Media Center
Related Topics
Related Stories
Performers of folk music have long understood the importance of writing songs for children. Indeed, it is through the voices of children that many of the greatest folk songs and traditions are kept alive.
The father of modern American folk music, Woody Guthrie, penned thousands of songs, hundreds of them for children. Some, like "This Land Is Your Land," were not intended for children but found an audience there anyway.
And though Woody died more than 40 years ago, the well is still producing and the legacy is alive and well, now reaching a fourth generation of children.
Three of his songs for kids make their debut on the new disc from
Sarah Lee Guthrie & Family on the Smithsonian Folkways label, including the title track, "Go Waggaloo."
Sarah Lee is Woody's 30-year-old granddaughter, the youngest child of
Arlo and Jackie Guthrie. Including Sarah Lee and husband Johnny Irion, their two children and a gaggle of cousins, a total of 13 of Woody's descendants sing or perform on the album.
If the album gives you the impression that life in the Guthrie household was one long hootenanny, you'd be wrong.
"We didn't sit around and sing all the time, but music was always something that was part of life," Sarah Lee recalled in a telephone interview from a concert hall in Ontario. She is on the road with the rest of her brood on the Guthrie Family Legacy Rides Again tour, which comes to the Whitaker Center's Sunoco Performance Theater at 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 15.
"When people like Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Hoyt Axton came over, I didn't really think of them as musicians; they were people who brought stuff to the house and [came] to visit my parents," she said. "But I do remember going to sleep at night listening to my dad and the Dillards playing in the living room downstairs."
When she was 5, the entire family went on the road in a bus one summer along with David Bromberg. For the kids, it was more of a long family vacation than some kind of tour.
And even though she made her recording debut singing backup as a toddler on one of her dad's records in the early 1980s, Sarah Lee didn't show much interest in music at all growing up, aside from a rebellious streak of Minor Threat and Black Flag as a teen.
But after teaming up with Irion in 1999, Guthrie began exploring her family's musical heritage as well as crafting one of her own.
"I think it was helpful learning about folk and traditional music along with someone who was outside my family."
Now with two children (Olivia, 6, and Sophie, 2), Guthrie and Irion balance parenting with life as touring musicians. Part of that balance is including Olivia in the music.
"We always knew we wanted to do a children's album at some point, and so many of these ideas came up from time to time from Olivia," Guthrie said. "When the folks at Smithsonian Folkways suggested a kid's album, I knew we could do it well."
Olivia's contributions, for which she receives appropriate songwriting credit, include "Take Me to Show and Tell," which the three wrote on their way to a performance in Olivia's kindergarten class; "If Mama Had Four Hands" about a "multi-taskin' mama" who can help with homework and cook breakfast simultaneously; and the dreamlike "Oni's Ponies," a musical sketch based on a cell-phone recording of a melody thought up while in the car.
And while Olivia's muse is indeed all over the album, the songs by Woody and the participation of Arlo on the tender "Brush Your Teeth Blues #57" and Pete Seeger on a rousing "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain" tie the project to a deeper well of family and American music. Stick-figure drawings by Woody are included in the album's artwork.
This fall, Olivia and 12 other Guthrie clan members are on the road, including Sarah Lee's sisters, Annie and Cathie; brother Abe, who's been playing piano with Arlo since the 1980s; and a handful of their children.
This will be Olivia's first tour. "We're road schooling her for the first time," Guthrie said. Recalling that tour 25 years ago, she sees similarities to the current Guthrie campaign.
"I was thinking the other day that we have the same number of people and the same age kids as we did then, and it's amazing now how all the children then are now on stage performing. I hope it's not another 25 years before we get to do this again."
The Guthrie Family Legacy Rides Again tour will take the stage at 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 15, at the Whitaker Center's Sunoco Performance Theatre in Harrisburg. For ticket information, visit whitakercenter.org or call 214-2787.
(1001)
