Lackey's Class Links: July 2005 Archives

From Mark Twain's Guitar to the White Stripes

Found this site called Transom.org and a piece about an interview with the White Stripes while looking for stuff about NPR's Lost and Found Sound because they did a piece once about Mark Twain's guitar.

NPR Producer Elizabeth Blair's series, Present at the Creation, looks at creative genesis of social and artistic icons - from Monopoly, The Hollywood Sign, "The Raven," and the electric guitar, to Kerouac's On the Road and Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

Epiphone Airscreamer electric guitar, the Trailer Park Troubadours and a couple of their hits, Trailer on the Bayou and Pawn Shop of Broken Hearts. And then there's the pawn shop Gibson we saw this afternoon at Uncle Sam's Pawn Shop in Columbus, and the twenty-eight rooms of books at the Book Loft in German Village.

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Woody's Birthday - July 14, 1912

Today is Woody's birthday - born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma. Check out more at the WOODY GUTHRIE FOUNDATION AND ARCHIVES.

Woody Guthrie Poster Text:

I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim

Too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.

I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.

I could hire out to the other side, the big money side. And get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.

-Woody Guthrie

7th Annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival