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The “Arlo Guthrie Family Rides Again Tour” will come to the Collins Center for the Arts on Saturday. The Guthrie folk legacy traces back to the legendary Woody Guthrie, best known for writing “This Land is Your Land.”
Three generations will be on stage Saturday, including Arlo Guthrie, the influential ’60s folk singer, his daughter Sarah Lee Guthrie, her husband Johnny Irion and a slew of children and other relatives.
As the family’s tour bus rolled through Pennsylvania on Monday, Sarah Lee Guthrie spoke with The Maine Campus about her career, her family and what audiences can expect at the show.
Sarah Lee officially began her career in 2001 when both she and her husband released solo albums and toured together to promote them. However, she appeared on her first recording when she was 2 years old, singing on a version of “Garden Song” Arlo recorded. When she was 12, she made a record with her family singing kid-friendly versions of Woody’s songs.
“When I was 14 years old, I sang a Pete Seeger song at one of the shows and it ended up that they recorded that show and made a CD out of it,” Sarah Lee said. “I sort of got the spotlight bug then.”
Sarah Lee forgot about folk music and began listening to punk acts like Minor Threat and Black Flag as a teenager. When she was 18, Arlo gave her a job as a tour manager on a tour with The Black Crowes and members of The Grateful Dead.
“I really got turned on to great music that tour,” Sarah Lee said. “It was a tour that I’ll never forget — it changed my life. Once that tour ended, I moved out to Los Angeles to be around some of those cats that I had met on the tour. Within a week I met Johnny.”
Johnny turned Sarah Lee onto folk, bluegrass and blues music that she had grown up around but never really listened to. She said she stole a bunch of her dad’s old music and discovered all of it for the first time. From there she learned to play guitar and joined her dad on the road.
The three generations on stage include Arlo, Sarah Lee, her brother and sisters and seven grandchildren, according to Sarah Lee.
“Of course, most of the night we’re paying a tribute to the first generation, which is Woody,” Sarah Lee said. “So in a sense you get four generations of people playing music. I think we’ve been a really lucky family to be able to play music together, and it’s something that is sort of lost on a lot of families these days. It wasn’t that long ago that that’s what people did.”
Sarah Lee said families used to rely more on entertaining themselves when they weren’t surrounded by iPods, DVDs and TV. She hopes the show will inspire other families to make music together.
“There’s so much going on in the world today, and it’s a beautiful part of life to play music with your family. There’s nothing that replaces that in today’s world, in today’s media,” Sarah Lee said.
As Sarah Lee spoke, screams from kids packed on the bus were audible. She said there were 18 people on the bus and the chaos in the background portrayed a true sense of what the Guthrie family is like.
Sarah Lee’s family has recently released a children’s music album, “Go Waggaloo.” The album features vocals from her whole family on songs like “’Cuz We’re Cousins” and “Take Me to Show-and-Tell.” Some of the songs, like the title track “Go Waggaloo,” contain lyrics written by Woody that were never set to music.
Sarah Lee said they plan on playing a few songs from the kids’ album. In addition to the little kids, Sarah Lee’s nephew is 18 and is starting out as a singer / songwriter / guitarist.
“He’s never really played a show for himself, so this is a really cool way for him to do one of his songs,” Sarah Lee said. “My sister, who normally runs the record company, is a great singer / songwriter herself but doesn’t always get to do that because she’s in the office. She’s my dad’s right-hand man. She’s doing one of her songs.”
Each generation is represented on the tour and the crowd will hear some of Arlo’s classics, some of Sarah Lee and Johnny’s originals, some of Woody and much more.
While Sarah Lee’s children’s album might have drum machines and references to Xboxes and DVDs, she still believes music hasn’t changed much over the years.
“That’s the great thing about music, is that it takes a really long time for it change, and the times don’t often change that much,” Sarah Lee said. “A lot of Woody Guthrie’s songs, he wrote mostly back in the 1940s, 1950s. Mostly we find that the migrant worker songs that he wrote so many of are completely relevant today. In a sense nothing has changed. A song that is 60 years old sounds like it could have been just written.”
She said many songs written during the depression still ring true today as America tries to pull itself out of an economic downturn.
“A song like ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’ [by June Carter-Cash] is ringing true, and people are really comparing it with their lives today,” Sarah Lee said.
See Sarah Lee, Arlo and the whole family at The Arlo Guthrie Family Rides Again Tour, taking place 8 p.m. Nov. 21 at the Collins Center for the Arts. Tickets are available in the CCA box office, online at collinscenterforthearts.com, or by calling 1-800-622-TIXX.
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