Arlo Guthrie's family affair
Susan Whitall / The Detroit News

Some musicians travel with a big entourage, but it's hard to top Arlo Guthrie's posse.
The son of folk icon Woody Guthrie heads into Mount Pleasant's Soaring Eagle Casino on Friday with three generations of Guthries for "The Guthrie Family Rides Again." Among the tribe: Arlo's son Abe, daughters Sarah Lee, Annie and Cathy, and Sarah Lee's husband Johnny Irion, with whom she performs.

"We have guitars, autoharps, mandolins, ukeleles, my four kids," Guthrie, 62, says, calling from home in Massachusetts. Counting the grandkids, there might be four generations of Guthries onstage if a tape of Woody Guthrie's voice is played onstage, something they often do.

"Yes, and even the youngest of them will make a brief appearance," Guthrie says. "Marjorie, my daughter Cathy's daughter is 2, and Sophie, Sarah Lee's daughter is also 2. So we have a couple of 2-year-olds we'll drag out to sing on one or two songs then they can go backstage to play. No one is expected to be professional so much as join in."

That philosophy comes directly from Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl troubadour who sang countless folk and blues songs, and wrote such classics as "This Land is Your Land." The elder Guthrie felt that music was for everybody, not just people you pay to go hear in a concert hall.

Before radio and television, that's what families did, Arlo agrees. "But then people started buying into prepackaged music," Guthrie says. "Then there was this big folk revival in the '50s. There's still all these people playing nowadays, but they do it with other kids in the neighborhood."

Guthrie has high hopes for the younger generation. "When I was a kid, we had 40 years of recorded music to listen to. Before that, there's no recorded music, you don't hear the songs the pharaohs were singing. Today, young people have twice as much stuff to listen to. The result is their musicianship is twice as good as mine was. That 13-year-old kid can play circles around me!"

The Guthrie family has several generations of songs to choose from. In addition to the classics, they'll play some of the unfinished Woody Guthrie songs that were completed by such artists as Billy Bragg, Wilco, Janis Ian and the Klezmatics several years ago.

Arlo Guthrie also has his own cache of classics, including "The City of New Orleans," "Coming into Los Angeles" and "The Motorcycle Song." One he won't be performing is 1967's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree." It takes so long to sing, he only does it during special anniversary tours.

Guthrie likens it to the kind of big concert the Carter Family used to do (later, the Cash-Carter clan).

"We really look up to the Carter Family, the first family of American folk music," Guthrie says. "I met them years ago, after A.P. Carter passed away, I got to meet Mother Maybelle and the family when I did the Johnny Cash TV show in Nashville in the '60s."

It's said the melody of "This Land Is Your Land" is based upon an old Carter Family song, which in turn probably originated in the hills of Scotland.

"The Carter Family were really heroes to my father. They were willing to sing these old songs and not be part of the music industry. They sang the tough sad songs of the lives they'd lived. That was the way people knew what was going on, long before TV and electricity, it was through the songs and ballads that you would remember the history of what happened."





I have loved Arlo's music since I heard the anti-establishment hit "Alice's Restaurant" in the late 60s.

VERY good article... I love for people to appreciate the Carter Family...

I recommend this cd with Arlo Guthrie:Washington county.
Everything on this is great it includes the amazing folksong:Valley to pray.
Arlo sang this on the Johnny Cash show.

Me too, Patsy ...and thanks, Grahame for posting it. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Johnny and June, and now Arlo ...the Carter Family music lives on. There was a time that only people like Woody Guthrie and the folk group were aware of it along a few die-hards like me ....but Johnny's popularity assured a new audience for it ...and now people really appreciate it and realize it is the foundation for traditional country music. God Bless AP, Sara and Maybelle ....and those who still appreciate what they did.

Nice article. I'll have to check out his some of his music a bit more.

Nancy

It seems as though Arlo Gutherie has come a full 180 degrees from the pop folk days of the mid sixties to a full appreciation of The Carter Family--or is this a side of Arlo we never knew?

Guess I'll just have to hear/or buy the CD.

Mellowing out I would say ...thinking more clearly, becoming more mature ...all of the above?

quote:

Mellowing out I would say ...thinking more clearly, becoming more mature ...all of the above?

Interestingly--I was going to use the term 'maturation process.' Whatever!

Thanks for the article Grahame.......I think Woody instilled a deep, deep respect for Carter Family music in a young Arlo.

Up here in Minneapolis.......some time ago.......I heard Arlo perform "Wildwood Flower" complete with an almost perfect "Carter Scratch"

I think his Carter family respect has always been there however, it really is coming out now, as he shows his appreciation more and more now for it as he "matures"

Woody Guthrie used melodies from The Carter family songs very much in his song.
It takes a worried man
is an melody he used on several different songs.