Listen to Gutherie’s original recording:

While the “schoolhouse” version of the song still maintained the verses that celebrated the beauty of the country, in Guthrie’s plainspoken poetry, it clearly didn’t communicate the nuanced view that Guthrie had of the America he had seen up close, “From California to the New York Island.” As a traveling minstrel, Guthrie criss-crossed America during the 193o’s and 1940’s and saw both the grandeur and the injustice that made America such a contradictory and complex country, a country full of promise and problems, one that Guthrie loved dearly, and was still yet to fulfill the promise of its founding principles.

Roots

Interestingly, Guthrie lifted the melody and chord progression directly from The Carter Family’s “When the World’s On Fire,”

This practice reflects an age-0ld tradition where folk music literally belongs to the people, and anyone can take a song and make it new by writing new lyrics to make it current again. Hard to believe that, in this age of copyright lawsuits, when people are sued for thousands of dollars if they dare to download a copy of a song they like, that a musician like Guthrie would encourage others to take his music and update his lyrics to their own use, the way he did with the original Carter Family tune, and in fact the way every musician before him and since crafts songs by drawing on a tradition of music and a wellspring of songs and melodies that their musical predecessors have given the world.

Hidden in Plain Sight

It’s fascinating to hear how Guthrie’s work was kept alive and vital through the work of his son, Arlo, and his protogee, Pete Seeger, as they both continued to sing Woody’s songs to audiences that never had a chance to hear Woody Guthrie sing them himself. Even as Pete Seeger was driven out of the “mainstream media” in the 1950’s by the same clique of anti-communists that found the sentiments of Guthrie’s “secret verses” intolerable, he continue to sing to school kids, churches, and union halls, keeping the song alive in its full form, a reminder that, even if you can’t play your music on the TV or the radio, no one can stop you from picking up your guitar and joining your voices in harmony wherever people may gather and meet.

At the same time, millions of kids sang the “safe” version of Guthrie’s song in schools across the country, so the strains of the melody would be forever embedded in their unconscious, ready for the time when the whole song, all the verses, could be sung aloud, still ringing with meaning and relevance. For now, almost 80 years after Woody Guthrie first wrote the words to “This Land is Your Land” in his neat, precise penmanship, we face many of the same problems that he knew from firsthand experience: massive disparities between the rich and the poor, a financial and political system that serve the interests of a narrow elite, increasing hardship and suffering for the majority of Americans while a few gorge themselves on power and privilege, and a sense that the country has perhaps lost its way, lost sight of the ideals that animated our rise from a few tenuous colonies on the edge of a vast and mysterious wilderness to a world-spanning colossus that espoused freedom and democracy as an antidote to tyranny and oppression.

His lyrics still ring true today, reminding us how much work still remains for us to reach those lofty goals, yet how much hope and beauty we can find just by looking out to our “endless skyway.” Guthrie understood that the people of this country, be they poor, hungry, dispossessed, are still the greatest strength and hope, that our freedom to savor the splendor of our nation connects us to the country’s founding principles, and protects us still from the tyranny of unchecked power and wealth: “Nobody living can ever stop me, / As I go walking that freedom highway.”

For this reason, Guthrie’s song remains an anthem that’s just as relevant today as it was when he wrote it on February 23, 1940, a song of protest and solidarity for every American who longs for a day when words like “freedom and justice for all” are more than just a far off ideal or a fairy tale from a history book.

Some Other Versions You May Enjoy

Guest Tom Morello, guitarist from Rage Against the Machine, sings This Land and strums his acoustic, as he does at many Occupy rallies across the nation (warning: contains naughty words):

Springsteen, in the middle of the Reagan years, sings a poignant version at the height of his career:

Pete Seeger and Springsteen, in Washington DC, sing all the verses, with everyone helping out:

To hear many other Woody Guthrie songs, with others from the American songbook, join us on May 6 at our spring concert.

Terry Gross recently had a long interview with Carole King on Fresh Air, where they discussed becoming a songwriter, Gerry Goffin (King’s writing partner and ex-husband), and King’s life in music. It’s worth listening to.

To put the conversation in a bit of context, Gross wanted to be a songwriter when she was younger, and King was just a few years older and from around the same neighborhood.

One thing King doesn’t talk about in that interview is how she became a performer: she moved to Los Angeles (Laurel Canyon, specifically) and was part of James Taylor’s band. JT encouraged her to sing her songs on stage as part of their set.

“I was just with him on his little college tour the first year he went out,” she says. “And James one night just said, ‘You’re going to perform ‘Up on the Roof’ tonight.’ It was just a wonderful transition for me, from being really scared to realizing that the audience was with me, and it’s because James had set me up for that.” -NPR

Taylor recorded King’s song “You’ve Got a Friend” (and played guitar on her recording of it on Tapestry). On their recent reunion album “Live at the Troubadour,” Taylor says, to introduce the song:

I remember standing there and hearing maybe the best pop tune ever written. I didn’t realize it at the time that I would be singing that song every night for the rest. of. my. life. [laughter] But it’s a great song to be known for and I’ve travelled around the world on this tune.

For an altogether weirder, fictional take on King’s world, you can check out the Alison Anders movie “Grace of My Heart” (IMDb, Wikipedia) which follows a songwriter through a tumultuous marriage and eventual success on stage. The movie’s a bit goofy, but if you know the people who made pop music in that era, it’s fun to see how they are fictionalized.

He eventually collected so many photographs, he hired a curator and in 1990 sold the collection at auction at Sotheby’s.

Nash goes on in those 1991 liner notes:

‘Teach’ started out as a slightly funky English Folk song but Stephen (Stills) put a country beat to it and turned it into a hit record.

The country beat helps, but so does that pedal steel guitar. That’s not any of the band members, but instead a friend who traded his time in exchange for harmony lessons for him and his bandmates. The friend? Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.

If you want to know what Garcia was playing, you can see it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6dcGA8pkUs

What? You missed it? This video teaches you exactly what to play, (although I have no idea what he’s talking about).

(Crappy) audio only of the second season episode of The Office “Take Your Daughters to Work Day” featuring Dwight and Michael singing Teach Your Children:

Here’s a listenable version featuring Kathy Mattea and Suzy Bogguss on vocals at the Grand Ole Opry (Mattea and Bogguss recorded the song with Nash as The Red Hots for the charity album “Red, Hot and Country”):

We have some information about Neil Young’s Sugar Mountain from fellow Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. From a concert where she was singing a duet (familiar with Newton Family Singers):

She introduces her next song by saying:

In 1965 I was up in Canada, and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a rock’n’roll band (…) he had just newly turned 19, and that meant he was no longer allowed into his favorite hangout, which was kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you’re over 18 you couldn’t get in there anymore; so he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends and everybody that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but it’s one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn’t play in this club anymore. But he was over the hill. So he wrote this song that was called “Oh to live on sugar mountain” which was a lament for his lost youth.He wrote it on his 19th birthday (…) And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 19 and there’s nothing after that, that’s a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope.

The song she wrote?

The Circle Game. A live version from 1974:

Here’s Joni’s version of Sugar Mountain (1967):

Right. Back to Neil and Sugar Mountain:

He wrote this song right after leaving his band The Squires (this is a great interview with a bandmate from those teenage years about Young, Neil).

From Neil Young: Long May You Run: Neil wrote this at the Victoria Hotel in Fort Williams, Ontario. Around this time he met Stephen Stills, who was touring Canada with his band The Company. Young on Stills: “Mainly, he was the funniest person I’d met in years. He didn’t have another gig until next weekend, so he stayed in Thunder Bay and we played and he took us to see buffalo. We lived on A&W cheeseburgers and root beer. Very Canadian.”

Sugar Mountain was the b-side to Young’s first solo single (The Loner) and did not appear on an album until 1977’s greatest hits compilation “Decade.” (It appeared as a b-side on a number of singles.)

Here’s Neil from 1971 with a talky intro:

at about the 5:45 minute mark, he talks about writing the song saying:

Folks, I want to tell you something. When I wrote this song, I wrote 126 verses to it. Now, you can imagine that I had a lot of trouble figuring out what four verses to use… I was underneath the stairs… Anyway, this verse that I wrote… It was the worst verse of the 126 that I wrote. So, I decided to put it in the song, to just to give everybody a frame of reference as to, you know, what can happen. What I’m trying to say here, by stopping in the middle of the song, and explaining this to you, is that… I think it’s one of the lamest verses I ever wrote. And it takes a lotta nerve for me to get up here and sing it in front of you people. But, if when I’m finished singing, you sing the chorus ‘Sugar Mountain’ super loud, I’ll just forget about it right away and we can continue.

The verse he’s speaking of?

Now you’re underneath the stairs
And you’re givin’ back some glares
To the people who you met
And it’s your first cigarette.

Here’s one of Young’s biggest fans doing his version:

(Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, for those wondering.)

And here’s a (quiet) video of Young from last year’s Farm Aid concert:

It took me a while to understand all the categories for various Grammy Awards: best record, best performance for a song, best song. The first goes to a producer, the second to a recording artist and the third to a composer.

I bring this up because I was thinking about “Daddy Sang Bass,” written by Carl Perkins for his friend and touring companion Johnny Cash. Perkins, of course, was the writer behind “Blue Suede Shoes” and other Sun Studio hits.

In the song, there is a direct quote of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” a hit for the Carter Family. Just to make things more roundabout, Cash’s wife, June was a Carter herself and the song is often credited to her father, A.P. Carter as the composer.

In fact, accounts say that Perkins asked Carter for permission to work “Circle” into “Daddy Sang Bass,” and Carter granted that permission. Well, why not? It wasn’t really his to give.

Our original edition of Rise Up Singing lists no composer for “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” but the 15th Anniversary Edition lists “C Gabriel” as the writer. Some quick Googling will reveal that the lyrics to the song were written by Ada Habershon and the music by Charles Gabriel. Here’s a scan of the sheet music.

Folk music is about adaptation and the Carter Family did make some changes to the original song, the most obvious change in the chorus where a question — “Is a better home awaiting…?” becomes a statement — “There’s a better home awaiting…”

So yes, “Daddy Sang Bass” quotes the chorus of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Fitting perhaps, that They Might Be Giants sampled “Daddy Sang Bass” in their song “Boat of Car” from their first album.

In this case, “sampling” is understood to mean, took a recorded snippet out of another composition. As anyone who has seen They Might Be Giants live, they don’t always have a ton of equipment (I remember seeing two guys, a guitar, accordion and a tape recorder of backing tracks play at my college). So sometimes when you play a song with samples, you just have to sing the song your own darn self.

(Not really relevant, but I find it poignant that this video was recorded on September 10, 2001.)

Bonus from a television special.

A recent obsession with the song Seven Bridges Road led to lots of time on YouTube and Wikipedia, and even an actual book. I figure after making a little effort, it’s worth putting together some of the information for others.

So, Seven Bridges Road was written by Steve Young and recorded for his album Rock Salt and Nails (1969). Here’s a YouTube of a 1972 version by Young from his second album, named after the song:

There are more recent live recordings online and he plays and sings the song in a similar style, as a singer-songwriter.

In 1973, Iain Matthews, of Fairport Convention (and other rock/folk/pop bands) recorded the song with the harmonies that have come to define Seven Bridges. It appears on his album Valley Hi.

Who arranged the harmonies? Well, if it wasn’t Matthews, perhaps it was the producer of Valley Hi, the former Monkee Mike Nesmith!

According to the photographic history book The Eagles: An American Band (p. 166), Don Henley and company would sing Seven Bridges Road in their dressing room as a vocal warm up before shows on their Hotel California tour (that album was released in late 1976). The band later performed the song on stage and a version of it was recorded for Eagles Live. The liner notes to Eagles : The Very Best Of (2CD) state that they learned the song from Steve Young, but they clearly borrowed harmonic ideas from Matthews. Here they are from Portland in 2010:

The Eagles version has become the most iconic, although Dolly Parton’s all-star bluegrass band does a pretty fine job by it, too. Here’s Dolly:

More recently, Keith Urban (Mr. Nicole Kidman) has been bringing up opening acts to sing the song with him. In 2009, Sugarland add two voices to Urban (as well as a mandolin). I have to say, one thing I love about Sugarland is how happy they seem to be to be making music. It’s not perfect, but they’re having fun and projecting that; a charming stage presence.

In 2010, Urban was on tour with Grammy winners Lady Antebellum. The female vocalist, Hillary Scott, doesn’t seem to know the song as well as the guys, but she wings it and finds her harmony lines.

Finally, a couple of non-professional acts. The first is an earnest attempt, but the recording makes clear the problem of pushing the bass part too hard. Let it resonate, but don’t sing it out, man. (Also, something’s a little off with the guitar. That’s the time to just pause out of this one…)

The second, by the Hartley Brothers sounds great (and has a terrific toy poodle pontificating).

A great song by Young, terrific arrangement by Matthews and Nesmith, and kudos to the Eagles for bringing it to the attention of a whole lot of people (although a shout-out from them to Matthews would have been nice).