Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.
The Southbound Odyssey
Arlo Guthrie and clan do their part to help New Orleans recover.
BY BARRY MAZOR
Mr. Mazor writes about popular music for The Wall Street Journal.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005 12:01 a.m.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill.--We were, in fact, aboard the train last Friday as it pulled out of Kankakee. This stretch of The City of New Orleans's celebrated southbound odyssey through the musical heart of America takes place at night now, and it's a double-decker Amtrak Superliner with sleeping cars, not a morning run on the old Illinois Central--but you can still see those graveyards of rusted automobiles out there on your right, just as the late Steve Goodman, author of the song about the train Arlo Guthrie would make a hit, noted back in 1971.
"Growing up in this family," said Sarah Lee Guthrie, Arlo's daughter, "that song has always been a part of my life, in my veins. But it never even occurred to me until we first got on the train in Chicago the other night that, holy cow, here we are, my family, and we're all singing this song and going on this train!"
Sarah, at age 26, is a well-known performer herself, as half of a duo with her husband Johnny Irion. Sarah and a slew of other third-generation performing Guthries and close performing friends are joining Arlo, son of legendery Dust Bowl balladeer Woody Guthrie, in a tour that's playing venues along The City of New Orleans route south to the Crescent City in hopes of speeding the restoration of the music that is so central to what "New Orleans" means, and to its tourist economy.
Arlo placed the idea for the tour in context as we sat and talked just before the entourage's performance at the Canopy Club in Champaign, Ill., Saturday afternoon.
"We saw this disaster unfold in New Orleans, on a level that probably hadn't been seen since the Dust Bowl era, . . . and I wanted to do something that would actually help, not just get caught up in the bureaucracy of support. Then I noticed a little scroll coming across the TV screen that noted that Amtrak was resuming service of The City of New Orleans to New Orleans--and I had an idea.
"Maybe we could ride the train down from Chicago and target some help for the kind of musician that my father was--playing for tips, playing for beer, in the little clubs, the bars, the street corners. If we can get some instruments into their hands, get the soundboards back into the clubs, microphones into churches and schools and the other places where the music is learned, give the city its voice--we'd also get more people back into the city to listen to music."
Long a train enthusiast and active supporter of railway transportation, Mr. Guthrie was able to turn not only to the MusicCare organization as a conduit for funneling donations of cash and equipment to musicians in need, but to Amtrak for logistical support. The City of New Orleans service, necessarily cut off as the closing levy floodgates blocked the tracks just before the flood, was restored in full by early October. Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari reports that ridership on the train was just 3% less than a year ago by November. A diesel locomotive had provided emergency power for the only working correctional facility in the city--at the train station.
Joining benefit tour shows along the way already have been Neville Brother Cyril Neville and irrepressible contemporary singer-songwriter Ramsay Midwood. Joining at the New Daisy in Memphis, Tenn., tonight will be blues singer Guy Davis, Woody Guthrie buddy Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and latter-day rambling raconteur Todd Snider. At the final New Orleans shows at Tipitina's this weekend, Willie Nelson, who had a country hit with the Goodman song himself, will join in.
But this tour is very much a family affair at its core. Arlo's daughters Annie and Cathy, executives of the family record label Rising Son, quickly set up the gigs. And it hardly took the creation of special material for family acts to join in. Son Abe Guthrie's long-rolling harmonious pop band, Xavier, has one song called "Last Train." Alternative country rockers Sarah Lee and Johnny had already written and recorded a modern train song, "Cease Fire," and when their own three-year-old daughter, Olivia, demanded a chance to sing on stage like the rest of the clan, she chose "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." This family likes to sing about modes of transportation.
The Guthries emphasize that calling attention to the need for focusing on restoration of the musical infrastructure, and the music-makers' working lives, will be at least as important a result of this benefit tour as whatever amount of cash, instruments and equipment it raises (for additional information, see www.traintoneworleans.com). And for all of the varied sounds in the shows, the theme running through the songs is essentially hope, the possibility of making a difference even in the face of devastation as overwhelming as Katrina's. A hilarious, rambling Arlo Guthrie monologue riffing on the biblical story of Joseph had as its punchline, Saturday, a comment on the difference a single anonymous man had made when he told Joseph's brothers that the future Grand Vizier had headed "that away"--for Egypt. The story was attached to a rousing rendition of "This Land Is Your Land," his father Woody's classic contribution to Americana. "That's a song I've been singing since I was a little kid," he told the crowd, in a poignent echo of Sarah's off-stage comment earlier in the day.
The entire congregation at Champaign, cast and audience alike, then joined in for "The City of New Orleans" finale, and then Arlo said goodbye.
"We've got a train to catch." |
