The Pop Story

Woody Guthrie - Dustbowl Ballads (1940)

Woody Guthrie via last.fm

No finer place to start in my opinion, as this man exerted the greatest influence on Bob Dylan, a man who has exerted the greatest influence on me. What’s immediately obvious from the first strummed chords of ‘The Great Dust Storm’ is that nothing about this music sounds out of date in 2009: it’s crackly, it’s basic, it’s quite evidently being beamed from a different era - but it still sounds alive and vital, and the musical structures are recognisably ones that underpin most of the modern pop we listen to today.

Let’s not get too hyperbolic though: this guy did inspire a lot of terrible musicians to pick up acoustic guitars and get all ‘earthy’. As someone (me) once said, listening to Billy Bragg is like being stuck in Woody Guthrie with a lift.

Woody Guthrie - Dustbowl Ballads on Spotify