Three generations of Guthries take over the Long Center stage tonight: Arlo and his children Abe, Cathy, and Sarah Lee; her husband Johnny Irion; and assorted siblings, children, and grandchildren.
Besides their music, the show also leans on the work of family patriarch Woody Guthrie, whose lyrics have been put to song by Billy Bragg, Wilco, Eliza Gilkyson, and others.
The last time I spoke to Sarah Lee, she and Irion had just released Exploration, one of my favorite discs of 2005. Could that really be five years ago?
“You mean, ‘What have we been doing really?’” she laughs. “We just made a record last June with the guys from Vetiver, along with Gary Louris [of the Jayhawks], in Woodstock. I hope it’s going to come out by the fall. I’m really excited about it. It’s a beautiful kind of a psychedelic folk record. We’ve been working really hard the last five years. We’ve grown. We toured for Exploration for two or three years, going all over the world. We moved up to Massachusetts two years ago and had another baby. Johnny released a CD on his own. We did a live CD from a show we did in California and I did a children’s record.”
Making music is obviously in Guthrie’s blood, and as tonight’s show will amply demonstrate, it’s continued to the next generation.
“Our oldest child, Olivia, is seven now and she had been writing her own songs,” Sarah Lee claims. “She was encouraged by Johnny. He’ll just press record and we have a song. But kids are like that. They come up with the best things to say in the simplest ways, if you can just capture it while it’s happening. Then it’s our job to write it down.”
Some of those songs ended up on Go Waggaloo, the children’s album released last fall. “Smithsonian Folkways called and asked if we would consider making a record for them,” she recalls, “with those songs and some children songs they had in their archives that my grandfather had written but never recorded. We had no idea the world we were about to enter when we made that record. It’s been great, especially with this tour, because we get to invite them out on stage and have them perform some of the songs. It’s a pretty amazing experience for Olivia to go from writing to recording to actually performing her songs. She’s in the thick of it more than I ever was.”
The night before we spoke, the Guthries had played a show in St. Louis, with surprise appearances by Jay Farrar of Son Volt and Jim James of My Morning Jacket. Sarah Lee wouldn’t make promises of similar guests in Austin, but held out that Willie Nelson’s daughter Amy might be part of the proceedings, as she and Cathy form the bawdy duo Folk Uke.
“I’ve been filling in for Amy when she’s not around and we do the safest Folk Uke we can,” she says. “There’s a great Woody quote out there: ‘Our job as folk singers is to make the uncomfortable comfortable, and the comfortable uncomfortable.’ It’s something like that. It’s helped me get through that part of the night.”
This article appears in March 26 • 2010.