Arlo Guthrie live in Calgary

Arlo Guthrie: link to www.arlo.netLast Tuesday I went to the Arlo Guthrie concert. Yes, the guy who sang Alice's Restaurant way back in 1967, the son of legendary singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie. Dennis & Robin had a spare ticket and were kind enough to offer it to me. A wonderful night!

On stage were members of Arlo's family: son on keyboard and daughter and son-in-law playing guitars and another playing slide-guitar and mandolin. Mercifully the 4-year-old granddaughter didn't come on until the end. It could have been dreadful.

Instead it was a fabulous night of funny/ touching/ homespun-country stories about family, politics in the US, Woody Guthrie's life and, of course, dealing with the police and other government types in the tumultuous 60's and 70's.

Alice's Restaurant was played of course, with all the joy and humour of the original, even though Arlo reminded us that he's had to sing the song six times a week 10 months of the year, for the last 40 years. But the best songs were those by Woody (This Land is Your Land, etc.). He wrote more than 2500 songs, but only recorded about 100 of them, leaving behind a legacy of notebooks and scraps of paper filled with poetry and lyrics that various artists are now trying to put to music. The most touching of the evening was one of the last lyrics written by Woody in his last days as he struggled with the debilitating Huntington's Disease:

My Peace

My peace my peace is all I’ve got that I can give to you
My peace is all I ever had that’s all I ever knew
I give my peace to green and black and red and white and blue
My peace my peace is all I’ve got that I can give to you

My peace, my peace is all I’ve got and all I've ever known
My peace is worth a thousand times more than anything I own
I pass my peace around and about ‘cross hands of every hue;
I guess my peace is justa ‘bout all I’ve got to give to you

Words by Woody Guthrie
Music by Arlo Guthrie
Words © 2003 Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc.

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