Note of Hope: A Celebration of Woody Guthrie

"There's a feeling in music," Pete Seeger says toward the end of this disc. "It carries you back down the road you have traveled and makes you travel it again; or it takes you back down the road somebody else has come and you can look out across the world from the hill they are standing on." No better summation of Woody Guthrie's particular craft has likely ever been stated. That Guthrie's music and stories have influenced generations of artists is hardly news. On Note of Hope, a dozen artists come together to pay tribute to his definitive influence on American folk music.

Woody Guthrie was born in Oklahoma in 1912, just after it became a state. You can imagine, almost, what the small town of Okemah must have looked like back then – steeped in Native American tradition, isolated, far off…Okemah was incorporated less than a decade before Guthrie's birth. As a teenager, he moved to Texas then, later, to southern California. He spent some time in the Pacific Northwest writing songs for the Department of the Interior about the Columbia River. Guthrie even lived in Florida briefly. But, it was New York City where he would live out his later days, tossed in the throes of Huntington's disease.

I bring all this up because Woody Guthrie's music was very much a product of the places from whence he came. Tracing his career, you can hear the oppressive billowing of the dust bowl, the Hollywood, the rolling of the Columbia River and the rhythmic hammering of the men working on the dams, the railroads, their picking and cutting of crops along the railroad lines. Later in his life and career, you could even begin to hear the spastic sputtering of the city – the raunchiness, the daring, the cacophony of Manhattan.

This last part was carried on and magnified by his protégé Bob Dylan, of course, but has persisted in the way Guthrie’s legacy has draped itself over the likes of more contemporary singer-songwriters like Ani DiFranco, Tom Morello, Nellie McKay, Michael Franti, and others.

Note of Hope presents twelve tracks paying tribute to the great folksinger, including an instrumental opener by Van Dyke Parks, which is a cinematic-sounding folk piece featuring dulcimer, accordion, harmonica, and other folk instruments. It’s mostly an imaginative piece, but gives way to a few lines of melody from one of Guthrie’s most famous topical songs – "Pastures of Plenty."

The disc also includes a number of Guthrie’s stories and musings, recited by the likes of Studs Terkel, Ani DiFranco, Chris Whitley, and Pete Seeger. These story breaks are, at times, more like journal entries – observations or a toying with words. Where Guthrie’s own songs stuck to simple storytelling, these excerpts puff a bit more toward poetry.

DiFranco’s selection, specifically, is a bit more cryptic – exploring the various ways humans use their voices, the languages we speak – the way in which there is a language of service and a language of entitlement. Guthrie spends the poem (or whatever you choose to call it) searching for the language which speaks to him. He cannot find it in film or through the various avenues of mainstream media. He finds it only in the ways individuals communicate directly with one another. The moral, of course, being one about individual empowerment – about using one’s own voice in any context in order to balance the language of commerce and consumerism.

But, it’s Seeger (another protégé, of sorts) whose story seems to best characterize the spirit of this particular tribute. In fact, it so perfectly summarizes Guthrie’s influence and appeal, it should probably have gone last on the track listing.

Seeger’s voice toward the end of the disc carries you up a hill to look out over the century which has passed since Guthrie’s birth. It’s been a century of wars and revolutions – one which has seen the rising wealth of the American upper class, and has swung the pendulum past the Great Depression to an era of relative economic comfort, and back again. The century since Guthrie’s birth has seen generations of activists achieving things like women's suffrage, labor laws, black civil rights, an unprecedented environmental movement, and other things of which Woody Guthrie – during his short life – was an advocate.

That Woody Guthrie’s 100th birthday will come during a year when we’re all trying to decide who will be our next president – during a time when the economy is faltering and jobs are hard to come by – seems like a sick sort of coincidence. But, that a recording like this should also come now, can be a fierce reminder of our place in it all; can be a reminder of what our language is, of how our voices can be used. After all, "Music," Seeger recites, "is a tone of voice - a sound life uses to keep the living alive."