Daddy-O Daddy!: Rare Family Songs of Woody Guthrie

Overview

Before Marlo Thomas, before Raffi, before even Sesame Street or Captain Kangaroo, there was Woody Guthrie, America's premier folk singer, who liked to adopt a kid's-eye view during songwriting sessions. This compilation gathers 14 Guthrie originals and hands 13 of them over to illustrious Guthrie fans, including Taj Mahal, Cissy Houston, Bill Bragg, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. These artists pump new life into the songs here -- six of which are presented on disc for the first time -- offering up reggae (Mahal's "Don't You Push Me"), Afro-pop (Bragg's percolating version of the brilliant "Dry Bed"), R&B (Kim Wilson's "New Baby Train"), and plenty of sizzling folk. Guthrie himself appears on the opening and closing tracks, reciting his lyrics to "Howdy Little Newlycome," a moving celebration of a baby's birth.

Product Details

Release Date:	10/02/2001
Label:	Rounder / Umgd
UPC:	0011661808720
catalogNumber:	618087
Rank:	122911

Tracks

1. Howdy Little Newlycome
2. Want to See Me Grow
3. Don't You Push Me Down
4. New Baby Train
5. Little Seed
6. Dry Bed
7. Little Sack O Sugar
8. My Daddy (Flies a Ship in the Sky)
9. I'll Write and I'll Draw
10. Bigger
11. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
12. Tippy Top Toe
13. Curly Headed Baby
14. Sleep Eye
15. Howdy Little Newlycome

Album Credits

Performance Credits

Taj Mahal   Organ,Electric Guitar,Vocals,national steel guitar
Jimmie Dale Gilmore   Vocals
Arlo Guthrie   Keyboards
Billy Bragg   Acoustic Guitar,Vocals
Joe Ely   Guitar,Vocals
Syd Straw   Vocals
Ian McLagan   Piano,Hammond Organ
Kim Wilson   Harmonica,Vocals
Martyn Barker   Drums
Jeff Bova   Piano
Tony Braunagel   Drums
Cissy Houston   Vocals
Steve Conn   Accordion
Ramblin' Jack Elliott   Acoustic Guitar,Vocals
James "Hutch" Hutchinson   Bass
Greg Leisz   Acoustic Guitar,Mandolin,Pedal Steel Guitar,Electric Guitar
Carl Leyland   Piano
Lovitt   Trumpet
Lu Edmonds   Electric Guitar
John Mahon   Percussion,Marimbas
Ben Mandelson   Pedal Steel Guitar,Electric Guitar,wah wah guitar
David Raven   Drums
David Sanger   Percussion,Drums
Gary Herman   Bass
Christopher Parker   Drums
Donnie Harper   Piano
Dickie Fliszar   Percussion
Rob Gjersoe   Acoustic Guitar,Dobro,Mandolin
Frank Fuchs   Organ,Electric Guitar
Latina Webb   Background Vocals
T-Bone Wolk   Banjo,Bass,Mandolin,Accordion,Mandola
Anthony Field   Background Vocals
Billy Bragg & the Blokes   Track Performer
Simon Edwards   Bass,Sentir
Dan Wilson   Acoustic Guitar

Technical Credits

Taj Mahal   Arranger
Arlo Guthrie   Arranger
Woody Guthrie   Liner Notes
Billy Bragg   Arranger
Kim Wilson   Arranger
Cissy Houston   Vocal Arrangements
Marc DeSisto   Engineer
Ben Mandelson   Contributor
Scott Noll   Engineer
Grant Showbiz   Producer
Frank Fuchs   Arranger,Producer
T-Bone Wolk   Arranger
Chris Burns   Engineer
Frankie Fuchs   Producer

Editorial Reviews

As passionate as dust bowl troubadour Woody Guthrie was about politics and inequality, he was even more passionate about children, particularly his own. It has been long known that Guthrie left behind a wealth of unrecorded and half completed songs while he was living in New York near the end of his life, the most famous of these appearing as Billy Bragg and Wilco's collaborations on the Mermaid Avenue albums. It stands to reason that many of his incomplete song outlines would revolve around children, and many of these appear on Daddy-O Daddy!: Rare Family Songs of Woody Guthrie. "New Baby Train" provides a typically Woody view on the old legend of the stork delivering newborns, performed with a gruff sentimentality and bluesy harmonica by Fabulous Thunderbirds frontman Kim Wilson. Bragg himself appears on the album on the humorous "Dry Bed," recounting a certain growth step in early childhood, and also on "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8," chanting through a fun blast of nonsense sentences recalling his live interpretations of the Guthrie-penned "Hoodoo Voodoo." Nonsense lyrics seemed to have been swirling around the songwriter's pen since his satirical "Howdjadoo" in the early '30s, and these songs are no exception. Adults may cringe a little through the "zoop, zoop, zoopity-zoop"s and the "zippety hop"s, but kids are sure to love it, and grown-up artists like Taj Mahal, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, and Cissy Houston keep the sound and feel of the songs a million miles from Barney's prehistoric tunes.

All Music Guide - Zac Johnson