JOEL RAFAEL BAND: Woodyboye: Songs of Woody Guthrie (and Tales Worth Telling) Volume II

Joel Rafael Band

Woodyboye: Songs of Woody Guthrie (and Tales Worth Telling) Volume II

© 2005 Appleseed Recordings (611587108623)

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Award-winning songwriter Rafael, one of the most authentic interpreters of the songs of Woody Guthrie, presents a second acoustic collection of Woody's music, including four "new," previously unrecorded Guthrie lyrics completed by Joel's melodies.

notes

After releasing three well-received CDs of original material since 1994, the nationally acclaimed and award-winning singer-songwriter Joel Rafael felt like it was time to honor one of his formative inspirations, the late Woody Guthrie, godfather of topical folk music. On "Woodeye," a 2003 release on Jackson Browne's Inside Recordings label, the acoustic, San Diego-based Joel Rafael Band recorded a dozen Guthrie compositions, both familiar and rare; a Rafael original about Woody's hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma; and, most significantly, a previously unpublished Guthrie lyric ("Dance a Little Longer") set to music by Rafael with the blessing of Woody's daughter Nora Guthrie, director of the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives. "He's one of the true interpreters," Nora said of Rafael, who has been a longtime performer at the annual Woody Guthrie Free Folk Music Festival in Okemah and has played Guthrie material alongside his original songs for decades.

Joel wasn't ready to stop, though. Having made one album "that would bring a Woody Guthrie experience to a new audience," he wanted to present more of the thousand-plus unpublished and unrecorded lyrics Guthrie left behind after his 1967 death of the degenerative Huntington's disease. In selecting Guthrie lyrics to complete with music, "I was looking for songs that would show off his tremendous lyric skills and his appetite for diverse subject matter," says Rafael, "For songs that would demonstrate his timeless sense of how things work and the way things are."

"Woodyboye: Songs of Woody Guthrie (and Tales Worth Telling) Volume 2" expands "Woodeye's" achievements by shifting the balance of Guthrie originals to include four songs combining Woody's lyrics and Joel's melodies amongst its eleven Guthrie-penned tracks, plus another Woody-esque Rafael original. The new CD is indeed full of tales worth telling to a 21st Century audience, about political martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti ("Two Good Men"), the Dust Bowl disenfranchised ("Heaven My Home"), and Guthrie-like cross-country ramblers driven by compulsion or circumstance ("Stepstone," "Ramblin' Reckless Hobo"). Strong women save the day in a pair of Wild West adventures ("Rangers Command," "Circle of Truth") and are courted in the playful "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key" (a Guthrie lyric with its tune added by England's Billy Bragg, one of Woody's international torchbearers). The eerie "Dance Around My Atom Fire," one of the songs completed by Joel, is a temperate welcome to the nuclear age, with its potential for "brotherhood or a world of ashes." Guthrie's faith in God ("Your Sandal String") and man's potential ("Love Thyself" and "This Train is Bound for Glory," the CD's best-known song), adds extra dimensions to this complex man's world view. Rafael's one original composition, the heartbreaking "Sierra Blanca Massacre," recounts a true-life 1987 tragedy involving undocumented Mexican immigrants, whose plight was the topic of several Guthrie songs.

This spectrum of events and ideas is lovingly colored by the authenticity and empathy of Rafael's trio (Joel on mature, unaffected vocals and guitar; daughter Jamaica Rafael on violin and harmony vocals and Carl Johnson on acoustic lead guitar and backing vocals), who are joined on various tracks by established solo artists Jackson Browne, Joel's fellow Guthrie-phile Jimmy LaFave (who trades verses on "Stepstone" with Joel and Jackson), Woody's son Arlo Guthrie, the Burns Sisters, and Jennifer Warnes on guest vocals. Van Dyke Parks, who penned the lyrics for Brian Wilson's long-shelved but recently and triumphantly revived SMiLE CD, provides understated flavoring on piano and accordion. Other
contributing musicians include Matt Cartsonis (banjo, mandola) who has performed with Warren Zevon, Warnes, and Parks, among others, and a rhythm section comprised of Mauricio Lewak, Jackson Browne's drummer, and Will Landin, Jimmy LaFave's bassist.

Forged by Joel Rafael's vision of keeping Woody Guthrie's old songs alive and bringing unheard Guthrie lyrics to a new generation of listeners without artificial attempts at modernization, "Woodyboye" is a triumph of genuine and meaningful folk music by two of our country's finest songwriters.

About JOEL RAFAEL

Compared to his musical hero Woody Guthrie's tragic childhood - a mother driven mad by illness, an older sister's early death, a series of temporary homes - Joel Rafael's early life was mercifully conventional. Born in Chicago in 1949, Joel and his family moved to Southern California four years later. His first exposure to music was his parents' record collection, which included LPS by Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman, Fats Waller, classical albums, "all kinds of stuff."

After mastering, and then abandoning, the accordion in early grammar school, he joined the school band as a drummer and started a group of his own that performed popular standards. By the time he hit 8th grade, Joel and his combo were playing mostly instrumental surf tunes like "Pipeline" and "Wipe Out," but "once we started doing a few vocals it became clear that I was the only one who could sing," Joel remembers. By his first year in high school, the '60s folk boom had kicked in and Joel's tastes were shifting from the Ventures and Beach Boys to his greatest inspiration, Woody Guthrie, major Guthrie disciples Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan, plus Joan Baez, Ian and Sylvia and many others. "Every school had a hootenanny, and the one at my school changed my whole way of looking at things. I knew I could do this."

After much begging, Joel's parents took him to nearby Tijuana to buy a $25 acoustic guitar. "I learned a few chords and a couple songs from my friends and I was on my way," says Joel, who started to write his own songs after a year of guitar playing. "Sort of pop/folk songs, I guess." It was the right time and place for a young folkie - besides school hootenannies and local talent shows, with Joel a frequent winner, all-age folk clubs were springing up around the Los Angeles area. At 17, Joel was offered a recording contract and cut some demos in North Hollywood that led nowhere, but he continued to perform and write songs while attending college.

As the Sixties wound down and the controversial Vietnam War continued, Rafael dropped out of college, lost his student draft deferment and had his "conscientious objector" application rejected. To keep the draft board guessing, Joel moved to the Pacific Northwest, still writing and performing acoustic folk-oriented music even as the genre was overtaken by a more pop-oriented sound. By 1970, Joel and his girlfriend Lauren were living in a riverside cabin in the western Cascade Mountains of Washington state.

In the spring of 1972, with the war waning and the draft ended, Joel and Lauren, pregnant with their first child, moved back to the San Diego area of California, where their family still lives. Joel spent the next two decades performing around the southwest as a solo artist and in various groups, including a year-long partnership (1978-79) with alt.country/rockabilly singer, songwriter and guitarist Rosie Flores, who has maintained her own career through the present.

With a family to raise and support, Rafael eventually took a day job at the San Diego Wild Animal Park lasting into the mid-'90s. But an important connection was made when Joel first met Arlo Guthrie at the 1993 Troubadours of Folk Festival at UCLA, where he also learned of the annual Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. His 1995 performance at Kerrville won the festival's "New Folk Emerging Songwriter" award and raised the profile of the acoustic Joel Rafael Band, then a quartet, which had already released their first, eponymous CD in 1994 on Joel's own Reluctant Angel label. The CD also won San Diego County's Country Music Association "Album of the Year" award.

The Rafael Band, then as now including Joel's daughter Jamaica on violin and vocals and his high school friend Carl Johnson on lead guitar, released a second CD in 1996 before their next CD, "Hopper," was issued on Jackson Browne's independent label, Inside Recordings, in 1999. Meanwhile, Joel had become a regular performer at the yearly Woody Guthrie Free Folk Music Festival in Guthrie's Okemah, Oklahoma, hometown, where he reencountered Arlo Guthrie.

When the inspiration to record a CD of Woody Guthrie songs struck Joel, it was Arlo who seconded Joel's intention to complete and include one of Woody's unpublished lyrics on the CD, "Woodeye," which became Joel's entrée to the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives. The artistic success and critical reception of the project, in which Sing Out! magazine described Joel as "one of the great interpreters of Woody's songs," fueled Joel's desire to record a second CD of Guthrie material that would include additional melding of the late songwriter's lyrics and the melodies of one of his truest spiritual descendants. And so "Woodyboye" was born, Woody Guthrie's legacy is furthered, and Joel Rafael again displays his own gifts as a sympathetic, ego-free interpreter, writer and performer of powerful, moving and timeless music.

reviews

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  • Brilliant album never heard any of Joels stuff before.
    author: David rae

    C.D. was Brilliant never heard any of Joels stuff before but everything on C.D. was AWESOME

  • Well worth the money
    author: garry brooks

    Some Woody songs, some Woddy lyrics put to music by Joel Raphael, and a Joel Raphael form a seamless mix on this fine album. Well worth the money

  • Joel Rafael IS the current LIVING incarnation of Woody Guthrie!
    author: Jonathan G. Hinchliff

    Go ahead, close those eyes of yours and put your ears into song #3 Sierra Blanca Massacre from the latest CD from Joel Rafael - Woodyboye. How you feel, where it takes you, the emotions of a time long past and yet still with us. Nothin really ever changes... except maybe our perceptions; and this latest record from Joel Rafael reminds us of what we have left behind as a people, yet cannot forget. If you enjoy music that at once reconnects you to the past and welds you to present then buy this CD. You will be the better for it. Somewhere in Heaven - Woody is smilin' .

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