No Depression has been the foremost journalistic authority on Americana and roots music for well over a decade, publishing 75 Issues from 1995-2008. They ceased publishing magazines in 2008 and took to the web. No Depression’s website features an extensive archive of all 75 print issues and a robust active community full of blogs, videos, photos, music news, forums and more. Visit the No Depression Web site here.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself
(I am huge, I contain multitudes.)
– Walt Whitman (”Song Of Myself”)

It says here that Merle Haggard is our greatest living singer and songwriter. Country singer and songwriter, if you must limit him.

Just do not argue the point.

We are not in the mood. Johnny Cash is newly buried, George Jones doesn’t write his own material, Willie Nelson and Ray Price, Billy Joe Shaver and Bob Dylan are astonishing, towering figures. Dolly Parton comes darn close, there’s that.

But if you can listen to “Sing Me Back Home”, “If We Make It Through December”, and, say, “I Hate To See It Go” without being moved to the core of your soul…well, you’re beyond our repair.

Depending upon where you took your meals during the winter of 1969, that may prove a difficult pill to swallow. Those not yet born may have a hard time understanding what all the fuss was (and is) about: A generation later we’re still arguing about “Okie From Muskogee”, either the most or least important of Haggard’s 38 #1 country hits, and the most famous song he will ever write.

“Okie” made Merle Haggard the darling of Spiro T. Agnew’s silent majority and a lightning rod for the new left. It suggested a southern strategy to the Republican party that dramatically changed the political landscape. And it cemented the chasm separating country from rock, made that divide seem as impenetrable as the Berlin Wall. (It wasn’t, not even that permanent; Waylon, Willie, and a five-leafed weed eased tensions only a few years later.)

Already a major country star, Haggard became a household name, and, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin more than a century earlier, “Okie” clove that house in two. So politically charged were the times that even chitchat around the dinner table, ordinarily useful to keep family values on track, could erupt into screaming matches. Nightly. America was, then as now, in the midst of a bitter cultural war, and everything got serious when names like Richard Nixon, Martin Luther King and Abbie Hoffman came up in conversation. Haggard’s song inserted him into the middle of that discussion.

By the winter of 1969 there was no middle ground, and where you stood on “Okie” firmly established which side you were on, whether you wore sandals or boots, whether you thought hippies deserved to be beaten or honored for their opposition to the Vietnam War. Haggard’s next single, the patriotically charged “Fightin’ Side Of Me”, made clear where he stood.

No, it didn’t, actually.

The reaction to his latest single, “That’s The News”, smartly selected from his latest record, Like Never Before (on his own Hag Records imprint), suggests just how complex and mercurial a figure Merle Haggard has always been. And what a gifted artist he remains.

Sad truth to tell, Haggard has been old news for a while, at least in the pop culture wars. His last #1 country hit, “Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Star”, charted in 1987. As with many of his peers, he was consigned to greatest hits packages and casino tours. And, like a gratifying number of his contemporaries, he rose from the slumber of premature retirement and proved to have rather more to offer, if to a smaller and more discerning audience.

Haggard’s 2000 release If I Could Only Fly, the first of his two albums for Epitaph…wait. Think about that: 31 years after “Okie”, Haggard was finally, unexpectedly embraced not simply by the rock world, but by one of its foremost punk labels.

The first record he gave Epitaph revealed a newly self-aware, mature, still brutally honest singer, a man still willing to write songs that cut precisely to the marrow of his own bones, an artist easy with his own legacy. If I Could Only Fly record managed little of the commercial impact of Johnny Cash’s four American albums. Nor did Roots (its 2001 follow-up), nor did The Peer Sessions, a sparkling homage (his latest among many) to his musical ancestors (released in 2002 on Audium). The work, however, was first-rate, and suddenly Haggard was back among us as a functioning artist.

And yet so potent is the memory of his celebrity, so deeply rooted is Haggard’s place on the right wing of our cultural imagination, that the fairly mild anti-administration protest of “That’s The News” landed him on the national news. Which only amplified the point of his song, though the talking heads ignored the obvious irony.

“Politicians do all the talking, soldiers pay the dues,” Haggard sings in his calm, resonant, world-worn voice. “Suddenly the war’s over, that’s the news.” That, combined with an editorial he posted on his website defending the Dixie Chicks (while simultaneously praising Toby Keith), led to great concern among certain of his longtime fans.

The first post on CMT’s message board reads: “I just saw Merle Haggard on Fox News discussing his new song…which is anti-Iraq war and will give great aid and comfort to the Sadamites who are killing our troops every day.”

And so it began.

Continue reading the complete essay on the No Depression Web site.

Themes of hope and homecoming weave through Day After Tomorrow. Other songs explore the individual and collective anguish of life during wartime starting with the Tom Waits title track, “Day After Tomorrow” (introduced on his 2004 album Real Gone and reprised as the emotional closing track of Body Of War, the award-winning 2007 documentary of a paralyzed Iraq war recruit) and the haunting “Scarlet Tide” (written by Elvis Costello and T Bone Burnett for the 2003 Civil War film, Cold Mountain).

Day After Tomorrow, recorded in Nashville, is Joan’s first full-length album collaboration with Steve Earle, who produces, plays guitar and sings harmony. Earle is represented on two new compositions: “I Am A Wanderer,” written overnight before one of the sessions and the album’s opening track, “God Is God” (which has already won a place in Joan’s concert sets, along with Earle’s perennial “Christmas In Washington”—“So come back Woody Guthrie/ Come back to us now…”). A third Earle tune closes the album in a cappella form, “Jericho Road,” a song that would not be out of place on a Staples Singers record (from Earle’s most recent album, Washington Square Serenade), though Joan is careful not to characterize it as a “gospel” tune.

On two songs, Earle plays the harmonium, an unusual instrument with a curiously unique sound: “Henry Russell’s Last Words” by Diana Jones (a true account based on an American mining disaster); and Austin, Texas stalwart Eliza Gilkyson’s “Requiem,” from her 2005 album, Paradise Hotel. “Requiem” is one of two Gilkyson songs on Day After Tomorrow, along with “Rose Of Sharon” (from Eliza’s Redemption Road of 1997). “A little gem,” says Joan, “such a sweet song. If I didn’t know otherwise, I would have just assumed that it was an old English folk song.”

Earle assembled a first-rate core of Music City “A-Team” players to accompany Joan, each one a headliner in his own right: respected singer-songwriters and multi-instrumentalists Tim O’Brien (who shows up on mandolin, fiddle, and bouzouki) and Darrell Scott (guitars, dobro, banjolin, bouzouki), who frequently appear on each other’s records; bassist extraordinaire Viktor Krauss; Nashville elder statesman Kenny Malone on drums and percussion; and an occasional jingle of tambourine by the album’s veteran recording engineer Ray Kennedy (Steve Earle’s long-time producer).

Guest appearances are limited to two singers on Day After Tomorrow. Ray’s wife, Siobhan Kennedy, sings harmony on “Mary,” a Christian allegory written by Patty Griffin for her Flaming Red album of 1998. (The song took on a life of its own on the first Concerts for a Landmine Free World benefit album in 2001 and then on Willie Nelson’s Songs for Tsunami Relief benefit album in 2005.) U.K. singer/songwriter Thea Gilmore recorded her harmony vocal in Liverpool for “The Lower Road,” one of the songs on her May 2008 album Liejacker, her tenth album in ten years—though the song made its way to Joan months before.

A stunning soprano, Joan’s natural vibrato lent a taut, nervous tension to everything she sang. Yet even as an 18-year old, introduced onstage at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959, her repertoire reflected a different sensibility from her peers. In the traditional songs she mastered, there was an acknowledgment of the human condition.

She recorded her first solo LP for Vanguard Records in the summer of 1960, the beginning of a prolific 14-album, 12-year association with the label. Her earliest records, with their mix of traditional ballads, blues, lullabies, Carter Family, Weavers and Woody Guthrie songs, cowboy tunes, ethnic folk staples of American and non-American vintage, and much more—won strong followings in the U.S. and abroad.

Among the songs she introduced on her earliest albums that would find their ways into the repertoire of 60’s rock stalwarts were “House Of the Rising Sun” (the Animals), “John Riley” (the Byrds), “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” (Led Zeppelin), “What Have They Done To the Rain” (the Searchers), “Jackaroe” (Grateful Dead), and “Long Black Veil” (the Band), to name a few. “Geordie,” “House Carpenter” and “Matty Groves” inspired a multitude of British acts who trace their origins to Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and Steeleye Span.

In 1963, Joan began touring with Bob Dylan and recording his songs, a bond that came to symbolize the folk music movement for the next two years. At the same time, Joan began her lifelong role of introducing songs from a host of contemporary singer-songwriters starting with Phil Ochs, Richard Fariña, Leonard Cohen, Tim Hardin, Paul Simon, and others. Her repertoire grew to include songs by Jacques Brel, Lennon-McCartney, Johnny Cash and his Nashville peers, and South American composers Nascimento, Bonfa, Villa-Lobos, and others.

At a time in our country’s history when it was neither safe nor fashionable, Joan put herself on the line countless times, and her life’s work was mirrored in her music. She sang about freedom and Civil Rights everywhere, from the backs of flatbed trucks in Mississippi to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963. In 1964, she withheld 60% of her income tax from the IRS to protest military spending and participated in the birth of the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley. A year later she co-founded the Institute For The Study Of Nonviolence near her home in Carmel Valley. In 1966, Joan Baez stood in the fields alongside Cesar Chavez and migrant farm workers striking for fair wages and opposed capital punishment at San Quentin during a Christmas vigil. The following year she turned her attention to the draft resistance movement. In 1968, she recorded an album of country standards for her then-husband David Harris. He was later taken into custody by Federal marshals in July 1969 and imprisoned for 20 months for refusing induction and organizing draft resistance against the Vietnam war. As the war escalated, Joan traveled to Hanoi with the U.S.-based Liaison Committee and helped establish Amnesty International on the West Coast.

In the wake of the Beatles, the definition of folk music—a singer with an acoustic guitar—broadened and liberated many artists. Rather than following the pack into amplified folk-rock, Joan recorded three remarkable LPs with classical instrumentation. Later, as the 60’s turned into the 70’s, she began recording in Nashville. The “A-Team” of Nashville’s session musicians backed Joan on her last four LPs for Vanguard Records (including her biggest career single, a cover of the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” in 1971) and her first two releases on A&M.

Within the context of those albums and the approaching end of hostilities in Southeast Asia, Joan turned to the suffering of those living in Chile under the rule of Augusto Pinochet. To those people she dedicated her first album sung entirely in Spanish, a record that inspired Linda Ronstadt, later in the 80’s, to begin recording the Spanish songs of her heritage. One of the songs Joan sang on that album, “No Nos Moveran” (We Shall Not Be Moved) had been banned from public singing in Spain for more than 40 years under Generalissimo Franco’s rule and was excised from copies of the LP sold there. Joan became the first major artist to sing the song publicly when she performed it on a controversial television appearance in Madrid in 1977, three years after the dictator’s death.

In 1975, Joan’s self-penned “Diamonds & Rust” became the title song of an LP with songs by Jackson Browne, Janis Ian, John Prine, Stevie Wonder & Syreeta, Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band—and Bob Dylan. His Rolling Thunder Revues of late 75 and 76 (and resulting movie Renaldo & Clara, released in 1978) co-starred Joan Baez.

In 1978, she traveled to Northern Ireland and marched with the Irish Peace People, calling for an end to violence. She appeared at rallies on behalf of the nuclear freeze movement and performed at benefit concerts to defeat California’s Proposition 6 (Briggs Initiative), legislation that would have banned openly gay people from teaching in public schools. Joan received the American Civil Liberties Union’s Earl Warren Award for her commitment to human and civil rights issues and founded Humanitas International Human Rights Committee, which she headed for 13 years. She won the San Francisco Bay Area Music Award (BAMMY) award as top female vocalist in 1978 and 1979. A number of film, video and live recordings released in Europe and the U.S. documented her travels and concerts into the ’80s.

In 1983, she performed on the Grammy awards telecast for the first time (singing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In the Wind”). In the summer of 1985, after opening the U.S. segment of the worldwide Live Aid telecast, she later appeared at the revived Newport Folk Festival, the first gathering there since 1969. In 1986, Joan joined Peter Gabriel, Sting and others on Amnesty International’s Conspiracy of Hope tour; her subsequent album was influenced by the tour, as it acknowledged artists and groups whose lives in turn were influenced by her, with songs from Gabriel, U2, Dire Straits, Johnny Clegg, and others. Later in 1986, however, she was chosen to perform The People’s Summit concert in Iceland at the time of the historic meeting between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Joan’s 1989 concert in Czechoslovakia was attended by many of that country’s dissidents including President Vaclav Havel who cited her as a great influence in the so-called Velvet Revolution.

After attending an early Indigo Girls concert in 1990 (the year after their major label album debut), Joan teamed with the duo and Mary Chapin Carpenter (as Four Voices) for a series of benefit performances. The experience reinforced Joan’s belief in the new generation of songwriters’ ability to speak to her. When her album, Play Me Backwards, was released in 1992, it featured songs by Carpenter, John Hiatt, John Stewart, and others.

In 1993, Joan became the first major artist to perform in Sarajevo since the outbreak of the civil war as she traveled to war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina at the invitation of Refugees International. The next year, she sang in honor of Pete Seeger at the Kennedy Center Honors Gala in Washington, D.C. Also in 1994, Joan and Janis Ian sang for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Fight the Right fundraising event in San Francisco.

In 1995, Joan received her third BAMMY as Outstanding Female Vocalist. Joan’s nurturing support of other singer-songwriters came full circle with her next album, Ring Them Bells. This idea of collaborative mentoring was expanded on 1997’s Gone From Danger, where Joan was revealed as a lightning rod for young songwriting talent, with compositions from Dar Williams, Sinead Lohan, Kerrville Music Festival newcomer Betty Elders, Austin’s The Borrowers, and Richard Shindell (who went on to tour extensively with Joan over the years).

In August 2001, Vanguard Records began the most extensive chronological CD reissue program ever devoted to one artist in the company’s history. Expanded editions (with bonus tracks and newly commissioned liner notes) were released of her debut solo album of 1960, Joan Baez, and Joan Baez Vol. 2 (1961). The six-year campaign went on to encompass every original LP she recorded while under contract to the label from 1960 to 1972. In 2003, spurred by Vanguard’s lead, Universal Music Enterprises gathered Joan’s six complete A&M albums released from 1972 to 1976 into a mini-boxed set of four CDs with bonus material and extensive liner notes.

The release of Dark Chords On a Big Guitar in September 2003 was supported with a 22-city U.S. tour. On October 3, Grammy Award-winning classical guitarist Sharon Isbin presented her debut performance of The Joan Baez Suite, Opus 144. Written for Isbin by John Duarte and commissioned by the Augustine Foundation, the piece featured songs from Joan’s earliest days in folk music.

On the night of February 11, 2007, at the 49th annual Grammy Awards telecast viewed by more than a billion people worldwide, it was announced that Joan Baez had received the highly prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, the greatest honor that the Recording Academy can bestow. In turn, she introduced the live performance of “Not Ready To Make Nice” by dark horse nominees the Dixie Chicks. It was an ironic moment, as Joan’s “lifetime” of activism resonated in sync with the trio. They had been blacklisted by country radio and the Academy Of Country Music (ACM) when they criticized the president and the impending war in Iraq back in March 2003.

On Saturday, June 28, 2008, Joan was seen by countless TV viewers worldwide at the 46664 event in London’s Hyde Park, celebrating Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday. After appearing with Johnny Clegg and the Soweto Gospel Choir singing “Asimbonanga,” Joan later stood center stage behind Mandela when he addressed the assembled crowd of 46,664 people. The event coincided with the annual Glastonbury Music Festival that same weekend, where Joan was also performing.

Most recently, on September 4th, in advance of Day After Tomorrow’s release, Joan launches the new 2008-2009 lecture season at New York City’s 92nd Street Y (where she made her official NY concert debut in 1960). The event will be an in-depth conversation with Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis at the 900-seat Kaufmann Concert Hall.

Later, on September 18th, Joan receives the Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award at the Americana Music Association’s 7th annual awards show in Nashville. The honor “recognizes and celebrates artists who have ignited discussion and challenged the status quo through their music and actions.” Past recipients include Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Judy Collins, Mavis Staples and Steve Earle, who presents the award to Joan.

“All of us are survivors,” Joan Baez wrote, “but how many of us transcend survival?” 50 years on, she continues to show renewed vitality and passion in her concerts and records, and is more comfortable than ever inside her own skin. In this troubled world, to paraphrase “Wings,” she will always continue to seek “a place where they can hear me when I sing.”

—Arthur Levy

He was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, on July 14, 1912, 12 days after the Democrats nominated his namesake for the presidency of the United States.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie — “Woody” almost immediately — was Charley Guthrie’s son and like his father ever the optimist. He was Nora’s son too, hers the gift of old songs, and a dreadful fear he would inherit her madness.

Together they raised Woody, his two brothers and two sisters in a middle-class, foredoomed home the neighbors judged one of the finest in that farming community turned oil boom town.

Life in Okemah might have been comfortable, with cotton prices up and beef down, but for the fires.

Fire was to dog Woody, boy and man. A kerosene lamp shattered – the OKEMAH LEDGER reported it as an accident, while folks in town whispered otherwise – and flames consumed his beloved older sister Clara, the one who called him “Woodblock,” when the boy was just months shy of his seventh birthday.

Another blaze leveled the family home, sending the Guthries to live in the weathered London house, high on the weedy hillside overlooking the Fort Smith and Western depot at the foot of Columbia Street.

There were other fires, unexplained. Woody was not yet 15 when his mother hurled a kerosene lamp at a dozing Charley, searing his chest from neck to navel. Members of Charley’s Masonic Lodge arranged to send Nora to the state asylum in Norman.

Years later, and half a continent distant, a short circuit in a newly repaired radio sent flames racing through the child’s bedding, and took the life of Woody’s charming daughter Cathy Ann, “Stackabones,” the youngster who inspired so many of her father’s magical songs for children.

And near the end of his wanderings, Woody splashed gasoline on a Florida campfire; it flared and severely burned his right arm. The puckered scars would leave him unable play guitar. He was left mute, the once restless youth turned rebel now a man resigned to his mother’s fate.

Guthrie was just 42 when he entered the hospital for the last time in 1954. His period of true creativity had spanned no more than eight or nine years, though in that time, he had traveled far, seen wonders and known defeats, and written as many as 1,400 songs. He had traveled Route 66, he boasted, enough to run it up to 6,666, back and forth, across the county as whim and winds took him.

All the while, he never seemed to find what he was looking for.

Marjorie, his second wife, came closest to replacing the mother Woody had lost when Nora was committed to the asylum. But Marjorie put their children first.

Woody sought, needed, so desperately a cause to believe in. Advocating a program of social and economic justice, the Communist Party, USA, offered that and more, but party apparatchiks never asked him to be a member.

Woody reached out to acquaintances – he who knew almost everyone – but could allow close only a bare handful of those he had called upon. There was Huddie Ledbetter, the huge black man pardoned from Louisiana’s dreaded Parchman Farm, and Huddie’s wife, Martha, who opened their Greenwich Village flat to Guthrie. There was Pete Seeger, who would later make Guthrie’s songs so well known; and actor Will Geer, Guthrie’s tutor in Marxist orthodoxy; Jim Longhi, a merchant marine buddy and future lawyer; and Gilbert Houston, stalwart, handsome, the would-be movie star they all called “Cisco.” Those few Woody let in, and damned few others, including the succession of women who sought to mother him and ended up in his bed.

Despite the rich legacy of his songs, still sung four decades after his death from Huntington’s disease, Guthrie was at best an indifferent guitar player, his efforts at Mother Maybelle Carter’s “lick” haphazard.

At the same time, he was a sterling musician. He played harmonica well, if backwards, with the bass notes on the right rather than the left. At other times he played bass fiddle, washboard, spoons, bones, straws, whatever came to hand, rhythmically underpinning other, better players. It bothered him not at all.

He might have been a middling fiddle or mandolin player had he practiced, but he knew he would never be as good as his boyhood friend Matt Jennings. Over the years Matt the butcher would master as many as 600 fiddle tunes. Woody probably never used more than 30 or 40, mostly borrowed melodies, for his 400-plus-recorded songs. Good enough was good enough for Woody Guthrie.

Come spring, an itch came over him, a need to see beyond the next hill, beyond the county line to the next town and the next. He hated riding the rails, fearing railroad bulls and mutilation if he fell beneath a freight car. He preferred instead to travel by thumb, with a handful of paintbrushes shoved in a back pocket. If a song or two didn’t earn a meal in a café or a drink in a bar, he could always paint a few signs or a storefront for 50 cents – enough to last him for a day or two if he didn’t share it with the other hobos camped along a siding just out of town. Mostly he shared it, if he didn’t plain give it away.

He was, like Walt Whitman, whose “swimmy” poetry he disdained, a tangle of unresolved contradictions. And like Whitman, he embraced multitudes.

He was a faithful correspondent, writing, pouring on the page word pictures of startling beauty, letters so compelling that friends kept them for years to read and reread.

He was an unfaithful husband, flitting from lover to lover as easily and as often as he pawned his Sears Roebuck guitar.

He fathered eight children by three wives, and perhaps a ninth, unacknowledged. He left the raising of the first three to his first wife, doted on the next four with Marjorie, and, lost in illness, ignored the last of the children by a third wife. Yet he had such regard for his “manly seed” that he refused to pay for a hotel-room abortion when one of his on-again lovers discovered herself pregnant. His singing companion Cisco Houston secretly gave the frightened girl the $500.

Unconcerned about money, he was generous – to a fault. Guthrie would give away his day’s wages to a migrant family when his own children had to rely on an aunt for dinner. He was just as likely to give his jacket to a shivering fruit picker, his meal to a gaunt mother, or his last pennies to a grimy kid who had never eaten a Tootsie Roll, or drunk a Delaware Punch.

A radio-wise professional by the time he landed in New York City, he played the country boy just off the turnip truck. Well read – particularly in psychology and Eastern religions – he drawled terse comments and aphorisms seemingly sprung from the wind-whipped soil of the Dust Bowl, but more often his own droll wordplay.

Guthrie walked out on a weekly CBS radio show — and its lavish salary — because a sponsor wanted to tell him what to sing on the air. Yet he would meekly accept Communist Party censorship of his unpaid articles for THE DAILY WORKER.

He knew drifters and movie stars, migrant workers and Skid Row barflies, Martha Graham dancers and dance hall floozies, abstract expressionists Jackson Pollack and Robert Motherwell, as well as their wives, girl-friends, and lovers.

And he wrote about them all – in diaries, on random sheets of wrapping paper, on paper bags laid open to catch his torrent of words, his cascade of images, metaphors, allusions, and illusions. He put his name to his autobiography, but shared his royalties with the editor who transformed his bulky manuscript into a rambling narrative. The book was largely fiction – an “autobiographical novel,” Guthrie called it – while his unpublished fiction was real, the stuff of his own life and times.

He was Woody in all his contradictions and complexities – the man you see and hear in Peter Frumkin’s sterling documentary.
– Ed Cray

A professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, Ed Cray is the author of RAMBLIN’ MAN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WOODY GUTHRIE.