Before Bob Dylan was Bob Dylan, he was a disciple of Woody Guthrie. But Guthrie and his contemporaries were more than folk singers — they were blacklisted radicals, shaping American music while staring down the Red Scare.
The film, A Complete Unknown, accurately portrays Dylan's two sides—a brilliant creative genius as a songwriter/poet and a narcissist who used and discarded people on behalf of his ambition. It tells a good story, but certainly not all the stories.
Today, this classic folk song is usually sung as a popular pro-America anthem by Americans of every background. But it was written to have a radical edge that hollered for the country to make its bounty available to rich and poor alike.
This a radio program recorded in the 1940s in which Woody Guthrie sings accompanied in that performance by Sonny Terry on harmonica, Pete Seeger on banjo and Cisco Houston on guitar, they sing the chorus together. Also, two short videos with Pete.
Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, by James Mangold. Co-starring Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, and Monica Barbaro. Only in theaters Christmas Day. #ACompleteUnknown
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U.S. music was shaped to a considerable extent by people the government sought to destroy. Even as it mounted an effective attack on the Communist Party, the government was unable to erase the influence of musicians with which it was associated.
The 93-year-old musician, co-founder of the political label Paredon Records, looks back on a history of resistance. If you see your country “making horrible mistakes, you have to speak up,” she said. “You’re colluding with it if you don’t speak up.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1947, the oldest son of folk icon Woody Guthrie and professional dancer Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, Arlo grew up surrounded by folk legends — Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, to name a few.
The big crowds at Madison Square Garden during wartime and a few years after, the excitement at union halls and summer camps for some of the most interesting musicians and lyricists of the time? Gone — gone, but not entirely forgotten.
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