Woody Guthrie's recordings, restricted almost exclusively to the '40s, have been in the public domain in Europe for years due to a copyright limit of only 50 years in that territory. (In the U.S., where copyrights last much longer, his tracks continue to be claimed by such labels as BMG and Smithsonian Folkways.) That allows a reissue label like Great Britain's Prism Leisure, which specializes in unlicensed collections of such material, free to remaster old vinyl records and put out albums like this without paying royalties to the original recording companies, the recording artist, or his estate. It also allows the label to compile the material any way it likes, and
Hard Travellin' is a good example of the result. On the one hand, it's a generous collection for a mid-priced disc, containing 25 songs and running 69 minutes. On the other hand, it's all over the lot. The selections seem to have been sequenced randomly, and they are drawn, without attribution, from various aspects of
Guthrie's discography including his children's songs ("Car Song," "Ship in the Sky"), his work as a member of
the Almanac Singers ("I Ride an Old Paint," "Hard, Ain't It Hard"), his celebrated
Dust Bowl Ballads album ("Dust Bowl Blues"), and, most of all the many casually made recordings he did for
Moses Asch that subsequently appeared on Folkways Records and other Asch imprints. The last source dominates, and it finds
Guthrie, sometimes paired with pals
Cisco Houston and
Sonny Terry, running through lots of old folk songs and revealing his extensive debts to such predecessors as
Jimmie Rodgers and
the Carter Family. This miscellaneous collection is not to be understood as any sort of
Guthrie best-of; there's no "This Land Is Your Land" or "Pastures of Plenty" to be found. Instead, it's just a jumble of tracks, some better than others. Typical of this sort of effort, annotations are minimal; just the typical two pages of biography-oriented liner notes stocked with typos, grammatical mistakes and factual errors. (No,
Arlo Guthrie was not a child of
Woody Guthrie's first marriage.)