Friday, July 20, 2012 KSFR, Santa Fe, NM Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell 101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrel(at)ksfr.org
OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
South of the River by Ray Wylie Hubbard
47 Crosses by The Goddamn Gallows
I Truly Understand That You Love Another Man by The Carolina Chocolate Drops
Viceroy Filter Kings by Slim Cessna's Auto Club
Here Lies a Good Old Boy by James "Slim" Hand
The Story of My Life by Big Al Dowling
In the Jailhouse Now by The Soggy Bottom Boys
Country Bumpkin by Cal Smith
Smells Like Low Tide by Molly Gene One Whoaman Band*
My Go Go Girl by Bozo Darnell
Jukebox Blues by June Carter
Devils Look Like Angels by The Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band *
Steve McQueen by Drive-By Truckers
Ugly Woman by Hasil Adkins
Jimbo Jambo Land by South Memphis String Band
Viva Sequin/Do-Re-Mi by Ry Cooder
Pretty Boy Floyd by The Byrds
Vigilante Man by Hindu Love Gods
Philadelphia Lawyer by Maddox Brothers & Rose
Hard Travelin' by Simon Stokes
Grand Coulee Damn by Lonnie Donnegan
Dust Bowl Refugee by James Talley
Deportee by The Byrds
This Land is Your Land by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings
I Ain't Got a Home in This World Anymore by Bruce Springsteen
Honky Tonk Angels by Kitty Wells
The Bad Girl I Keep in My Heart by Cornell Hurd
Wind Blown Waltz by Giant Giant Sand
Seven Shades of Blue by Martin Zellar & The Hardways
The Portland Water by Michael Hurley
If You's a Viper by Martin, Bogan & Armstrong
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets
* These songs available on the 2012 Muddy Roots Festival compilation. Download for free HERE
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Steve Terrell is proud to report to the monthly
Steve Terrell is proud to report to the monthly Freeform American Roots Radio list
A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican July 20, 2012
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, you wrote us some songs.
And because July 14 would have been Guthrie’s 100th birthday, it’s a good time to celebrate his impressive body of work, which in turn celebrates all of us — when he’s not calling a pox on cruel vigilantes, bankers who rob you with a fountain pen, and others who would oppress the people.
I realized that Guthrie had transformed from a dusty old counterculture outcast hero into a mainstream icon eight years ago when I was covering a campaign speech by President George W. Bush in Albuquerque. At the end of the rally there was canned music — upbeat, if not quite inspirational, instrumental versions of patriotic songs. And among these was “This Land Is Your Land” by Guthrie.
I couldn’t resist needling a Republican friend I saw there. “Do you realize they’re playing a song written by an admitted communist?” He looked at me like I was crazy.
But a lot of people take this stuff seriously. At least they used to.
According to the Roadside America website in an article about the Guthrie statue in the the town of Okemah, Oklahoma, where he was born, local folks “remembered him mostly as a socialist who wrote a regular column, `Woody Sez,’ for The Daily Worker — the newspaper of the American Communist Party.”
It’s true that there were lots of bitter feelings about Woody’s politics among conservative elements in the Sooner state. I remember visiting there in the mid-’70s when the idea of the Okemah statue was first being discussed. The Daily Oklahoman was frothing over the notion of building a memorial for a commie folksinger. As Roadside America notes, “It wasn’t until 1998, 31 years after his death — and after everyone who disliked him had also died — that the town erected a statue in his honor.”
So you can listen to the songs of Woody Guthrie these days without being labeled a dangerous subversive. And there’s lots to choose from.
Here are my Top 10 Guthrie covers.
1) “Do-Re-Mi” by Ry Cooder. Guthrie meant for this song to be good-natured and humorous, a warning to poor folks against being lured to California to find work only to be exploited and mistreated once they got there. But on his live album, Show Time!, Cooder, aided by Flaco Jiménez on accordion, combines this with the Mexican polka “Viva Sequin” to turn “Do-Re-Mi” into a fiesta.
2) “Vigilante Man” by Hindu Love Gods. The Love Gods was a one-off project by Warren Zevon, backed by members of R.E.M. in 1990. This is a straightforward folk-rock version led by Zevon’s ragged voice and Peter Buck conjuring up the music of both Luther Perkins and Ennio Morricone on guitar.
3) “I Ain’t Got a Home in This World Anymore” by Bruce Springsteen. This appears on a 1988 various-artists compilation called Folkways: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. It was just a few years before that when Springsteen’s manager turned him onto Joe Klein’s biography Woody Guthrie: A Life, which was instrumental in politicizing Springsteen. Springsteen also did a rocking version of “Vigilante Man” on this tribute album, but his mournful, acoustic version of “I Ain’t Got a Home” goes straight to the heart.
4) “Philadelphia Lawyer” by The Maddox Brothers & Rose. This is a tale of revenge — well, perhaps just Old West justice — about a cowboy who loses his sweetheart to a slick attorney from the East. I’ve got it on a collection called America’s Most Colorful Hillbilly Band Vol. 1. Rose Maddox would record it again as a bluegrass number a few decades later on a solo album, This Is Rose Maddox.
5) “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” by The Byrds. Guthrie wrote this song in 1948 after reading about a U.S. government plane deporting 28 people to Mexico. The plane had caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon in California and crashed, killing everyone on board. Guthrie was saddened by the tragedy and angered at the fact that the victims weren’t named. The Byrds did this song as a country waltz, powered by those trademark Byrds harmonies.
6) “Pretty Boy Floyd” by The Byrds. Again with the Byrds. In their early days they were known as devoted Dylan interpreters. But they also did well by Guthrie. Years before I’d ever heard this song, my Oklahoma grandmother used to tell me the story of the famous Robin Hood-style bank robber delivering a truckload of groceries to the poor in Oklahoma right before Christmas one year during the Depression. Most of the world, me included, first heard this tune, done as a bluegrass romp on the landmark 1968 country-rock album Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
7) “Hard Travelin’ ” by Simon Stokes. Guthrie sang this as a happy hobo tune. But Stokes, with his gruff voice and minor-key arrangement, makes a listener believe that he’s traveled every mile and barely survived the journey. Stokes sounds like a hobo who would rip out your spleen and throw it in the pot with his Mulligan stew. He sounds scary in the song even when he does a verse in a strange falsetto.
8) “Grand Coulee Dam” by Lonnie Donegan. This song celebrates a massive public-works project of the ’30s — an economic stimulus package on a scale we can’t even imagine these days. True story: in 1941 the Bonneville Power Administration in Portland, Oregon, hired Guthrie to write music for a film about the Columbia River and public power. This song, “Roll on Columbia” and several others came out of that arrangement. Skiffle King Donegan’s 1958 studio recording of this song is a spirited take that gets faster and faster as the song progresses.
9) “Dust Bowl Refugee” by James Talley. This song is from Talley’s excellent tribute album, Woody Guthrie and Songs of My Oklahoma Home, which was recorded in Santa Fe at Stepbridge Studios in the 1990s. This is one of Guthrie’s finest if not that famous Dust Bowl ballads, and Talley did it justice.
10) “This Land Is Your Your Land” by Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings. Guthrie wrote in response to Kate Smith’s “God Bless America,” which he thought was pompous. “This Land” has been de-fanged to the point that it’s no more controversial than a summer camp singalong. But Jones, the most significant soul singer to arise in the last 10 years or so, puts fire and defiance back into the tune.
* The Essential Early Years: 1949-1954 by June Carter. Most people think of this lady as Mrs. Johnny Cash. It's a shame that her early solo largely has been overlooked. This collection, (a bargain -- $5.99 for 27 songs) shows Little Junie was a funny, sexy singer and a hundred-proof hillbilly.
A handful of these tunes were on the June Carter Cash retrospective, Keep on the Sunny Side, that Sony Legacy put out a few years ago.
As I've said before, back in the period covered in this collection, Nashville apparently was trying to market June as a real hillbilly version of Dorothy Shay (“The Park Avenue Hillbilly”). This involved a lot of novelty material. But June was really good at it.
A few songs that were on Keep on the Sunny Side are here -- "Root Hog or Die," "No Swallerin' Place" for instance. "Knock Kneed Suzy" is low-tone hillbilly humor, (and thus I love it). And speaking of funny business, Homer & Jethro are all over the place here on songs like "Hucklebuck" and "I Said My Nightshirt and Put On My Prayers."
Meanwhile, she sings about the heartbreak of erectile dysfunction in the song "You Flopped When You Got Me Alone."
But not everything here is a novelty song. Songs like "Honey Look What You've Done," "Crocodile Tears" and "He Don't Love Me Anymore" are shoulda-been classic country weepers. A young Chet Atkins plays guitar on most tracks
* Lex Hives by The Hives.Many critics have been less than kind about this album. Granted, a lot of the tunes here have a certain classic-rock sheen. “Go Right Ahead” sounds like Electric Light Orchestra filtered through T Rex. “I Want More” might be an AC/DC sendup. And on the very first track, The Hives seem to put the whole album in the context of arena-rock knuckleheadedness with their minute-long tongue-in-cheek invocation “Come On!” Here, with overdubbed crowd cheers in the background, Almqvist chants, “Come on! Come on! Come on! ... Everybody, come on!”
Sound familiar? I wrote about this album in a recent Terrell's Tuneup. Read the whole thing HERE
But before you do, have a little consumer advice: There are two versions of this album on eMusic: The regular (linked above) and a deluxe edition. The deluxe costs $2 more and has two additional tracks. The catch is, those are only available when you download the entire deluxe edition. Also, you can't get them separately on Amazon or iTunes either. So if you want the songs "High School Shuffle" and "Insane," (and they are pretty good -- I've heard them on Spotify.) be sure to go deluxe.
* Metal Circusby Husker Du . This seven-song EP from 1983 is one of the few Husker Du works I'd never bought.
This is known as a transitional record, where Bob Mould, Grant Hart and Greg Norton began to move away from being just another Midwest hardcore band and started paying more attention to songwriting, melody, lyrics, all those good things -- without losing the fire and fury that propelled them in the first place.
Although I tend to gravitate to the Mould songs on most Husker albums, and the opening song, "Real World" is a fine Mould effort, as is the exhilarating "First of the Last Calls."
But the greatest song on Metal Circus is a Hart tune. "Diane" is a chilling first-person account based on the 1980 abduction and murder of a West Minneapolis waitress by serial killer Joseph Donald Ture. The song is written from the perspective of the killer (eight years before Nirvana would take the same approach with "Polly."
"Hey little girl, do you need a ride?/Well, I've got room in my wagon why don't you hop inside?" (In reality, witnesses heard Edwards scream and saw the abductor force her into his car.) "... We could lay in the weeds for a little while / I'll put your clothes in a nice, neat little pile "
I was a latecomer to Husker Du. They had broken up shortly before I bought that used CD of Flip Your Wig that made me a fan. Now I almost wish I'd have heard this nightmarish contemporary murder ballad before I heard all the great Husker albums that followed
* Gus Cannon Vol. 1 (1927-28). While writing my recent review of The South Memphis String Band'sOld Times There ...I wanted to hear Cannon's original recording of "Can You Blame the Colored Man," which Cannon recorded under the name of "Banjo Joe." Lo and behold, it was right here on eMusic on this fine Document Records collection.
Not only that, but there were five other Banjo Joe songs, which Cannon recorded before forming his quintessential jug band, Cannon's Jug Stompers. On these, which were Cannon's first recordings, he's accompanied by Blind Blake on guitar.
So I nabbed all those, plus a couple of Jug Stompers tracks I didn't already have ("Springdale Blues" and "Riley's Wagon")
Some of the Banjo Joe songs -- "Jonestown Blues" (no, notthat Jonestown!), "Madison Street Rag" and "My Money Never Runs Out") were later recorded by the Jug Stompers. The later versions sound fuller with prominent harmonica and, of course, jug.)
Kitty indeed was the rightful queen of country music. She died Monday from complications from a stroke. She was 92.
She's best known for her 1952 hit "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," written by J.D. Miller, probably is the greatest "answer song" in the history of music. It was a pointed reply to the Hank Thompson's "The Wild Side of Life."
But one of the most soulful country songs ever recorded was Kitty's "Making Believe." Kitty had a hit with it in the '50s. Emmylou Harris and Merle Haggard both did fine versions. But I also love how Social Distortion made it work as a punk-rock stomper.
Here's an obituary from the Los Angeles Times'Pop & Hiss blog. And below are videos of Kitty singing those two wonderful songs.
Sunday, July,
2012 KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M. 10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain
Time Host: Steve Terrell Webcasting! 101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrell(at)
ksfr.org
OPENING THEME: Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) by
The Hombres
Dyin' for It by Mudhoney
Baby Stardust by Thee Michelle Gun Elephant
Kelly Ride by The Mighties
Jiving Sister Fanny by The Rolling Stones
My Baby's Gone by The Scumbags
Sticky by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Don't Call Us, We'll Call You by Figures of Light
Crack Head Joe by Little Freddy King
Advanced Romance by Frank Zappa & The Mothers with Captain Beefheart
Three- Time Loser by 68 Comeback
Red Right Hand by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Canyons of Your Mind by The Bonzo Dog Band
Devil's Motorcycle by The Chocolate Watch Band
Mr. Trouble by Stan Ridgway
Pictures of Lily by The Hickoids
Sunrise (Turn On) by The Chesterfield Kungs
I Couldn't Sleep by Joey Ramone
Macho Grande by Joe "King" Carrasco
Omo Pupa by West African Highlife Band
Buzz Buzz Buzz by The Hollywood Flames
I'm Leaving it Up to You by Big Sandy with Dewey Terry
Down in Mississippi by James Luther Dickinson with The North Mississippi Allstars
Locked Down by Dr. John
Maria Has a Son by Kult
You and Me and The Bottle Makes Three Tonight by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis
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Friday, July 20, 2012 
