Woody Guthrie
85 Songs

"I write the things I see, the things I've seen, the things I hope to see, somewhere, in a faraway place." W.G.

There was a time when all things were not as they are now and had meanings and contents different from those we commonly assign today. There was a time when music had nothing to do with commerce, sales, charts, TV appearances, or marketing.
There wasn't the cultural phenomenon that we all know now, and people were only marginally interested in songs, without giving them excessive importance.

With Woody Guthrie, something changed radically, and from him onwards, things would never be the same: music became a necessity, a visceral matter and a means to convey a mood or a more or less urgent discomfort to express, regardless of technique or listenability of the piece. All other things would come later, including record labels and recording studios for a serial and organized production of "music-product."

There was a time when this young white man born in 1912, a maladjusted and idealistic poet with a childhood more than terrible behind him (father in financial ruin, house burned down, sister died young in a domestic accident, mother gravely hospitalized, and father burned to death!) decided to leave everything behind and write verses and ballads NOT about wild loves, tortured loves, or affectionate hates for the dearly beloved, themes popular and explored in the 1920s and around. His songs would talk about other things, about things people imagined but did not like to know: they spoke of hanged deaths, sleepless nights on station benches, broken hopes, laid-off workers, and the American dream that was already going down the drain in those years. He sang stories of old drunks, ordinary people who couldn't make ends meet, old prostitutes, corrupt police officers, Jesus Christ, and people who had lost all hope.
There was a time when this lean, pale, and rebellious young man, sang for the first time about degradation and real life, and not the fake and idealized life of easy songs of the era. And precisely because of his going against the normal conventions of the time, this minstrel suffered wrongs, threats, arrests, accusations, and injustices almost unbearable for any other individual. They took his possessions, threatened him, and forced him into anonymity and escape to avoid being located by the mafia and any police that didn't like the things he was saying, but Woody didn't stop at anything and continued steadfastly on his path.

This special box set (at a really affordable price!!) from the Deja Vu series contains 5 CDs with the essence of his production and as many as 85 songs, including Tom Joad Blues (with an entire Bruce Springsteen album dedicated to it), Dust Bowl Blues, House of the Rising Sun, Buffalo Skinners, Car Song and many more. Ugly, dirty, and nasty songs, poorly played, sometimes even out of tune and full of static, but they have a value that goes beyond what we are given to hear on the surface. Songs that have paid a very high price and precisely for this reason deserve a listen and a memory in honor of the man who gave them the form that has been passed down to us.

Songs for which, in times gone by, someone decided to dedicate their life to praising a sense of justice, a morality, and an ethics that are no longer part of these times where everything is created and consumed at breakneck speeds and where a Woody Guthrie of any kind could never have existed.