Acoustic Americana Music Guide, July 11 SPECIAL POST

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Tied to the Tracks
ACOUSTIC AMERICANA
MUSIC GUIDE
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JULY 11 special post
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“THE BALLAD OF TOM JOAD: WOODY GUTHRIE AND THE GRAPES OF WRATH” performed by ROSS ALTMAN, is Sunday in Long Beach, CA…
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A generic listing for the “SASS!” series appears in the current edition of the Acoustic Americana Music Guide. Here are the details of a remarkable show:
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Sun, July 12; a “SHOW-OF-THE-WEEK” pick:
7 pm “THE BALLAD OF TOM JOAD: WOODY GUTHRIE AND THE GRAPES OF WRATH” performed by ROSS ALTMAN is today’s offering in the The Sunday Adult Storytelling Series - SASS! at The Found Theatre, 599 Long Beach Bl, Long Beach 90802. (Free parking across the street in the CVS parking lot.) SASS! continues its 3rd season at the Found Theater with this show. More at www.foundtheatre.org.
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Storyteller, folk singer and songwriter, Ross Altman, joins John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath with Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads into a solo evening of song and story. “The Ballad of Tom Joad” combines humor, hard times and hope.
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Al Martinez of the L.A. Times wrote of Ross's performance of Guthrie's anthem, “This Land Is Your Land,” that "When everyone sang with him about America, they were singing to one another, not just about mountains and rivers but about freedom and goodwill."
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Ross Altman writes of this show, “I performed it all over town at public libraries, and up and down the state, from San Diego to Sunnyvale, from Needles, where the fictional Joad family first crossed the border into California, to Salinas, where their real-life creator, John Steinbeck, was born in 1902.
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“To celebrate the Steinbeck Centennial the California Council for the Humanities (based in San Francisco) and the California Center for the Book (based at UCLA) joined forces to create the Grapes of Wrath Reading Initiative, sponsoring programs at 142 California public libraries to celebrate the novel that helped define the Dust Bowl. I got involved as a guest scholar, thinking I would do a few shows of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads and call it a day.
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“Then I recalled that I had directed a Reader’s Theatre production of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ back when I was a college professor, and I dug out the 20 page script I had adapted from the novel for my students to perform at speech festivals in Illinois. The script began and ended with Woody’s song, ‘The Ballad of Tom Joad,’ which he wrote so that the folks back in Oklahoma who didn’t have a dollar to buy the book or even an extra quarter to see the movie wouldn’t miss out on what Preacher Casy said. I decided to paint myself into a corner and combine the two, Steinbeck’s ‘poetry of folks talking,’ with Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads, recorded for RCA Victor on April 26, 1940. They were re-released in 1977 on RCA’s Legendary Performer’s series, the same series that contains Elvis Presley. They are still in print on CD (1995).
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“In one of ‘Woody Sez’ columns for the ‘Daily Worker’ in 1940, he described the album this way: ‘The songs are liberal as the dickens and as progressive as the angels…they came out of the hearts and mouths of the Okies. On no occasion have I referred to myself as either an entertainer or a singer and I’d better not start now…If I’m most proud of anything…(it’s) the fact that I seem to have been born a shade pink, and didn’t have to read too many books to become a proletariat, and you can guess that when you hear the records…What I’m glad to see is working folks’ songs getting so popular. I’m sure Victor never did a more radical album.’
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“I called my program ‘The Ballad of Tom Joad: Woody Guthrie and The Grapes of Wrath.’ Libraries came a knocking and before I knew it I had 30 bookings, all in October (the month the grant to the libraries was written for). The hardest part was memorizing the entire prose script, into which I wove Woody’s songs. What a short, strange trip it’s been: singing for Woody’s audience out in the hinterlands, where invariably I meet some folks who have family stories of coming here during the Dust Bowl. One granddaughter of a Dust Bowl refugee gave me a copy of his unpublished autobiography, a real treasure of firsthand experience written so his children and grandchildren would know where they came from.
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“It’s one thing to sing Woody’s songs at a folk music club, where they feel as comfortable as an old pair of shoes—quite another to see the shock of recognition on the faces and in the eyes of people whose distant stories he told, but for whom he was just another famous name. When these plain, down-to earth Midwesterners in towns like Montebello, Valencia, Downey and Palmdale hear his Dust Bowl Ballads as if they were being sung for the first time I realize what astonishing works of art they are. They are time capsules of living, breathing history, and still retain their power to make people laugh and be moved to tears.
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“These performances remind me why I became a folk singer in the first place—to carry it on, to make the dead past a part of the living present, and to share the treasures of some of America’s most distinctive voices with people who may not be folk music fans, but who definitely are the folk.
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“I’ve also done this program for groups of high school students and a modified version for elementary schoolchildren. I thought their musical tastes would be so far removed from mine that it would be hard to make a connection. On the contrary, they immediately and intuitively understood Woody’s sense of alienation, his role as an outsider looking in, his displaced refugee status, and his refusal to give up in the face of enormous adversity. Woody speaks to pimply-faced teens as surely as to grizzled old folks. I open my show with Woody’s well-known words defining what he stood for as an artist: ‘I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose, bound to lose, because you are either too young or too old, or too fat or too slim, or too ugly or too this or too that…I’m out to fight those kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.’
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“What a thrill it is to be able to bring Woody to new audiences—both in age and locale—and to see in their excitement and appreciation the same feelings I had when I first fell in love with these songs forty years ago.
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“Call it a second honeymoon—for a great novel and a great body of song. As Preacher Casy said, ‘Maybe a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but just a piece of a great big soul.’
He spoke to Woody, and he speaks to me.
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“Someday, when you see a little notice in the paper that says, ‘The Ballad of Tom Joad,’ performed by yours truly, remember this essay, and come by and say hello—to Woody, John and me.”
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That “someday” can be this Sunday in Long Beach. Reservations, 562-433-3363. Tix $10.
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Read the FULL EDITION of the “Tied to the Tracks” ACOUSTIC AMERICANA MUSIC GUIDE with all the events of July 10 through 15, at
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http://acousticamericana.blogspot.com/2009/07/acoustic-americana-music-guide-july-10.html
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In it, you’ll find details of our other weekend “SHOW-OF-THE-WEEK” picks:
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Saturday’s “SHOW-OF-THE-WEEK” picks are Sligo Rags in Altadena at 7 pm; “Woody Guthrie's 3rd Annual Birthday Bash” in Ventura at 7:30 pm; Chip Taylor (“Wild Thing,” “Angel In The Morning”) plus Kendal Carson opening in Santa Monica at 8 pm; Harriet Schock & band, plus Joy Graysen & Band in NoHo at 8 pm; and Alejandro Escovedo, Chuck Prophet, & David Pulkingham, playing the “Sings Like Hell” series in Santa Barbara at 8 pm.
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Sunday’s “SHOW-OF-THE-WEEK” picks are the “Los Angeles Blues Society Benefit Show” with Kelly’s Lot, The Phil Gates Band, & Laurie Morvan Band, 1-5 pm in Long Beach; the “Ash Grove Summer Intra-National Series Kickoff” with Michelle Shocked, Bernie Pearl, Roy Zimmerman, S. Pearl Sharp, Conjunto Los Pochos, Get Lit Players, & the S.H.I.N.E. Mawusi Drummers, 1:30-5:30 pm in Santa Monica; This Just In and The Nathan McEuen Band, 3-5 pm in Agoura Hills; Riders Of The Purple Sage with mandolin phenom Evan Marshall at the L.A. County “Free Concerts in Public Sites” series, 5-7 pm in South Pasadena; “The Grand Ole Echo” with Gina Villalobos playing her CD release show, 5-9 pm in Echo Park; and Conjunto Los Pochos at 7 pm in Altadena. And, the late addition of “THE BALLAD OF TOM JOAD: WOODY GUTHRIE AND THE GRAPES OF WRATH” in Long Beach at 7 pm.
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And, for those who appreciate music festivals, read Larry Wines big round-up of the Spring Music Festival circuit for FolkWorks, at
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http://www.folkworks.org/content/viewcategorycur/89
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Yes, it’s true -
There are more ACOUSTIC AMERICANA / ACOUSTIC RENAISSANCE music performances EVERY week in the Los Angeles area than the COMBINED TOTAL of ALL OTHER KINDS OF MUSIC!
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(And that doesn’t even take the dozens of electric Americana shows into account!)
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copyright (c) © 2009, Larry Wines. All rights reserved.
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