Day Thirteen - What Would Woody Do?

“I may be plenty lost right now, 

but tomorrow I’ll be found”

You can hear an audio version of this post here.

Today’s song (lucky 13 in a series of 31), is What Would Woody Do?, written by Dana Robinson (hear it here). I first heard this song at Montrose Folk Club in 2005 when I saw North Americans Dana and his wife Susan play live (and I saw them there again in 2009). They currently live and work in Vermont (though they lived in North Carolina for some years and Dana grew up in California). The song we’re looking at today is on an early solo album of Dana’s but since 2004 all their releases have been under the name of the duo, Dana and Susan Robinson (she plays banjo, he takes lead vocals and guitar). 

Dana was one of the songwriters who replied to my questions with answers in an email so his responses about this particular song are later in this post. You will soon realise, if you haven’t already that the Woody in the title is Woody Guthrie (1912-1967). I managed to get to my teens before I heard the name Guthrie and that was when I saw Woody’s son, Arlo Guthrie, on the 1970 Woodstock documentary on TV. That film was shown on the brand new Channel 4 in 1982 and, aged about 15, I sat up late on the edge of Middlesbrough to watch the whole thing (amazed most of all, for so many reasons, by Jimi Hendrix). I think I also watched the 1969 film Alice’s Restaurant somewhere along the way on C4 too (it features Arlo Guthrie and he has a well-known song with the title, Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, though the song came before the film). I still haven’t listened to a huge amount of Woody Guthrie to be honest, though a quick peek at any biography will show you quite the life story and I certainly know his most famous song This Land is Your Land. The closest I’ve come, apart from that, is probably the Billy Bragg/Wilco* Mermaid Avenue albums (a project where they took Woody Guthrie lyrics and gave them tunes). I was quite the Billy Bragg fan in my student years (the late ’80s), and one of the songs on the first Mermaid Avenue album, Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key, is very much the Bragg sound I remember (it’s a great song). For many American folk singers, however, Woody Guthrie is a, if not the, very significant figure (he is often quoted as an influence on Bob Dylan and a great long list of other songwriters). 

As for this song of Dana’s, there are so many reasons I liked it when I heard it (and it certainly nudged me to buy the 2002 album, Avenue of the Saints** (I later also bought 2004’s Native Soil and 2009’s Big Mystery). What Would Woody Do? is super jaunty (and folk clubs can get very dour at times) and the lyrics are brilliant (especially if you look at them on their own – certainly not the case for many songs, even great ones). The language is beautifully poetic and meaningful and it all rhymes in a really neat, compact way. It makes a very clever use of the ‘what would X do’ idea, something we come across all the time. I imagine ‘what would Jesus do?’ is particularly popular in the US and that must be involved here as we think about heroes and messiahs and what that all means. Many writers have played with this idea (I had the line ‘what would Michael Marra*** do?’ in a poem for last year’s Fun A Day Dundee) but Dana’s twist on it works particularly well and I can see why people kept wanting him to play the song (see his answers below).  You can still buy the CDs of the album online or head on over to Bandcamp to get it there (more money to the artist).  Anyway, here’s Dana…

When did you write this song?

I wrote this song early in my time of “road-warrior” style touring in the late 1990s. That means basically taking any gig that comes your way and being on the road year-round. I had been reading everything I could get my hands on that Woody Guthrie wrote and I was trying to channel his free flowing language. 

 

Is there anything else you’d like to share about the writing of this song?

The song is an homage to all the hard working traveling songwriters out on the road at any given time. I don’t think audiences are aware of the degree of hardship that most performers experience on a day to day basis, in order just to tour. The hours driving, the bad food, poor accommodations, the financial unpredictability and insecurity of it all. 

The other intention of the song is to share Woody’s philosophy and practice of how songwriting is actually not mysterious - it’s simple and accessible, and anyone can do it!

Who performed and/or recorded it first? What year was that? 

 

I wrote it in 1997 or ‘98 and recorded it in 1999 on ‘The Trade’. 

(This was Dana’s first answer but we later agreed that in fact it was on 2002’s Avenue of the Saints. Sometimes the fans know best!)

Is it a song you particularly like/have good feelings about?

I like the song. I’m proud of it. I don’t sing it much any more, because I played it at every concert from 1998 to 2015.

What is the song you’ve written that you are most proud of?

I’m actually most proud and satisfied with songs I’ve written that are more obscure. One Way Ticket, Island, Stepping Stone, Safe Home, Angel’s Share ... There are many. 

Could you name me one song by someone else that you wish you’d written?

There are too many to name, mostly obscure songs -  I love  ‘On a Sea of Fleur de Lis’ by Richard Shindell and ‘One Foot in The Grave’ by Rayna Gellert & Kieran Kane. Most anything by Jeff Tweedy.

Thanks so much to Dana for those answers about his song.

See you tomorrow for a trip to Leeds (West Yorkshire, England) and a slight change of direction.

*As you might notice in Dana’s answers there’s a link here as Dana mentions Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) as a songwriter he admires. Also recently I have been listening to some of the Mastertapes radio programmes and I came across Billy Bragg’s appearance on the series in 2012 talking about his 1986 album Talking with the Taxman About Poetry. In the (very interesting) programme he says: “Songs can’t change the world. Only the audience can change the world. What a song can do is give you a different perspective of the world”. 

**This album also has the song Safe Home that got me started on this whole writing project (I wrote about that last year – here).

*** Coincidentally, the song I wrote about yesterday was a Michael Marra song and you can read about that by just clicking ‘older posts’ or go here.

This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022's Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.

If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).