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CONTACT:
Charlie Maguire
Mello-Jamin Music
Post Office Box 580794
Minneapolis, MN 55458-0794
P: 612-709-3848
E-mail: mellojam@visi.com
www.charliemaguire.com
There probably isn't a Kindergarten child in the entire United States that can't sing a little bit of THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND if you ask. There is likely no senior citizen over 70 that would not recognize the refrain to SO LONG ITS BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU.
Such is the range and staying power of a songwriter whose voice, author John Steinbeck once described as sounding "like a tire iron on a rusty rim", Woody Guthrie.
Minnesota folkies Pop Wagner, Charlie Maguire, and bluesman Tony Glover come together for the first time in their careers to the Ginkgo Coffeehouse at 8PM on Tuesday, July 14 to sing and perform Guthrie's songs on what is Woody's 97th birthday.
The favorite song of Kindergarten and school children from coast to coast isn't on their rehearsal schedule. They figure you already know that one. What they are planning is to reintroduce a Guthrie song that mentions the Mississippi River, and introduce another that sings about sailing out of Duluth. Songs that Guthrie wrote but were not widely sung or known, about places in Minnesota he personally saw and visited during his lifetime.
Guthrie was in Saint Paul for example, in 1941 on University Avenue in front of the International Harvester Plant along with Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell, and Lee Hays singing union songs "when the National Guard was called out and a tear gas battle ensued", according to published accounts. Guthrie and Seeger found themselves later in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin singing for lumberjacks on a freight-train tour that took them through Duluth.
Additionally, the program will pull deeply from a well of over 132 songs that were recorded 65 years ago in April of 1944 in a tiny recording studio on West Forty-Sixth Street in New York by Woody, his closest friend and harmonizer, Cisco Houston, and often backed by legendary blues harmonica player Sonny Terry and others. There are songs of hard traveling, being lonesome, being broke, and the sights, and sounds, and certain freedoms of the road.
The obscure Guthrie songs, and the 46th Street sessions were both collected by Tony Glover over a long period of time on bits of tape and actual disc. Glover put them all together, and gave them to Maguire on a reel-to-reel tape in 1981. Maguire shared the tape with Wagner in a little studio at the Minneapolis Public Library soon after, but then they sat unstudied until 2004 when on a whim, Maguire took them to Creation Audio and had everything digitized onto CD. "We were amazed at what we heard", remembered engineer Steve Wiese.
Sending a CD copy to Glover of everything Glover had given Maguire years before started a new conversation between them about Guthrie. Glover actually met the man on a visit that he made with Bob Dylan in 1962. Maguire was tutored and mentored in "Woodyisms" by Guthrie fellow traveler Lee Hays in the 1970s. All that reminiscence then culminated in an article entitled "Rambling Men" for the Minneapolis magazine, The Rake. That got the Woody Guthrie Foundation involved and today even though the print magazine version is long gone, you can still read Glover and Maguire's article on the web site under "Nora's News" (www.woodyguthrie.org/norasnews/nn20040701.htm).
The three plan to feature a different theme for annual Guthrie concerts on or around his birthday for the next two years, culminating in a series of concerts in Saint Paul, and Duluth in 2012, Woody's 100th birthday. "Woody traveled through just about every state in the United States", Maguire says, "but Minnesota's cities and rivers is one of only a handful of places he actually mentions in his songs."