Woody Guthrie Album: “Muleskinner Blues: The Asch Recordings, Vol. 2”

This album is a must for any fan of folk music, acoustic blues, or country/western. The songs are all excellent. Guthrie plays an integral role in american music, and this album shows some of his influences. There are no original songs. The liner notes are great. They often mention the influence of the Carter family on Guthrie, and some of the songs were done by them. Guthrie is often with Cisco Houston; some songs are solo, and Sonny Terry occasionally plays. Guthrie's music is essential, and hopefully with two recent tribute albums more people will listen to him, rather than only having heard of him.

If you are determined to collect all recorded Guthrie tracks, you may want this one, but there is a new multi-disc set available just this year which features a lot of these same performances in a remastered version from sources better even than those available to the Smithsonian back in the 1990's. If that is too pricey, this will do. However, the main effect of this compilation is to remind us that Woody's peculiar, sporadic genius, which offset somewhat his tragic life, was in poetic song composition. As a singer and guitarist, he was not particularly wonderful, especially on songs he did not create. His friend Cisco Houston did a lot of these numbers on his 1950's solo LP's for Folkways, and if you want to hear these traditional songs performed beautifully, his versions are so much better. On a lot of these, he accompanies Woody, but really took a minor role during these 1944 sessions. For those who want to have a collection of Guthrie's "cover versions" buy it. There are people, (like me) who appreciate that aspect of those who achieve fame by their own songwriting. I like Hank Williams' recordings of songs written by other people, for instance...but, as with Woody, not as much as him doing his own stuff. As for Woody's own songs, for my money Cisco Houston's versions are even better than Woody's own, and luckily some of those are still available on CD. If you are a beginning fan of Woody's, branch out to Cisco. You won't be sorry.

I am glad to see that certain folksingers such as Woody

Guthrie are now also considered country singers. After all,

some folk music is traditional nonpopular country music, and

some folk music is not country music.