Top 10 Most Influential Folk Artists: Number One: Woody Guthrie

"I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you." Wood Guthrie

Biography:

Woody Guthrie was born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma. His father was a cowyboy and a local politician, and his mother was institutionalized when Woody was just a boy.
After Okemah's boomtown status started to lose speed, Woody headed down to texas where he married his first wife. There he also joined his first band, the Corn Cobb Trio, and started writing songs at an alarming rate.

Around the time the stock market crashed, unemployed men from all over the Dust Bowl states started heading out in search of jobs and promising futures. Woody was among them, and he spent the next couple of years hopping railroad cars, and in some cases even walking to California.

Once he arrived in California, he got a job doing weekly radio broadcasts, wherein he covered all sorts of social and political commentary. He quickly tired of that lifestyle, though, and headed to New York City two years later.

In New York, Woody joined up with Pete Seeger to form leftist troupe the Almanac Singers, and enjoyed a bit of fame entertaining leftist organizations and labor unions. Soon, he was married again, and fathered four children, including Cathy, Arlo, Joady, and Nora Lee.

As World War II heated up, Woody enlisted with the Merchant Marines and served several tours of duty before returning home in 1946 to his family in Coney Island, NY.

Always subject to his wanderlust, he headed back onto the road with his protégé Ramblin Jack Elliot. Later, in California, he would marry a third time, before falling ill. In 1954, Woody was admitted to a hospital in New Jersey. Over the next decade, he was constantly in and out of the hospital, and was treated for illnesses from alcoholism to schizophrenia.

In 1967, Woody Guthrie died of Huntington's Chorea, but his music continues to thrive. In 1988, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and in 1996, he was honored at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame American Music Masters Series.

Top 10 Most Influential Folk Artists: Number Two: Bob Dylan

"Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot." Bob Dylan

Biography:

Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in 1941 in Duluth, MN. When he was six years old, his father came down with polio, and the family moved to Hibbing where Bob grew up in a small Jewish community.
In 1959, he enrolled in the University at Minneapolis, where he became involved in the local folk music scene. It was during this time that he started using the name Bob Dylan, which has no verifiable origin.

At the end of his first year in college, Dylan quit school but stayed in Minneapolis and remained active in the Folk scene. During a tour in 1961, he spent a good deal of time in New York City, and was eventually signed to Columbia Records.

Over the next half-decade, Bob wrote and released a hand full of records that became sentinels in the evolving folk-rock scene. His "Blowin in the Wind" (Purchase/Download) and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" typified a generation and soon became somewhat anthemic tributes to the emerging social climate at the time.

Then, finding himself pigeon-holed as a protest song writer, Dylan changed the tune with the release of Another Side of Bob Dylan in 1964. This record showcased less serious tunes and introduced fans to a more edgy and somewhat sentimental side of his work.

Over the next 30 years, Dylan continued to release timely topical records as well as some occasional flat out rock and roll records. He's toured at the pace only a Folk singer could really hold up. And he's managed to influence just about every second or third artist making a living these days in music.

Top 10 Most Influential Folk Artists: Number Three: Joni Mitchell

"Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell." Jonni Mitchell

Bigoraphy:

Roberta Joan Anderson (Joni Mitchell) was born in 1943 in Fort McLeod, Alberta, Canada. She began playing piano, guitar, and ukelele as a very young child, but was always primarily a painter.
In 1965, she was married briefly to the Folk singer Chuck Mitchell, from whom she took her name. During the mid 1960s, Joni enjoyed early success as a songwriter, while other artists took her original songs to the top of the charts. Meanwhile, she continued to play in folk clubs and coffeehouses around the country.

Throughout the next decade, Joni released several memorable and inimitable recordings that have been hailed as some of the best from a contemporary folk singer/songwriter. The influences of jazz and rock started creeping into her work toward the middle of the 1970s.

Since then, Joni Mitchell has displayed her wealth of talent by dabbling in genres ranging from rock to pop and jazz. She is best known for her emotive, poetic lyrics and her impressively wide vocal range.

She was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1981, and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. In 2002, she was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for her life's work.

Top 10 Most Influential Folk Artists: Number Four: Bill Monroe

"Bluegrass is wonderful music. I'm glad I originated it." Bill Monroe

Early Days:
Bill Monroe was born in Rosine, Kentucky, in 1911. He started playing mandolin as a small child, and was part of his Uncle Pendleton Vandiver's backup band at local dances. He was orphaned at the age of 16, at which point he moved to Chicago to live with his brothers Birch and Charlie.
Bill Monroe Starts Bluegrass:

After several years of playing with his brothers, Bill formed his own band in 1938. In honor of his home state, he called them "The Blue Grass Boys." By the time the 1940s rolled around, Bill had added lyrics to his Bluegrass tunes, and was revered as the grandfather of Bluegrass. In 1965, Bill was the main act at the first multi-day Bluegrass festival. He also started his own festival in rural Indiana.

Bill Monroe in the Hall of Fame:
In 1970, Bill was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He won the National Endowment for the Arts' Heritage Award. In 1989, he was awarded the first ever Grammy award for a Bluegrass record, and in 1995, Bill Clinton awarded him with the National Medal of Honor. A year after his death in 1996, Monroe was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Artists Influenced by Bill Monroe:
Many of Bluegrass' best players came from the Blue Grass Boys, including Earl Scruggs and Del McCoury. Newer artists that were clearly influenced by Bill's sound range from Gillian Welch to Railroad Earth and Open Road.

David Bowie By Lou Reed

David Bowie's contribution to rock & roll has been wit and sophistication. He's smart, he's a true musician and he can really sing. He's got such a big range: I like the Ziggy Stardust voice, but he's got a lot of different voices. He's got his crooner voice, when he wants to. And he has a melodic sense that's well above anyone else in rock & roll. Most people could not sing some of his melodies. He can really go for a high note. Take "Satellite of Love," on my Transformer album: There's a part at the very end, where he goes all the way up. It's fabulous.

There had been androgyny in rock from Little Richard on up, but David put his own patina on it, to say the least. He thought hard about that Ziggy character; he'd been studying mime, and he didn't do it just for laughs. He was very aware of stagecraft. He made an entire show out of that character -- and then he left it behind. How smart can you get? Can you imagine if he had to keep doing Ziggy? I mean, if you listened to what critics and audiences say, you'd be playing four songs over and over again. David set himself up to do other characters, like the Thin White Duke. And his take on American soul music, on albums like Young Americans, was incredibly good; the original material he wrote was great.

I can't pick a favorite record. It depends on my mood -- any of the dance records; Ziggy Stardust; I always liked "Bewlay Brothers," that track on Hunky Dory. And the albums he did with Brian Eno, like Low and Heroes, are phenomenal. He's always changing, so you never get tired of what he's doing. And I mean all the way up to now: "The Loneliest Guy" on his latest album, Reality, is a great song. Yet another one.

We're still friends after all these years, amazingly enough. We go to the occasional art show and museum together, and I always like working with him. I really love what David does, so I'm happy that he's still doing it and that he's still interested. I saw him play here in New York on his last tour, and it was one of the greatest rock shows I've ever seen.

The Beatles By Elvis Costello

I first heard of the Beatles when I was nine years old. I spent most of my holidays on Merseyside then, and a local girl gave me a bad publicity shot of them with their names scrawled on the back. This was 1962 or '63, before they came to America. The photo was badly lit, and they didn't quite have their look down; Ringo had his hair slightly swept back, as if he wasn't quite sold on the Beatles haircut yet. I didn't care about that; they were the band for me. The funny thing is that parents and all their friends from Liverpool were also curious and proud about this local group. Prior to that, the people in show business from the north of England had all been comedians. Come to think of it, the Beatles recorded for Parlophone, which was a comedy label.

I was exactly the right age to be hit by them full on. My experience -- seizing on every picture, saving money for singles and EPs, catching them on a local news show -- was repeated over and over again around the world. It was the first time anything like this had happened on this scale. But it wasn't just about the numbers; Michael Jackson can sell records until the end of time, but he'll never matter to people as much as the Beatles did.

Every record was a shock when it came out. Compared to rabid R&B evangelists like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles arrived sounding like nothing else. They had already absorbed Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry, but they were also writing their own songs. They made writing your own material expected, rather than exceptional.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney were exceptional songwriters; McCartney was, and is, a truly virtuoso musician; George Harrison wasn't the kind of guitar player who tore off wild, unpredictable solos, but you can sing the melodies of nearly all of his breaks. Most important, they always fit right into the arrangement. Ringo Starr played the drums with an incredibly unique feel that nobody can really copy, although many fine drummers have tried and failed. Most of all, John and Paul were fantastic singers.

Lennon, McCartney and Harrison had stunningly high standards as writers. Imagine releasing a song like "Ask Me Why" or "Things We Said Today" as a B side. They made such fantastic records as "Paperback Writer" b/w "Rain" or "Penny Lane" b/w "Strawberry Fields Forever" and only put them out as singles. These records were events, and not just advance notice of an album release.

Then they started to really grow up. Simple love lyrics to adult stories like "Norwegian Wood," which spoke of the sour side of love, and on to bigger ideas than you would expect to find in catchy pop lyrics.

They were pretty much the first group to mess with the aural perspective of their recordings and have it be more than just a gimmick. Brilliant engineers at Abbey Road Studios like Geoff Emerick invented techniques that we now take for granted in response to the group's imagination. Before the Beatles, you had guys in lab coats doing recording experiments in the Fifties, but you didn't have rockers deliberately putting things out of balance, like a quiet vocal in front of a loud track on "Strawberry Fields Forever." You can't exaggerate the license that this gave to everyone from Motown to Jimi Hendrix.

My absolute favorite albums are Rubber Soul and Revolver. On both records you can hear references to other music -- R&B, Dylan, psychedelia -- but it's not done in a way that is obvious or dates the records. When you picked up Revolver, you knew it was something different. Heck, they are wearing sunglasses indoors in the picture on the back of the cover and not even looking at the camera . . . and the music was so strange and yet so vivid. If I had to pick a favorite song from those albums, ift would be "And Your Bird Can Sing" . . . no, "Girl" . . . no, "For No One" . . . and so on, and so on. . . .

Their breakup album, Let It Be, contains songs both gorgeous and jagged. I suppose ambition and human frailty creep into every group, but they managed to deliver some incredible performances. I remember going to Leicester Square and seeing the film of Let It Be in 1970. I left with a melancholy feeling.

The word Beatlesque has been in the dictionary for a while now. I can hear them in the Prince album Around the World in a Day; in Ron Sexsmith's tunes; in Harry Nilsson's melodies. You can hear that Kurt Cobain listened to the Beatles and mixed them in with punk and metal in some of his songs. You probably wouldn't be listening to the ambition of the latest OutKast record if the Beatles hadn't made the White Album into a double LP!

I've co-written some songs with Paul McCartney and performed with him in concert on two occasions. In 1999, a little time after Linda McCartney's death, Paul did the Concert for Linda, organized by Chrissie Hynde. During the rehearsal, I was singing harmony on a Ricky Nelson song, and Paul called out the next tune: "All My Loving." I said, "Do you want me to take the harmony line the second time round?" And he said, "Yeah, give it a try." I'd only had thirty-five years to learn the part. It was a very poignant performance, witnessed only by the crew and other artists on the bill.

At the show, it was very different. The second he sang the opening lines -- "Close your eyes, and I'll kiss you" -- the crowd's reaction was so intense that it all but drowned the song out. It was very thrilling but also rather disconcerting. Perhaps I understood in that moment one of the reasons why the Beatles had to stop performing. The songs weren't theirs anymore. They were everybody's.