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[OM] Re: OT Speaking of ugly

Subject: [OM] Re: OT Speaking of ugly
From: "Joel Wilcox" <jfwilcox@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2007 23:14:44 -0600
It's taken me a while to find the reference.  I had thought it was in
Clinton Heylin's biography, but it's actually told by Dylan himself in
"Chronicles."

I messed up several facts as well.  Mrs. Guthrie was not at home when
Dylan visited the Guthrie home, which was probably the main reason
Dylan never saw the manuscripts.  Pp. 99-100:  "On one of my visits,
Woody had told me about some boxes of songs and poems that he had
written that had never been seen or set to melodies -- that they were
stored in the basement of his house in Coney Island and that I was
welcome to them."  He follows Woody's directions to his house, but his
wife Margie is not there, only a babysitter and the young Arlo
Guthrie, who didn't know anything about the manuscripts.  Dylan
writes, "Forty years later, these lyrics would fall in the hands of
Billy Bragg and the group Wilco and they would put melodies to them,
bring them to full life and record them.  It was all done under the
direction of Woody's daughter, Nora.  These performers probably
weren't even born when I had made the trip out to Brooklyn."

"Chronicles" is a delightful read, by the way.  It helps if you like
the album "Oh Mercy," since he devotes an entire chapter (of a mere
four) to the making of that album.

Joel W.

On 2/19/07, Walt Wayman <hiwayman@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> I never heard the Dylan story. If you say so, it probably happened.
>
> Billy Bragg's liner notes on "Mermaid Avenue": "Despite the fact his 
> recording career was more or less over by 1947, he carried on writing songs 
> until he became too ill to hold a pencil. The last years of his life were 
> spent in the Brooklyn State Hospital, and when he died in 1967, the tunes 
> that he had drempt up for these hundreds of unrecorded songs, tunes he had 
> carried in his head all his life, were lost forever.
>
> "Woody's daughter, Nora Guthrie, approached me in the spring of 1995 with the 
> idea of writing some new music to accompany these lost songs. She runs the 
> Woody Guthrie archive in New York City and offered me access to over a 
> thousand complete lyrics of her father's that are in her care, handwritten or 
> typed, often bearing the date and place where they were written, and 
> sometimes accompanied by an insight into the process at work..."
>
> And it goes on from there.
>
> Good album.
>
> Walt
>
> --
> "Anything more than 500 yards from
> the car just isn't photogenic." --
> Edward Weston
>
>  -------------- Original message ----------------------
> From: "Joel Wilcox" <jfwilcox@xxxxxxxxx>
> >
> > On 2/19/07, Walt Wayman <hiwayman@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > And I highly recommend the Billy Bragg album shown at the bottom.
> > >
> > > http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Way_Over_Yonder.htm
> > >
> > > Walt
> >
> > Did we have this conversation before?  I believe that these were songs
> > that Woody sent Bob Dylan to fetch out at Woody's home on Long Island.
> >  Guthrie was in the hospital at the time (about 1962) and Dylan had
> > been paying homage.  Dylan was turned away by Mrs. Guthrie, who said
> > she had no knowledge of any songs.
> >
> > Might have been for the best though.  I'd rather have "Masters of War"
> > and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" than a bunch of new Guthrie covers, if
> > it came to a choice.
> >
> > Joel W.

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