When this list of Woody Guthrie’s “New Year’s Rulin’s” popped up on the internet a year ago, it became an instant classic of the season. Which means that the time  has rolled around to remember it, reread it and take it again to heart. There’s a rulin’ on it to suit just about anybody because it never hurts to be reminded “Don’t get lonesome,” “Stay glad,” “Dream good” and “Love everybody.” Also, “Wash teeth if any.”

Happy New Year everybody!

Via Lists of Note

floodedgus:

A happy 100 to Mr. Guthrie on saturday.

Fresh Air Celebrates Woody’s 100th

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ours, cause we don’t give a darn. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do

— Message on mimeographed copies of lyrics distributed by Woody Guthrie to fans in the 1930s (via oracionessucias)

theparisreview:

Woody Guthrie’s unpublished novel will be published next year, with a little help from Johnny Depp.

(Source: The New York Times)

nprmusic:

Celebrate the Woody Guthrie centennial with a Folk Alley mix of Guthrie’s greatest songs, plus music from the musicians he inspired, like Joan Baez, Ani DiFranco and Old Crow Medicine Show.

Illustration: Aaron Meshon for eMusic (embiggen)

Tomorrow Fresh Air celebrates Woody Guthrie!

americanroutes:

(via My Dust Road Boxed Set, Rounder Records)

Woody Guthrie’s business card from his time at KFVD Los Angeles as co-host of the Woody and Lefty Lou show. 

mlarson:

Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s Rulin’s, 1942. (via). See also Johnny Cash’s to-do list and David Foster Wallace on the philosophical depth of country music.

1. Work more and better
2. Work by a schedule
3. Wash teeth if any
4. Shave
5. Take bath
6. Eat good - fruit - vegetables - milk
7. Drink very scant if any
8. Write a song a day
9. Wear clean clothes - look good
10. Shine shoes
11. Change socks
12. Change bed clothes often
13. Read lots good books
14. Listen to radio a lot
15. Learn people better
16. Keep rancho clean
17. Don’t get lonesome
18. Stay glad
19. Keep hoping machine running
20. Dream good
21. Bank all extra money
22. Save dough
23. Have company but don’t waste time
24. Send Mary and kids money
25. Play and sing good
26. Dance better
27. Help win war - beat fascism
28. Love Mama
29. Love Papa
30. Love Pete
31. Love everybody
32. Make up your mind
33. Wake up and fight

I was running the folk archive there when the archive was shut down by a rabid born-again Southerner who attacked it because we had recorded that cantankerous, rambling ballad-maker Woody Guthrie. He just then, by the way, recorded “This Land Is Your Land” and I recorded it for the Library of Congress. But they were so severe about it that they cut the whole Library of Congress appropriation out. Later it was put back but the archive didn’t recover for many years.

— Folklorist Alan Lomax, on the Library of Congress folk archive being censored for recording Woody Guthrie, in an interview that originally aired on Fresh Air in 1990.