Description:
Woody Guthrie's recordings, virtually all made in the 1940s, are in the public domain in Europe, where copyright extends only 50 years. That means anyone who wants to can release a Guthrie album without licensing the material or paying royalties. Golden Stars' three-disc Guthrie box set American Folk Legend is a good example. Running an hour and 52 minutes and containing 42 tracks, the contents could have fit onto two CDs easily. The collection has no annotations beyond song titles and songwriting credits. It appears that all the unnamed compilers did was take some of the recent Guthrie collections made in the U.S. by Smithsonian Folkways and copy a bunch of the tracks. For example, "Farmer-Labor Train" was released for the first time on Smithsonian Folkways' Long Ways to Travel in 1994. It might sound as if taking another company's CD and copying it would constitute counterfeiting and therefore be illegal, but apparently that's not the case given the disparity in copyright law. (This ought to mean, though, that albums like this would not be for sale in the U.S.; in practice, they are readily available, not only through mail order, but often at retail as well.) Since the Smithsonian Folkways albums boasted cleaned-up fidelity, the sound here is usually quite good. And many of Guthrie's best-known songs are included, among them "This Land Is Your Land," "Pastures of Plenty," "So Long (It's Been Good to Know Yuh)" (with special lyrics relating to World War II), "Do-Re-Mi," "Pretty Boy Floyd," and "Grand Coulee Dam." So, a casual fan buying this album at a modest price would get a reasonable Guthrie collection, despite the skimpy packaging and miscellaneous selection and sequencing. But, of course, this album simply is not in the same league with the Smithsonian Folkways albums. ~ William Ruhlmann, AMG

Track Listing:

Disk 1
1.	Pastures Of Plenty
2.	So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You
3.	Hard, Ain’t It Hard
4.	Car Song
5.	Ramblin’ Round
6.	Ship In The Sky
7.	Sinking Of The Reuben James
8.	Do-re-mi
9.	Jesus Christ
10.	When The Curfew Blows (Curfew Blow)
11.	1913 Massacre
12.	Talking Fishing Blues
13.	Pretty Boy Floyd
14.	Grand Coulee Dam
Disk 2
1.	Hard Travelin’
2.	Wreck Of The Old 97
3.	Sally Goodin’
4.	Farmer-labor Train
5.	I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore
6.	Whoopee Ti Yi Yo, Get Along Little Dogies
7.	Jesse James
8.	Going Down The Road Feeling Bad
9.	When That Great Ship Went Down
10.	Billy The Kid
11.	Buffalo Gals
12.	Dead Or Alive
13.	Slipknot
14.	New York Town
Disk 3
1.	This Land Is Your Land
2.	Buffalo Skinners
3.	Muleskinner Blues
4.	Jarama Valley
5.	New Found Land
6.	Talking Columbia
7.	Talking Sailor
8.	Cowboy Waltz
9.	Go Tell Aunt Rhody
10.	Chisholm Trail
11.	Ranger’s Command
12.	Stackolee
13.	Danville Girl
14.	Better World A-comin’

Availability
This is an import product, and as such may take longer to source stock, we estimate that despatch will take 35-40 days after ordering, click here for more information regarding import products.

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