Cynicism Is for Suckers

Notes on Woody Guthrie, hifi's biggie small, and rock drumming

Tim Riley

Jul 12, 2024

Article voiceover

1×

0:00

-25:29

Billy Bragg and Wilco, Mermaid Avenue — The Complete Collection, 2012

Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions, Billy Bragg & Wilco (Nonesuch, 2012)

You little bastard. How could you say in twelve verses what it took me an entire novel to write?

—John Steinbeck

Two years ago, this Woody Guthrie piece ran on his birthday (July 14, 1912) to boost awareness and reboot anti-fascist history. Given Biden’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” moment, Guthrie’s wisdom still consoles: beware cynicism, the right’s lethal stealth tactic. And lo, our first rerun…

IN THE EARLY 1990s, Nora Guthrie, the daughter of the famous songwriter, came across a shoebox full of her father’s letters. Leafing through his notes, she soon found more boxes and was quickly overwhelmed. “I had just discovered that my father had written more song lyrics than any of us could ever imagine. Over 3,000 when I finally did the count,” she wrote in her liner notes to Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions (Nonesuch). Suddenly, Guthrie’s legend began talking an entirely new language, saying things even his daughter never suspected. “I had just discovered that he had a bad crush on Ingrid Bergman and dreamed of getting her pregnant,” she continued, “that he felt sorry for Hanns Eisler, that he was a proud lush and a comfortable luster, that he believed in flying saucers, that he was homesick for California, that heaven knew who Joe DiMaggio was, let alone wrote a song about him, or that he once made out with a girl in a tree hollow when, as a kid, he bragged, ‘There ain’t nobody that can sing like me’.”

She blushed at reading her father’s intimate creative diaries. “There’s maybe... three people that had ever looked through these files and boxes of my dad’s stuff that had been sitting around for forty years,” she told an interviewer. But alongside that came the shock of the sheer volume of work Guthrie had left behind, which more than tripled his already prodigious output between 1939 and 1952 when he began to wither from Huntington’s disease.

Nora decided to seek out musicians to help extend all this new material. The leftist punk-rocker Billy Bragg had already been poking around the Smithsonian archives, chatting up archivist Jeff Place. Although British, Bragg appealed to Nora Guthrie’s counterintuitive impulses.

“One of the things I really liked about Billy was he didn’t come with a lot of baggage,” Nora explained. “And I don’t mean that in a critical sense, but he really didn’t know that much about Woody. Here we’re discovering lyrics about topics that were so un-Dust Bowl balladeer, un-Grand Coulee Dam, even un-folk song. So I wanted to work with someone who didn’t have a lot of history with Woody in one sense and didn’t have a lot of shoulds: what Woody should sound like, what Woody Guthrie should be like, what a Woody Guthrie album should be."

At first, Bragg simply assumed that anything by Guthrie had PROPERTY OF BOB DYLAN stamped on it. But Nora persuaded him that Guthrie’s legacy deserved a new generation of artists and listeners. Her approach had more than a dash of inspiration: What could be more predictable than Dylan setting Guthrie’s words? [continued…]

elsewhere

The Woody Guthrie Center and Archives

Woody Guthrie and Songs of my Oklahomah Home, by James Talley (Cimarron, 2000)

A Tribute to Woody Guthrie, Various Artists (Warner, 1969/1976)

Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913, By Daniel Wolff (Harper, 2018)

gear

speaker, DAC, headphones — The Brane X (dreadfully named), Spectra's DAC, B&W cans

The Brane X

At Austin’s SXSW conference last spring I entered a trade floor booth for a speaker demo and felt my ears go kaboom. The sound in that tent defied physics, with a force way too robust for a speaker that size. They had some line about technology, I asked for more specifics: air pressure, the guy said. Sure enough at startup it makes a wheezing noise, like a whale preparing to toot. But with either wifi or bluetooth connection, your test track of choice (”Come Together,” or “Shoot Out the Lights”) delivers on the bottom end like your crazy uncle’s basement. Like double-take crazy. And outdoors you finally get the ballast you need. No dropouts. Long battery. And it rivals my Ultimate Ears Hyperboom (twice the size) for depth, torque, and warmth. (Ignore that model name’s phony, unironic swipe at tw*tter.)

experts agree, press page bulges