Sarah Lee Guthrie and husband Johnny Irion were last in New Orleans December 17, 2005 at the end of the City of New Orleans Tour. It was an effort by Arlo Guthrie, his family and friends to raise money for New Orleans’ relief, and it was on the Chicago launch party that Cyril Neville made his now-infamous comments about the city’s future and ethnic cleansing.

Guthrie and Irion return to play d.b.a. Friday night with Grayson Capps. Their most recent album, Go Wagaloo, is a children’s album and includes three songs with lyrics written by her grandfather, Woody Guthrie. Whether singing kids’ songs or folk songs, the heart of her music is the interplay of her voice with Irion’s. Some have likened it to that of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, but that’s really only true in the sense that there’s an emotional bond that expressed when they sing, regardless of the subject.

In a recent conversation, she talked about children’s music, Arlo, Woody, family and Katrina.

 

Why a children’s record?

We talked about doing a children’s album for a while now, and Olivia (one of their two daughters) who is 7 now, had been singing with us. She’s been on the road us since she was five weeks olds, so she had no choice in a lot of shows. She had to be there, so she decided she wanted to sing a few years ago. So she’s been doing that with us, and coming with little songs here and there. Then we had our second child a couple years ago, so all the songs we wrote for our first child were relevant again. Then Smithsonian Folkways called us last summer and this guy John Smith from Smithsonian and Johnny were talking, and he asked Johnny, “Hey, would you be interested in making a kids’ record that doesn’t want to make you jump out of a minivan?” We loved that, and we thought that was something we could do. 

We had listened to all the records [Smithsonian Folkways] put out over the years, and of course I grew up with them. They put out ’40s records, Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, Leadbelly, and all these records that I love and stole from my dad’s record collection. It was completely an honor that they even thought of us, so we started working on the record. 

Another inspiration for it was that when we walked into the Smithsonian Folkways offices down in Washington, D.C., they had the archives right there as well. And in the archives they had a whole bunch of lyrics that my grandfather had never recorded. Words that were kind of childlike, or kids’ songs. They handed me this folder of about a dozen or so of these lyrics and that inspired three of the songs on the record; they are actually co-writes with Woody.

When it came time to put music to Woody’s songs, did you feel a little bit of pressure?

No, I find it a great experience. I don’t feel pressure; it’s a unique opportunity. Woody these days, his presence is felt more in our society than ever because of the work of the archives, because of the work my Aunt Nora has been doing, but also because of the times. He’s been gone for 42 years now – he died in’67 – but for some reason I feel him now more than ever and his presence, especially because of what I do. I sing a lot of Woody Guthrie songs, and we are doing the Guthrie family tour right now. It’s a little tour in-between tours – we just ended the first part of the Guthrie family leg, and we’ll pick up the second half in February and go until May. That’s a tour with my father and my entire family, there’s 17 of us, my brother, sisters, kids and everything. We’re doing a lot of Woody Guthrie songs, so when I sit down with his lyrics that he wrote, I feel like I’m having a cup of coffee with him. It’s a really unique experience to feel his presence, kind of like we’re doing it together. I love looking at his work because he wrote with so much expression, and you could almost read the melody right off the page.

Do the songs tell you what ought to happen next?

I feel like they do. He writes phonetically, so you can tell the accents and the intonation, perhaps, and that might give you an idea of where the notes might be.

It seems like family is really important for you, not just on a personal level, but on a musical level.

Yeah, dad’s been gracious enough to invite us into his professional life. That’s how I got started, so it’s hard for me to separate the two, because they certainly go hand in hand in our family. I don’t know where that comes from, maybe because my dad never really got to play with his dad very much, maybe that’s something he wanted to do. I think if I were him, that might be a dream and he’s made it a reality.

To travel around with my dad, who I cherish and learned everything from, it’s really something special, and my siblings know that as well. We are having a great time on this tour, and it’s different this time around. It seems really important right now for us to be making music and playing music together as a family; it doesn’t seem like anybody is doing that anymore. 

For whatever its worth, what we represent as the Guthrie family, it’s all about heart space and making people feel good, and I think playing music with your family is one of the ultimate experiences of feeling good, and it’s a healing process.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5NJKx8ObDY&feature=related[/youtube]
How old were you when you started singing with your dad?

I was 12 years old when we did our first concert together, but I totally didn’t know what I was doing, and when I was 14 I joined him again, but I really didn’t start singing and knowing that it was what I wanted to do until I was 18 and I met Johnny and he put a guitar in my hands for the first time, and I started to play and sing with him. Then my dad gave me a job, which I couldn’t refuse, and I went out on the road with him, and that’s when I didn’t stop.

It seems like you’re passing that tradition along, starting Olivia at such a young age.

She is way more of a monster than I ever have become! I can see it now, she’s either going to go the complete opposite way or she’s going to be the next little thing, because she really is our little folk diva. She’s really got it, too and people recognize that. She really loves it, so who knows what’s going to happen.

When you come down here, is it going to be a kids’ music show, or is it going to be a mix?

No, we are going to leave the kids in Columbia. This is Grayson Capps’ tour, so it’s going to be a little raunchier, I think, and we may get a little more into our honky tonk voices. Johnny and I do a lot of different stuff.  Most of the time we are a folk duo – well folk is the umbrella, and underneath there, sometimes we play with a rock band and Johnny channels his Neil Young and I channel my Nicolette Larson, and every once in a while we get some Gram and Emmylou Harris going’, but of course our own original songs. Every venue’s been different. We played a church last night, and a church the night before, night before that we were in a club and a bar. I think Grayson’s going to bring his rock band.

Are there certain basic that have to be there for something to be a folk song?

I tend to think that the folk genre doesn’t really have any boundaries. They way it was explained to me is that there is folk music and there’s classical music, and classical is something that people read. Reading is part of their instrument, and they are arranged pieces, very complicated and beautiful. Folk is something anybody could do, and for me that’s rock ’n’ roll, that’s blues, that’s gospel. That’s the music of the people, handed down for generations and you don’t have to be an expert to play it. In that case, the only element that needs to happen is that you just have to do it, have to sing it, and someone else can sing it with you. It’s easy to learn. It encompasses everything.

What do you remember from the City of New Orleans Tour?

That trip changed my life. It really did. I like the way my dad describes it sometimes – it was actually disastrous at moments. My sisters worked their asses off putting this tour together last minute, and a lot of cool people stepped up to the plate. The first thing my dad did was send out this email, like, “Wouldn’t this be a cool idea?” a couple of weeks before the tour, and we were all like, “Yeah that would be a cool idea.” Then all of a sudden, emails go to other emails, we had 500 emails that came flooding in, saying, “You have to do this.” “How can I help?” “How can I promote this show?” “I’m going to bring the piano for this.” It became completely overwhelming and we said, “Okay, we have to do this now.” 

One of the first things that happened was Richard Pryor called my dad. He was the first one to call, and he said, “I’m with you whatever you need me to do.” His wife actually worked closely with my dad to get a few things happening in the beginning, and they donated some money. It was shortly after that that he passed. Then Willie Nelson called, and said, “Whatever I have to do. I’ll go down to Tipitina’s.”

So the ball started rolling, and my dad is exhausted, my sisters were exhausted, we had been working nonstop. We finally get on the City of New Orleans, this train, and it pulls out of the station (in Chicago), I looked up at my dad and I said, “Do you know what we are doing?” And he’s like, “What?” And I’m like, “We are riding on the City of New Orleans.” We had never done that before. Dad sang the song for 40 years, its been so much a part of my life, I’ve listened to that song over and over again, him even more so, and he had never been on the train before. It was like, “Oh my gosh, we are living a dream. We are living a song.” And, we are also carrying out something way beyond us to lend a hand.

So we get going, and some of the shows (at stops along the way) weren’t so well attended because it was last minute, but as we went down, every show was double in size and the momentum was picking up. All of a sudden we had press at every stop on the train. Dad was nonstop and he didn’t turn down anything. We pull up some place at 2 in the morning, and he’d jump off and do the news. It was so encouraging to see us all working together, not just our immediate family but we had a bunch of family and friends on the tour. By the time we got down to New Orleans, we were still exhausted, but as we were riding into the city we saw signs on the side of the tracks that said, “Thank you Arlo.” The people had spray-painted little messages on the sides of buildings to my father, and I had no idea that we had made that big of an impact.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgl0W7k_Q-4[/youtube]