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Woody Guthrie comic

 
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jefflewis



Joined: 21 Nov 2005
Posts: 1485

PostPosted: Mon Oct 15, 2012 5:58 am    Post subject: Woody Guthrie comic Reply with quote

I've been working a whole lot on this Woody Guthrie comic, trying to get it finished before the upcoming US tour! I have to do at least 8 pages, it's for an upcoming book called "Bohemians" or "Bohemianism", put together by Paul Buhle (the same guy who assembled "The Beats" book which I did the Tuli Kupferberg comic for). Reading/researching Woody, and doing the writing and art... it's coming along nicely but time is running out! Arrr!
I don't know when the final book will be published... not sure what the other artists/chapters will be.
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dazman



Joined: 07 Aug 2012
Posts: 42

PostPosted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 10:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Cool..that's something to look forward to. Keep us updated on publication dates...

How long does it usually take to draw an 8-page strip (not including the research..)? I imagine that your artwork takes a long time, as its so detailed.

There's been quite a few articles and features in the media lately about Woody, as its the centenary year since his birth. It got me thinking about his autobiography "Bound for Glory" which led me on to thinking about the Holy Modal Rounders song title (and film of the same name) "Bound to Lose". I presume this was a pun on the Guthrie's title. Who knows...seems apt.
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jefflewis



Joined: 21 Nov 2005
Posts: 1485

PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 1:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, I never thought about the Bound For Glory/Bound To Lose comparison before I started working on this Guthrie comic but it definitely was on my mind recently.
Although the "Bound To Lose" song that the Holy Modal Rounders movie is named after was a song on their first album, recorded 1963, and was written by some other person, so the song/movie title itself is probably not a reference to Guthrie on the part of the Rounders.

AND there is no actual Guthrie song called "Bound For Glory" (it was the name of his autobiography) although there is a Phil Ochs song of that title (a song about Guthrie).

The Guthrie autobiography title is named for an old gospel song, "This Train Is Bound For Glory" and Guthrie uses it as a comment on a freight train full of roughneck hoboes.

I guess it's cool that if somebody was looking thru music-related films in alphabetical order they'd probably see Bound For Glory and Bound To Lose right next to each other!
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dazman



Joined: 07 Aug 2012
Posts: 42

PostPosted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I just had to check to see who wrote Bound to Lose....it is a Stampfel original. (or atleast he gets the writing credit).

To paraphrase the CD notes by Stampfel....the melody is probably based on Clarence Ashley's "Walking Boss". It was taught to Stampfel by none-other than Bob Dylan, who thought it was a Guthrie song...Stampfel altered the words and added a new verse and changed the chorus.

It seems the Rounders based some of their songs on earlier folk tunes, I already knew they'd based their most famous "hit" Bird Song on Ray Price's "You Done Me Wrong" with modified lyrics. Mind you, they were in good company - I vaguely recall that Dylan's The Times They Are A Changin' pinched the melody from an earlier Scottish folk-tune.

There was an interesting radio show on Woody recently presented by Billy Bragg. He mentioned that new artists (I can't remember who) have taken unrecorded Guthrie lyrics and set them to new melodies. It mentioned song lyrics about UFOs and flying saucers. I guess this would date from the fifties - and shows how tuned-in he was to the spirit-of-the-time.
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jefflewis



Joined: 21 Nov 2005
Posts: 1485

PostPosted: Sun Dec 02, 2012 2:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hmmm, wow, thanks for the info!

There's a good section in the book "Positively 4th Street" talking about how Dylan's first trip to England gave him a chance to hear some different sorts of folks songs in the British folk clubs, British folk songs that gave him new types of melodies to use. That's where he picked up the melody for Masters of War (based on British folk song Nottamun Town), and Don't Think Twice, It's Alright, and other Dylan stuff of that period... these Dylan songs knocked out the NYC folk scene when he got home because they didn't know he'd swiped the melodies, the NYC folk scene wasn't familiar with British folk stuff, or so the story goes.

And of course everything has its precedents in some way or other, no big surprise there... it's just fun to trace the roots of things.

For example, though sort of a tangent - Alan Moore's Watchmen! ( I can't go five minutes without thinking about Watchmen, right?)
I've been wondering if Gary K. Wolf's 1981 detective novel "Who Censored Roger Rabbit?" (later adapted into the significantly different 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit) might have been a sort of inspiration for Watchmen...
Gary Wolf's original novel was a weird Post-Modern mystery in which newspaper-comic strip characters interact with a gritty real world to solve the murder of one of their own. If this sounds vaguely comparable to Watchmen already, consider that Moore's original title for Watchmen was "Who Killed the Peacemaker?"
The Roger Rabbit movie version from 1988 changed the story quite a bit and made it more about animated characters rather than comic strip characters, but the original book had folks like Dick Tracy, Blondie, Hagar the Horrible, etc., juxtaposed with a noir reality. The similarity may just be coincidental, but maybe Moore really did read that book at some point in the early 80s right before writing Watchmen?
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