute concert in 1988, an array of stars gave their own renditions of songs from these two legends. Bob Dylan chose Pretty Boy Floyd, giving his own edge to this ballad of an Oklahoma Robin Hood folk hero. U2 gave a powerful and passionate Jesus Christ performance, continuing the underdog theme and foreshadowing liberation theology.

There is a particularly powerful stanza at the end of the song, where Guthrie brought the subject back to his present day reality:

This song was made in New York City
Of rich man and preachers, and slaves
If Jesus was to preach like He preached in Galilee
They would lay Jesus Christ in His grave.

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U2 in the 1980s. Creative Commons via Wikimedia by Michael Richardson.

Bruce Springsteen took on Vigilante Man and I Ain’t Got No Home, which sound very much like Springsteen songs in verse and tune. Brian Wilson performed a Beach Boys-style cover of Lead Belly’s Goodnight Irene. Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson gave memorable country treatment to Hobo’s Lullaby and Philadelphia Lawyer. The latter song played off of one of Guthrie’s recurrent themes, David over Goliath, a commoner from the West besting a privileged East Coast aristocrat.

There were some other great songs as well, including from Guthrie’s protege Pete Seeger and from his son, Arlo Guthrie. But many would say that Sweet Honey in the Rock stole the show with their two songs. The quintet of voices led with Lead Belly’s Sylvie, while its gospel-inspired version of Gray Goose was a standout performance as well.

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Sweet Honey in the Rock ensemble. Pbs.org.

I will include a few of the individual tunes below. Near the end of this post, you also can find a link to the full concert playlist on YouTube, as well as a playlist for the same songs as sung by Guthrie and Lead Belly.

Why is my Folkways CD still in shrinkwrap?

Though I enjoy old-time music, I’m not a complete dinosaur. I listen to many of these songs frequently, but I do so with digital copies of them. I rarely play CDs anymore, even though I have a whole shelf of them. And this is the third CD of the Folkways concert that I have ordered. I often buy CDs of what I consider to be “real music” to hand out to people who might appreciate them. In that way, I’m playing a small part in keeping this music alive.

Author photo.