Done: The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done

Woody Gurthrie: The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done
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I’m staying in the political song area again, but this time something more overt, Woody Guthrie’s “The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done.” The song takes the form of recollections of an “historical bum,” present at great moments in human history (real or imagined), sort of like a folk song version of Zelig. 

It turns out that Guthrie borrowed the idea from earlier songwriters—the template (and even some of the lyrics) come from an 1894 song called “I’m A Highly Educated Man,” a version called “When Abraham And Isaac Rushed The Can,” was recorded in 1924 by “Fiddlin’ John Carson,” Grand Old Opry stars Uncle Dave Macon, Charlie Poole and Vernon Dalhart each did a version called “I’m The Man Who Ride The Mule Around The World,” (as has Loudon Wainwright III), and it has been recorded by many others, including Elvis Presley (in 1970), as “I Was Born About Ten Thousand Years Ago.” (And if you look hard, you might be able to find a version of the song by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter from 1961, before the Grateful Dead was formed). 

Guthrie took the bones of the song and grafted on to it the populist, pro-labor, probably small-c communist politics that he espoused (and yes, I know that the evidence shows that Guthrie was probably a member of the Communist Party at some points, but also that he really wasn’t a “Party” kind of guy.) So, he’s present at the creation, worked in the Garden of Eden (as a member of the apple pickers union), worked on the Pyramids and the Tower of Babel, fought in battles, beat Romans, Turks, and other great powers, helped win the American Revolution and the Civil War before moving on to the issue that was directly on Guthrie’s mind in 1944, when the song was recorded: World War II. 

There was a man across the ocean, I guess you knew him well,
His name was Adolf Hitler, goddam his soul to hell;
We kicked him in the panzers and put him on the run,
And that was about the biggest thing that man has ever done. 

There's warehouse guys and teamsters and guys that skin the cats
Guys that run my steel mill, my furnace and my blast
We'll stop the Axis rattlesnakes and thieves of old Nippon
And that will be the biggest thing that man has ever done.

I know that the card that I used as an image indicates that it was recorded in 1942, and it may well have been—the record is vague—but the version above was probably from 1944, which makes sense, because by then, Hitler was more “on the run” than he would have been in 1942. But it is clear that Guthrie is also giving credit for winning the war to the workers, as well as the soldiers. 

Guthrie ends this version of the song (and if you’re interested, here’s a set of lyrics that has many more, and different verses, but I haven’t been able to find a recording of this version): 

Well I better quit my talking 'cause I told you all I know
But please remember pardner wherever you may go
The world is digging Hitler's grave and when the job is done
This'll be the biggest thing that man has ever done. 

And, in 1944, that probably was right (and it still might be right, today.) 

I’ll confess that the first time I heard this song, it was being sung by Dan Bern, and I didn’t know that it was a Woody Guthrie song until I did a little poking around. Bern, a family favorite who I’ve written about a few times, and seen even more times, is a folksinger in the Guthrie tradition, mixing politics with nonpolitical songs (and, like Guthrie, writing children’s songs and Hanukkah music). Bern released his version in 2004, and it included a few of the verses from the longer version linked to above (modified a bit). But he also updated it a little, adding a verse about the moon landing, and then the verse that probably was the impetus for the release: 

There's one big thing we must do when shove comes to push
Defeat the so-called President by the name of Bush
Vote early and vote often, November 2 not 1
And that will be the biggest thing Man has ever done
That'll be the biggest thing Man has ever done 

Now, that didn’t work, sadly, but it is nice to know that the Guthrie tradition of political songwriting carries on (and yes, Bern has written anti-Trump songs).  

Dan Bern: The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done
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No Thanks: Dead or Alive

 

purchase [ Woody's version  ]

<No, thanks> or <no thanks>. There is a difference. Syntax/punctuation matters.

Actually, I think this SMM theme is more about <no Thanksgiving> and other joys denied us in 2020. Yes, the holiday will come and go, but we are being told not to invite the whole family. I'm usually the host, but if I were invited, I would say "No, thanks. Not this year."

"No, thanks" leads me to think of all sorts of issues that have poppped up in 2020: Another 4 years? Classes in a room with 20 X 14 year olds? Sharing my office with a colleague who has had COVID? Riding a service bus to work with 20 others? No, thanks no thanks to our incompetent "leadership".

Then consider the other version: I have recieved no thanks for my actions related to many of the above. At this point I am expected to be thankful for still being alive?

That aside, let's focus on the music that drills down into the theme. Above Woody, then here his son Arlo: <Dead or Alive>. How appropriate!

   the sherrif wants me dead or alive ... no thanks

Arlo sounds a lot better than his old man, but that may be related to recording technologies as much as the way things evolve over time.

I think it's fair to say that Woody Guthrie was re-working a "traditional African-American work song", a tune called <Poor Lazarus>, but the chronology is a bit muddy as far as I could discover.

James Carter is credited as the author of Poor Lazarus, but the Alan Lomax recording from the state pen is dated 1959. setlist.fm lists the first Woody Guthrie performance of <Dead or Alive> recording as dated 1949. 

Poor Lazarus and Dead or Alive are pretty much the same story and I would be inclined to leave the provenance as traditional. The Guthrie legacy is managed by grandchild anna canoni and there is an informative dialog here.

The Alan Lomax/James Carter story includes this information.

Other versions based on the original: 

There's a version by Lonnie Donegan (a Brit I've never heard about, but Wikipedia calls the "King of Skiffle")

Bob Dylan made his reverence for Woody Guthrie clear: his song called <Song to Woody> and his version of <Dead or Alive>:

LEFTOVERS: RED, YELLOW OR ORANGE/RED, YELLOW AND ORANGE

I initially thought I wouldn't make it to this party, my macbook's hard disk seeming to be in dire need of  palliative care, the icing on a week of disappointments. Yup, just as you guys are belatedly getting around to impeaching your bleach blond furball, we have elected ours back in, with a steaming majority. Steaming as in, well, you know. So Brexit has been "done" and, pending 5 or 6 years of expensive, extensive wrangling with Europe, our garage sale of goodies will be up for grabs. It is what it is, and chlorinated chicken can't be all bad.

In the UK, our politics is gauged by colour. Red is Labour, a sort of rather more socialist Democrat party, not communist by any means, if still a shade by far too goddam lefty pinko for your Republicans. They were trashed on friday. Orange is the colour of the traditional 3rd party in the usual two horse race we run here, the Liberals, or, as they re-badged some time back, the Liberal Democrats. They came, traditionally, 3rd. Or rather, 3rd in England, somewhat swamped by Scotland's resplendent bright yellow party, the Scottish Nationalists, dominant party in that aspirational stand alone nation for 3 elections now. And counting. And, much as I am despairing the blue tide of the Conservative party in England, more right wing than they have ever been, who have triumphed and some, I doff my bonnet to the SNP. If and when, my scottish parentage may offer me the safety net of a scottish passport, when and if ever should become a reality.

Billy Bragg is the nearest thing we have to a Woody Guthrie. (OK that's harsh on Ewan MacColl and other musical firebrands, but, in terms of success, sales, and ubiquity, Bragg has a greater claim to the accolade, in my humble.) I can't imagine he will have been raising any glasses in good cheer this weekend, if similarly, like me, probably downing some. Of course, he is known in the US, having been chosen by Nora Guthrie to add music to the reams of songs found within her father's legacy, she appreciating their shared stance about fighting (aka singing) for the undertrodden and overlooked. The song chosen would be as much at home in the US as UK; it is an american song after all. All feeling today, mind, as equivalently out of step.

I'm spoilt for choice in looking for something evocative enough for the SNP; music of the scottish tradition is within an equivalent renaissance now as was irish in the 1970's and 80's. In my cups, sentiment is all, and so it is the Battlefield Band to whom I turn, with this tear stained version of the old Charlie Rich standard. I'm not so naive to believe in the the shortbread tin school of scottish thought, as so savagely laid into by Dick Gaughan, another firebrand politico, but you never know.
I think the UK will dissect in the near future, a new referendum demanded by the SNP of the new government, allowing the scots their right to an independent future, if so sought. This time it will be closer. Meanwhile, in Northern Island, the Unionists (stay with UK) are for the first time in a minority with relation to the Nationalists (join the rest of Ireland).......

I was never that much into the Liberals, feeling them often more material for a protest vote or for tactical voting. Sure, they have had some good ideas in their manifestos, and some fascinating characters in their ranks, but their time has rarely seemed right. As for a song with an appropriate link, it is back north I go. The scottish northern isles, Orkney and Shetland, with their respective scatter of tiny islands and far-flung communities, have long been staunchly electing Liberal members of parliament. Too far north to ever consider themselves Scots, I think this is why they sleight the Nationalists, a greater affinity to the Vikings and Scandinavia than to other britons, whether scottish, english, welsh or irish. The song has no political axe, but is as good a place as any to introduce Orcadian songwriter Erland Cooper to these pages, one third of Magnetic North and the Erland of the earlier Erland and the Carnival. He describes the music of Magnetic North as psychogeography. And that's fine by me.

Here!

POWER: DIRTY OLD TOWN

Most of us when we think about power, we look at the outcome: heat, light, government. Let's now look briefly at the flip and the mess left behind. With tiny Greta now bestriding the world, I think it only fair. The main thing the industrial revolution showed us was soot. And this hit home hard here in UK, arguably the first home for the coal fires of industry, and certainly first to take it for granted.

Ewan MacColl

Ewan MacColl is a name of some importance in the world of folk music. I'll bet you know at least one of his songs, even if it is just this one. A complicated and seemingly difficult man, he was born James Henry Miller, in Salford, near Manchester in England. Of scottish stock, his father was a passionate trade unionist who had been drummed out of Scotland for his firebrand workplace politicking, these views etched deep into MacColl's psyche. Looking for work at the time of the great depression, street singing provided as much income as early jobs. A member of the Young Communist League from his teens, agit-prop theatre became his home up to, during and after the war, writing,  directing and acting. A brief spell in the army ended in either his deserting or being dismissed, depending on whose story you heard, but it seems his political persuasions had brought him to the attentions of the power that be.

Industrial Landscape: L.S.Lowry, 1955

Whilst the theatre provided his home and most of his activity and income, it is his music that has had greater posterity. Increasingly drawn to folk music in the 1950s, he was instrumental in the success of the still extant record label, Topic, releasing a slew of albums for them over the next few decades. And this was not folk as in trad.arr., old songs sung sweet, these were his own songs, fiercely opinionated and anti-establishment, if in the folk tradition. Think Woody Guthrie. Or, perhaps even, Billy Bragg. As well as offering a pointer to more of his music, here is a link to something I wrote a year or two back, which offers also some greater insight on the man.

'Dirty Old Town' is no call to arms, being one of the love songs he was more than capable of writing. But the words also reflect, if casually, the reality of most northern UK cities, the fumes and stench of pollution providing the backdrop to lives stunted thereby. Yes, the situation is better now, some might say as a result of knowledge and changes of practice. Or is it merely by the fact that the factories have all closed?

The song has had a fair few covers over the years. Here are a few of my favourites. I think it no surprise that both the Pogues and the Specials should find something of resonance in the song, their experiences, disaffected youth in post-punk London and Coventry perhaps not that changed from MacColls dirty old Salford of two decades earlier. Quite how or why LaVette chose the song remains uncertain, but the first few comments under the youtube clip suggest a recognition within any post industrial town anywhere,

The Pogues

The Specials

Bettye Lavette

Salford
London
Coventry
Detroit

Arlo: Low & Lonely

Rick Robbins: Low & Lonely
[purchase]

You know how in “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” Arlo sings that it:

all started two Thanksgivings ago, was on - two years ago on Thanksgiving, when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the Restaurant?

The friend at issue, an unindicted co-conspirator in the criminal garbage dump, was named Rick Robbins. They had been friends since the early 1960s, when they both attended the Stockbridge School, where the librarian was a woman named Alice Brock. That Alice. At the Stockbridge School, Robbins was exposed to American music from Bessie Smith to Arlo’s dad, to current stars such as Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.  He's the guy on the left.

In 1965, Robbins and Guthrie set off on the road to discover music and themselves, and spent a lot of time singing and playing folk music and the blues. But rather than opt for the life of a professional musician, Robbins settled down to build houses and learn architectural design.

Fast forward to 1995, when Robbins was trading construction work at a music studio for recording time to create a record of some songs for his family.  Rory Block, the blues guitarist and singer (who I saw the other day, opening for Richard Thompson), happened to hear him playing, added some vocals, and persuaded Robbins to release an album. Block produced the album, Walking Down The Line, which also features Ramblin' Jack Elliott, John Sebastian, Eric Weissberg, and Larry Campbell, as well as old buddy Arlo. Not bad for an unknown carpenter/folk singer, right?

Robbins and Guthrie perform a fun, jaunty version of “Low & Lonely,” a song written by “the father of the Nashville music business,” Fred Rose, who wrote, under his own name, and as “Floyd Jenkins,” a number of legendary songs including "'Deed I Do" and "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” He’s the “Rose” in the name of famed music publishing firm Acuff-Rose.

“Low & Lonely” was originally released in 1942 by Rose’s partner, Roy Acuff and His Smoky Mountain Boys, and has been covered a few other times, notably by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, one of Robbins’ main mentors and influences, Hank Williams, and George Jones, who recorded the song with Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys.

Robbins has released two more albums of music, most recently an album of original songs, in 2006.

Prison: Alan Lomax, Prison recordings, circa 1947-1948

Purchase: Prison Songs, Vol. 1: Murderous Home

For people that know the work of Alan Lomax, begun in 1946 as ‘field recordings’, the history, and thus the essentiality, of the work is equal to the power of the voices, styles, stories and history he captured. Born in 1915, Lomax spent almost 60 years continuing the work of his equally famous father, John, in recording literal and actual history, as understood through the guise of folk music.  Armed with various recording devices, including an automatic disk recorder, family Lomax traveled the United States and captured the unique songs and sounds and voices—some of which no longer exist—that displayed the entirety of the unique American ethnography of the people that came from so many places to call this land home. 

From Louisiana (Cajun music) to the Midwest and the multi-ethnic immigrant European communities, and especially the American South, from the Mississippi Delta to the Appalachian Mountains—the Lomaxs were able to create an archive that has become a uniquely personal, sociological and historical atlas of living art and expression.  And thus forever preserve various the kind of lives, customs and traditions that would have faded and been forever lost.

Historically, there is no greater sense of touching history than what comes from a tangible connection and the Lomax family were somewhat magician-like in the way they documented lives and the artistic fiber that made so many people who they were, at an ethnic and cultural level, to be sure, but also in what they were beyond their cultural identifiers. To record someone signing, reciting a poem, telling you the story of their life: that is capturing the emotional soul of a being and in their art, their story can be truly understood, without needing analysis or dissection. Art lays bare what is inside someone, and through voice, the strands of one’s emotional DNA are clear. What Alan and John Lomax did was preserve, yes, but they were also capturing history in a way that was never possible before.

Alan Lomax was a great proponent of what he termed “cultural equity" and promoted a movement called “One World.” Today, this would be termed more familiarly as multiculturalism.  What he was after was showing how a shared cultural identity, in all its various forms, was what bound us together, and that our differences did not divide us—it was just the opposite. There are two statements Lomax made in defense of his world view that I feel I have to share. He said both, “The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice,” and, "Folklore can show us that this dream is age-old and common to all mankind. It asks that we recognize the cultural rights of weaker peoples in sharing this dream. And it can make their adjustment to a world society an easier and more creative process. The stuff of folklore—the orally transmitted wisdom, art and music of the people can provide ten thousand bridges across which men of all nations may stride to say, “You are my brother.” [1]

IInterestingly, the FBI investigated Alan Lomax repeatedly for many years though no charges were ever filed against him. What were the Feds looking for on a folklorist armed with a pen and recording equipment? Take a guess…We are talking J. Edgar Hoover’s America, after all…but, I don’t want to go into politics.

You might know that the Lomaxs were the first to put such luminaries as Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Honeyboy Edwards, and Woody Guthrie to tape. The debt we owe to the Lomax family can’t be understated and the Smithsonian’s Folkways label and the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center, make it possible for all the myriad sounds can still be heard, studied and appreciated. ( A note for the historians among us: The Lomaxs traveled much farther afield than the US, and their history is just as fascinating as what they were able to preserve. But for our purposes, we are going to focus on one small portion and geographical region of their body of work.)

Of particular interest to me, and apropos of our theme this round, are the recordings that were captured in the American South, particularly Mississippi in 1947 and 1948. Known as the prison recordings, I can think of no music I’ve ever heard more haunting and visceral. Southern Penitentiaries were often forced labor work camps, and according the Association for Cultural Equality, “Southern agricultural penitentiaries were in many respects replicas of nineteenth-century plantations, where groups of slaves did arduous work by hand, supervised by white men with guns and constant threat of awful physical punishment. It is hardly surprising that the music of plantation culture — the work songs — went to the prisons as well.”  [2]

Drawing on the tradition of work songs sung in the field by slaves on the plantations, work songs in prisons carried much the same function of rhythm and spoke to the same sort of misery and desperation. Meant to help keep time in tandem working gangs, the songs have an undeniable rhythm and a raw, but beautiful cadence. But there is a palpable sense of anguish and misery that cuts through the acapella chorus, a choir of miserable souls bound to some duty, but somehow transcending the despair through the lifting of their voices. Hammer falls, wood cutting, tie-tamping—the sound of tools sinking into wood and striking the earth provide an imperfect rhythm track, but one that is equal ghost to the pained, drawn and anguished vocals.

The Lomaxs made a multitude of these prison recordings at the Parchman Farm, part of the Mississippi State Penitentiary system, and the liner notes to these recordings add to the haunted nature of the songs. The names of the inmates read like a gallery of souls from Dante’s Inferno, which, while it is an oft-used metaphor, seems fitting. One wonders about those men: what had they done to end up there, how long did they last? Dig deeply into the archives and you can listen to some of the non-musical tracks that were recorded, where the inmates talk about just that: what put them in the klink, what they planned on doing once they got out. It’s an amazing piece of preservation, but the songs themselves speak volumes that documentary interviews cannot. The rhythms, the stories the signers tell, are as vivid a portrait of pain and regret as you’ll ever hear. There is something vital in preserving even the saddest, most miserable of human experiences. I spoke of empathy in my previous post, but as an abstract of being invited into a fictional portrayal of a life we’re happy not to have for our own. But, in the prison recordings, there is no hiding from the reality. The longing, the anger, the prayers for release are unadorned by visuals or the writer’s syntactical flourishes. What you hear on these tapes is true, and therefore impossible to ignore for the spirit it carries. Pleas for release, for a woman left behind to remain true, for someone to believe their professed innocence—all these themes and more can be found in the songs, but knowing there is very little “performance” behind the words; the signers are being truthful in the only way that a man behind bars can express his plight in true terms.

With so many powerful songs to choose from, it’s hard to pick one or two that most capture the essential nature of the work. But, two of the more powerful tracks that have always stuck with me are “Early in the Morning” and “Rosie.”

“Early in the Morning” was sung by four inmate at the Parchman Farm in 1947. The palpable pain of the lead vocalist, credited as Tangle Eye, strikes an intense, material counter to the hollow thunking rhythm track which is actually the inmates’ axes striking wood. The lyrics are more about the rhythm than about making meaning. Though there is a bit of humor in what is being said, the lyrics cover traditional subjects that might accompany the experience of a man forced to work, forcibly taken far from home: complaints about having to get up early in the morning, admonishing his woman not to believe stories some other man might be her, and how he’s counting on her to remain faithful. That prayerful begging to keep a promise and remain true is one that can be found throughout these recordings and in “Early in the Morning”, we get a strange bit of juxtaposition, between the work and the woman:

Well-rocks ’n gravel make -a

Make a solid road

It takes a good lookin woman to make a

To make a good lookin whore[3]

Regardless of who he is singing to, Tangle Eye’s voice is fragile as a cracked vase and the axes striking wood, or perhaps it’s hoes striking dirt, bring to mind the desperation of the nearly dead. Or the kind of sadness that makes one wish for that specific release.

The other track I want to highlight is called “Rosie.” “Rosie” resonates with me as it was one of the first selections I heard from the Lomax archive. So, there is that sense of nostalgia, coupled with the power of how a song can muscle its way in and sink into your conscious, thus becoming part of your deeper understanding of music, the kind not easily described in terms that make sense of the feeling.  “Rosie” is a sad song, and a simple one in its sentiment:  be true while I’m away. It’s a classic call and response, the lead singer calling: “Be my woman, gal—“ and the rest of his gang answering back, “—I’ll be your man!” the lead vocal reminds Rosie to “Stick to the promise, gal, that—“ / “—you made me.” And that promise is not marry to “til I go free!”  But, by the end, we have an understanding of what worries the convict most, while his love is out there free and he’s locked away:

Call: "When she walks she reels and-"
Response: "-rocks behind."
Call: "Ain't that enough to worry-"
Response: "-[a] convict's mind."[4]

“Rosie” has a lighter tone than many of the songs in the prison collections, and I’ve heard renditions where Rosie is a young woman who sashays temptingly just beyond the gate, but ever out of the prisoners reach and thus as much a torment as she is a beauty. She might even have made some promises that to a desperate man might mean more than she bargained for. One of the interesting things I read while researching Lomax’s notes was the strange setup of many of these labor camps: "These recordings were made in 1947 in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. The singers were all Negro prisoners, who, according to the practice of Mississippi, were serving out their time by working on a huge state cotton plantation in the fertile Yazoo Delta. Only a few strands of wire separated the prison from adjoining plantations. Only the sight of an occasional armed guard or a barred window in one of the frame dormitories made one realize that this was a prison. The land produced the same crop; there was the same work for the Negroes to do on both sides of the fence. And there was no Delta Negro who was not aware of how easy it was for him to find himself on the wrong side of those few strands of barbed wire...”[5] Being so close to civilization, yet inexorably separated from it, had to be its own explicit kind of torture.

And, regarding that unique sound of the rhythm, and why the prisoners could sing such complex tunes wile working, I found this: “Songs like "Rosie" not only coordinated the dangerous teamwork of several men chopping trees but also made the workers more productive and helped the time pass. As with slave songs, the work songs also helped prisoners give vent to intense pent-up feelings, whether the words were specifically about that or not. Such singing and chanting can also ease the spirit, bring harmony to the group, and can even bring some pleasure to the moment. [6]

The prison recordings have been collected and released in many collections, and the Smithsonian’s Folk Ways releases are a good place to start. You can find a few collections in the Spotify library, as well. To read more about what went into these recordings, who you are hearing, the when and the where, so to speak, there is a wealth of information on the web, but culturalequity.org is an invaluable resource. The site puts the history into a fascinating perspective.

I’ll end with what I touched on earlier: recordings like these, and the rest of the Lomax archives are beyond music, for listening’s sake. Preserving the voices, and thus the experience, of those minority segments of society, either due to simple numbers, marginalization, or poor choices that land one in jail, is essential to understanding who we are as a collective. That sense of collective humanity is one our modern world’s great failings: the lack of recognizing it, in particular. Hearing another’s voice, and the experiences behind that voice, reminds us of the essential sense that we are more connected than we are separate. And when we forget that we really are more similar than different, we tend to forget that first and foremost, we are on this earth to treat each other well. Music, of all the arts, can remind us of this in the most profound ways.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Lomax#Cultural_equity

[2] http://research.culturalequity.org/get-audio-ix.do?ix=session&id=PR47&idType=abbrev&sortBy=abc

[3] https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Alan-Lomax/Early in the morning

[4] https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Alan-Lomax/Rosie

[5] http://pancocojams.blogspot.com.tr/2014/06/early-in-morning-prison-work-song-1947.html

[6] http://pancocojams.blogspot.com.tr/2015/05/rosie-african-american-prison-work-song.html