Five perfect Woody Guthrie covers by Bob Dylan
No one inspired Bob Dylan quite like Woody Guthrie. Born in 1912, the latter rose to prominence in the 1940s with his politically-charged folk songs. Although he wrote his most well-known track, ‘This Land Is Your Land’, a year before Dylan was born, it didn’t take long for the budding folk artist to latch onto Guthrie’s songs as a teenager, inspiring him to write his own music.
Dylan once explained: “I always kind of wrote my own songs, but I never really would play them. Nobody played their own songs, the only person I knew who really did it was Woody Guthrie”. Evidently, Guthrie’s influence was incredibly profound, so much so that he took off to New York in 1961 to visit his dying idol, who was in hospital suffering from Huntington’s disease.
Guthrie impacted Dylan so strongly that he even penned his first song in tribute. He explained: “I just wrote a song, and it was the first song I ever wrote, and it was ‘A Song for Woody Guthrie’. And I just felt like playing it one night, and I played it. I just wanted a song to sing, and there came a certain point where I couldn’t sing anything, I had to write what I wanted to sing because what I wanted to sing nobody else was writing, I couldn’t find that song someplace. If I could’ve, I probably wouldn’t have ever started writing.”
Dylan was incredibly well-versed in Guthrie’s music, taking it upon himself to sing the folk artist’s songs to him while he was in hospital. In My Name is New York, Dylan wrote, “When I met him, he was not functioning with all of his facilities at 100 per cent. I was there more as a servant. I knew all of his songs, and I went there to sing him his songs. He always liked the songs.”
He continued: “He’d ask for certain ones — and I knew them all!”
Subsequently, Dylan recorded multiple covers of Guthrie’s songs throughout his career, paying homage to a man that inspired his own political anthems.
Five Woody Guthrie covers by Bob Dylan:
‘Ramblin’ Round’
In 1961, the same year he made his pilgrimage to visit Guthrie, Dylan recorded ‘Ramblin’ Round’ in Bonnie Beecher’s apartment, a girl he briefly dated in college. Although the song wasn’t intended to be a professional recording, the result is a brilliant execution of Guthrie’s track.
Discussing how the brilliance of Guthrie’s music spurred Dylan to visit New York, he once wrote: “The songs themselves had the infinite sweep of humanity in them… [He] was the true voice of the American spirit. I said to myself I was going to be Guthrie’s greatest disciple.“
‘Ain’t Got No Home’
In 1968, Dylan and The Band played a cover of ‘Ain’t Got No Home’ from Dust Bowl Ballads at Carnegie Hall for A Tribute To Woody Guthrie performance. The recording was eventually released in 1972 as part of the tribute album.
Guthrie wrote the song in response to the gospel song ‘Can’t Feel at Home’, also known as ‘I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore’. Appalled by the message of the song, which suggested that Dust Bowl refugees should accept their suffering and subsequently be rewarded in the afterlife, Guthrie wrote ‘Ain’t Got No Home’ in parodic retaliation.
‘Do Re Mi’
After years of success, Dylan never forgot about his love for Guthrie, covering ‘Do Re Mi’ from 1940s’ Dust Bowl Ballads in 2009. The singer joined forces with Ry Cooder and Van Dyke Parks to perform the song on The People Speak, a show dedicated to Guthrie.
Guthrie’s song explores the fate of migrants with hopes to move elsewhere, warning them that their journies are futile if they don’t have money. He sings: “California is a garden of Eden/ A paradise to live in or see/ But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot/ If you ain’t got the do re mi.”
‘Pretty Boy Floyd’
The life of American bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd was described in Guthrie’s song of the same name in 1939. Dylan’s version of the song can be found on 1988’s Folkways: A Vision Shared – A Tribute to Woody Guthrie & Leadbelly, alongside covers by Bruce Springsteen, U2 and Brian Wilson.
Discussing the track with Songfacts, Guthrie’s granddaughter Anna Canoni said: “The outlaw who helped the poor, a Robin Hood story. What Woody would do, he would take newspapers, read through the articles and write songs about stories that touched him. Being able to write powerful stories about an event, I think that that’s such an amazing gift that Woody could bring to songwriting.”
‘This Land Is Your Land’
Of course Dylan has covered Guthrie’s most famous hit, ‘This Land Is Your Land’, which was written in response to ‘God Bless America’. Over the years, the song has been covered numerous times, but Dylan’s version remains one of the best. Recorded in New York City’s Carnegie Hall in 1961, Dylan, in the infancy of his career, exudes an appreciation for Guthrie through his cover.
However, the song has been covered by Dylan many other times, with his official website claiming that he first played it at the home of Karen Wallace in 1960. He sang the song regularly during a tour in 1975 but has not played it in almost 50 years.
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