| |
|
Wow, what a thread.
There’s an album, I think this is the CD version, of a tribute concert after Woody Guthrie - a bunch of frizzly folk-rock characters (Seeger, Arlo, Odetta, Dylan, Baez, Havens, etc) do a couple of concerts to commemorate Woody and to raise money for Huntingdon’s disease charities. This being 1968, they do it as a concept-album type piece about Woody Guthrie’s life story, and between songs we get readings from his autobiography and other writings. He’s a good writer, if you like that impassioned folksy beat-writer thing, which I do, and the readings are done by people like Will Geer, who I don’t know anything about, and Peter Fonda, who I kinda do.
It’s a record that never fails to make me cry. And I don’t want it to ever fail to make me cry, I don’t want the day to come when my heart has hardened and I *just* listen to it without getting knocked down and then lifted up by it. I’m aware that to a cynical ear it could very easily sound mawkish or overdone, and I so don’t ever want to think that. I save it up and don’t listen to it very often, so as not to wear out the effect.
So. It’s the closing sequence on side 4 that does it for me. First you get a song, ‘1913 Massacre’, which is about a load of kids and their families dying at the hands of a bunch of company enforcers, and mixed up with the bleak, mournful arrangement, it’s got this angry, burning resentment at this horrible crime inflicted by the rich on the dirt poor. Then the readings start and Judy Collins reads you a piece he wrote about his sister dying. She was caught up in a house fire, it’s pretty horrid, and Judy's voice falters and quavers as she reads, and her words are surrounded by that particular kind of auditorium silence where you can hear the sound of thousands of people being silent at the same time. It’s a horrible story, and then you get Claire’s deathbed words to Woody, something like ‘don’t you cry. Don’t you dare cry’ and the idea that Woody should laugh instead. And live.
And then a guitar strums and Odetta - booming, god-voiced Odetta - lets rip with ‘This Land Is Your Land’, and in the middle of that, a snippet of a reading fades in, with Will Geer reading out some of Woody Guthrie’s more famous lines, which go like this:
“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world, and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work”,
...it's rousing stuff, and he reads it so as to rouse, and the audience fiercely roars approval and almost drowns out his voice before he can finish, and your heart bursts and lets go a ‘yeah!’. And then you wipe away your tears and switch off the record player and go and get some real work done/conquer the fucking universe. You’ve heard a horrible story about death, and then you are pretty much ordered to go and live your life. Right now.
It’s immensely powerful. It’s my ‘In case of emergency - play record!’ record that I should hang on the wall behind a glass panel. It can snap me out of the deepest funk. It’s very, very important that I don’t wear this record out. Because I’m rubbish at crying, I don’t cry easily, I tend to bottle it up if I’m unhappy, so it’s a *really* good, healthy, useful thing to have this trigger sitting on my shelf. A good cathartic cry followed by an instruction to bloody well get on with it. Rock. |
|
|
