Did I say that Talking Woody Guthrie was my favourite among my Woody records? I forgot about this one. Maybe it hasn't got as many 'hits' on it. Maybe the sound quality isn't quite as good (all the 'cuts' are taken from the 1944/45 Moses Asch recordings; this record was originally released in 1968, and my copy is on Transatlantic, a UK imprint of RCA). But there are moments when you can imagine that what you're hearing is the original Gift of Song, preserved on tablets of stone, as dictated to the original Moses by the Lord himself.
Woody's own sleeve notes, excerpted from Born to Win
…for thirty minutes a day on Los Angeles radio station KFVD, [I kept] telling and singing tall and windy tales with a labor movement slant, oh, for two years. I got more than twenty thousand handwrote letters from folks in Canada down to Tia Juana — desert rat prospectors, seamen on the Pacific boat decks, snowy skiers, Reno divorcers, as well as all of the trade union local halls up and down the westerly coastline. This was really where the first little lights dawned on me of what a folk poem, a folk tale, a folk ballad, a folk tune really was. And my own original songs now have been on not just the three big radio dragnets, but I've been on most of their big and little programs in my flesh and on my fifteen albums of commercial records, both by the box and by the bulk. No. I've not got rich. I've made up scaddles and oodles of songs, ballads, about fires, floods, droughts, stabbings, rapings, killings, robbings, fistfights, gaming gamblers, riverboat rustlers, outlaws, inlaws, bad men, bad girls, wrecks of trains, cars, planes, ships, terrible accidents, political rally songs, songs of protest, trade union songs, ballads to tell you how racial hate's done got another good man and gone, sugarloaf jumps to tell you how pretty you dive and swim, to tell you how I love you, hate you, need you and can't stand you…
Check how he uses those lists to asset Universality and Justice. Well, every myth needs a little help.
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