I’ve had this CD a while, and I have listened to it a couple times. Those times had been when there were other distractions going on, so I was not really paying that much attention to it. I was definitely not paying attention to Bob Childers narration.
I recently took a road trip and listened to both CDs all the way through with out interruption. Most of the music I knew and was familiar to me. Woody’s prose that was narrated was new to me. I came away with a new and deeper appreciation of the music of Woody Guthrie and of Woody Guthrie as a man.
It did get me to wondering how Woody would be received in the Oklahoma of today. Would he have the same iconic stature that he enjoys today? Oklahoma is a very conservative, very fundamentalist Christian state. Woody was without question a populist and socialist. Even he wondered if he was a communist. My reading of the prose narrated on this CD was that Woody was not particularly any religion, and probably had issues with organized religions. He came across as a spiritual man though.
Woody was a keen observer of the human condition, and more than able to put that into words and music. Just the word pictures painted by the prose would make this CD worth the price.
The CD can also be looked at as peek into the history and the society of the dust bowl era. It is a study on how folks and society reacted to the massive environmental and economic disasters of the time.
Additionally, one of my all time favorite musicians, Jimmy Lafave, is featured on several of the songs on the CD. Pete Seeger makes a couple appearances. One unannounced appearance was to correct the lyrics of the performers, and a second time singing some of Woody’s children songs.
Ellis Paul, Eliza Gilkyson, Slaid Cleaves, Sarah Lee Guthrie and Jeremy Irion, Kevin Welch, Michael Fracasso and Joel Rafael all make appearances. Most of the folk singers are well know on the national level. A couple of the singers are more famous around the Texas, Oklahoma circuit. They all do wonderful interruptions of Woody’s music. There are one or two songs out the archives that have not been put to music before. On more than one song I found myself singing along. And to those folks that know me, “Yes I know you are glad that you were not in truck with me.”
I think it is a CD that every American should own, and sure enough every Okie.
Buy it for the music, buy it for the prose or buy it for the history. You will not go wrong.