‘Guthrie’s American Song’ Is Folk Music At Its Best

By Julie Stern

SHERMAN — The Sherman Playhouse is energizing these last summer nights with a rousing version of Peter Glazer’s tribute to the original American minstrel, Woody Guthrie.

Writing songs that expressed the pain and aspirations of working people displaced by the Great Depression during the 1930s, Guthrie criss-crossed the United States, from his west Texas-Oklahoma roots, to the migrant worker camps of California and the Pacific coast, back to New York City and down to New Orleans.

He sang for tips in saloons and on street corners, in box cars and hobo jungles, organized union workers, had his own radio show, and served in the Merchant Marine, and while he was cut down prematurely at age forty by Huntington’s chorea (now known as Woody Guthrie’s disease) he remains immortalized by songs such as “This Land is Your Land,” “The Sinking of the Reuben James,”  “Hard Travelin’” “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” and “Union Maid.”

Using a cast of seven for Woody Guthrie’s American Song, the current Sherman production uses two dozen of the thousand songs Guthrie wrote, providing a retrospective of his life. The first act covers the early years when he followed the dustbowl refugees as they migrated to California in search of farm work and then up to the northwest, hoping for jobs helping to build the Grand Coulee Dam.

The second act moves to New York City where Guthrie teamed up with folksinger Cisco Houston, singing in bars, and writing broadsides that responded to political and social inequalities, like “Deportee,” about the death of 29 nameless Mexicans in a government plane crash.

Under the guidance of two supremely gifted leaders – director Francis (Arnold) Daley and musical director Susan Lang – the show manages to be moving, entertaining, and a fine lesson in American history, all at the same time. Against a backdrop of changing slides depicting the photographs of Dorothea Lange and the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton, Mr Daley groups his cast in beautifully staged vignettes: a campfire in a migrant tent city, a Bowery saloon, and, the most technically impressive of all, a moving freight train box car full of homeless strangers.

In addition, he has the group acting flawlessly. In voice, dress and mannerisms, it is hard to believe they are not a group of Okies straight out of the pages of John Steinbeck.

Morgan Kelsey, Randy Watkins and Peter Pecora play the role of Guthrie by turns, when they are not being anonymous farmers and drifters. Sandy Walker, and Jen Moncuse seem straight off the farm in Act One, and morph into waitresses, barmaids and union members in Act Two. Will Pryor Bennett and Noelle Daley are the children of families who lost their farms in the dust bowl, wandering in search of “Pastures of Plenty” where they no longer feel at home any more.

With her own three-piece band, My Father’s Truck as backup, Ms Lang has arranged Guthrie’s songs in groups and harmonies that are hauntingly beautiful. All the performers are talented musicians, but Sandy Walker has sucha powerful voice and commanding presence that she might easily dominate the rest. This doesn’t happen, however, thanks to the way Ms Lang balances the presentation. Eventually the entire audience is invited to join in the singing, and, as in the old Hootenannies, they do so with delight.

If you like American folk music, this is about as good as it gets, and definitely worth a trip up to Sherman.

(Performances continue Friday and Saturday evenings, and Sunday afternoons, until September 25. Tickets are $18 for adults, $16 for seniors and students, and can be reserved by calling 860-354-3622.

Competitive bluegrass fiddler Marta Day will be the guest fiddler for this weekend’s evening performances. Her Cheshire-based band Rosin The Bow specializes in Irish and bluegrass music. The band’s latest CD, A Carol for A New Year, can be heard at its website, www.RosinTheBow.com.

Ms Day is also a member of The Bristol Old Tyme Fiddlers and Cheshire Symphony Orchestra. She has performed as a guest of master fiddler Roger Sprung of Newtown at fiddler fairs and conventions around the country.)