Folk Tradition

Andy Irvine's Devoted, just released, is the culmination of his nearly lifelong passion for the songs of Woody Guthrie, a musical and personal hero since the late 1950s. It includes renditions of eleven Guthrie songs with support from longtime Irvine collaborators John Doyle, Dónal Lunny, Mike McGoldrick, Bruce Molsky, Nikola Parov, and Rens van der Zalm. The twelfth cut is a remastering of Andy's tribute to Woody, "Never Tire of the Road," which appeared on his 1996 album Rain on the Roof and sports a new fiddle track.

The most interesting selection may be the one here entitled "Wallace-Taylor Train / Bet on Wallace," which is actually a mash-up of two Guthrie songs with roots in both "The Wabash Cannonball" and the old horse-racing song "Stewball." "Wallace" is Henry A. Wallace, former vice-president and Secretary of Agriculture under FDR, whose 1948 run for president on the Progressive ticket energized the American left but garnered less than three percent of the popular vote; "Taylor" is his running mate, former senator Glen H. Taylor.

Guthrie had earlier (in 1942) adapted the melody of "The Wabash Cannonball" into a song called "The Farmer-Labor Train," alluding to Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party; he updated the lyrics for the Wallace campaign. Andy's spirited bouzouki-based recording draws on a separate Guthrie lyric, "Bet on Wallace," which borrowed the phrase "He might win, win, win" from Leadbelly's version of "Stewball."

As for "Stewball," though the song has a long tradition in the US, it commemorates a famous horse race in Ireland in the eighteenth century. A version of the song, in a radically different version with a Balkan arrangement, appears on the eponymous 1976 Andy Irvine and Paul Brady album under the title "The Plains of Kildare."

Devoted is available from The Last Music Company, Ltd.