Album: Reg Meuross, Fire & Dust: A Woody Guthrie Story

I come to this album from a week or so spent among the denizens of the New York and Boston folk revivals, including a key figure from Tulsa and the Guthrie Center, and a concert (Judy Collins, marking 85 years of music and activism).

They were a reminder (if one were needed) of how much the music of Woody Guthrie, his children and grandchildren, still means in a country heading back at full throttle to one that Woody and his confrères would recognise all too easily: one of poverty and prejudice and life-altering climate change. But this time around there is no FDR, no New Deal, and right now precious little hope. So, we need this music, and these voices which have played such a crucial role in the fight for justice for all. It's far from over.

Reg Meuross is a British singer-songwriter who, during his 40-year career, has written songs that have illumined many aspects of history – most recently Stolen from God (2023), a song cycle chronicling the evils of the slave trade. Now comes Fire & Dust: A Woody Guthrie Story, a project that’s been marinading for some years. Commissioned by Pete Townsend (who produced the album) and blessed by Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter and Arlo’s sister, this powerful collection features four Guthrie originals – including the full version of “The Land is Your Land”, America’s alternative national anthem – and 12 Meuross originals, which deftly chronicle Woody’s tragic yet determined life and the Woodylore that lives on, introduced recently to a new generation thanks to A Complete Unknown in which a slowly dying Guthrie is brought magnificently to life by Scott McNairy.

Woody’s guitar famously bore the legend “This Machine Kills Fascists”, and the songs recently discovered by Will Kaufman stand as a reminder that Guthrie fought the fascist father of the current White House incumbent: Fred Trump’s Brooklyn development, Trump Village, did not welcome Jews or Blacks. None of those numbers feature here, but the breadth and depth of Woody’s song bag means there’s a vast amount to choose from. His Dust Bowl Ballads (1940) is essentially the first “concept” album. Two songs from that well-mined collection are included on Fire & Dust: “Ain’t Got No Home” and “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya”.

Meuross’ “Fit for Work (Illegal Hands)” is an all-too-contemporary companion to “Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” about the 1948 plane crash that killed so many Mexican migrant farmworkers, “scattered like dry leaves”: newspaper reports did not bother to discover their names, referring to them merely as “deportees”. (It was among Guthrie’s last songs, his words set to music by Martin Hoffman. The victims were finally identified only in 2013, and Joan Baez sang the song at a ceremony in Sacramento, CA, finally honouring them.)

Cisco, and Sonny and Lead Belly too (to coin a phrase), Ramblin’ Jack, the boxcars they rode, the tracks they travelled: all are echoed here, and those familiar with the Bob Dylan canon will appreciate “A Folk Song’s a Folk Song”, based on Dylan’s “Song to Woody” (written after he met Guthrie, not at Greystone but at the New Jersey home of the Gleasons where, for a while, Woody spent Sunday afternoons), itself based on Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”.  The closing song, “The Gypsy Singer”, recalls Dylan’s visits to the man he described as “my last idol” and to whom he never sang his own songs, only Woody’s own – which is why the Guthrie family so took the young wannabe to heart.

“Your song will make you free”, the frail Guthrie tells the man who was then still Robert Zimmerman. Woody, though, would not have stayed silent during these dark times and the songs he left us – and his writings – remain as relevant and timely today as when they were written.

Fire & Dust is an important album on which Meuross’ fine singing and picking is supported by among others Townsend (pictured above. left, with Meuross) on bass and keyboards; Phil Beer on mandolin, slide guitar and fiddle; Geraint Watkins on piano and accordion; Marion Fleetwood on fiddle; Roy Dodds on percussion; and Beth Porter on cello; with Katie Whitehouse on backing vocals. It deserves the widest possible hearing, in Britain and in the United States. And as a further exploration of the songs of the Dust Bowl balladeer, check out Woody Guthrie: The Tribute Concerts, the all-star 1960s concert performances lovingly remastered by Steve Rosenthal in 2017, to mark the 50th anniversary of Guthrie's death.

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