Arlo Guthrie & Alice Now Staples of fall Holiday

By Jim Beckerman - 2015

November 26, 2015 marked the 50th anniversary of the events that inspired Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacre" and the freaks and free spirits got their own Thanksgiving.

"Alice's Restaurant," now a holiday staple at many radio stations is the counterculture's answer to the kind of wholesome Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving we're all familiar with -- not least from Norman Rockwell paintings.

So consider this curious footnote to history: Rockwell and Alice shared an address.

Alice Brock's restaurant -- the inspiration for Arlo Guthrie's famous album and "talking blues" song -- was in fact located directly below the studio of Norman Rockwell at 40 Main St., Stockbridge, Mass.

"It's kind of funny to think that I have become another attraction, in addition to Norman Rockwell, to the town of Stockbridge," Guthrie told The Record, by email.

The actual article from the

Berkshire Eagle detailing the

arrest of Arlo Guthrie for

littering and his sentencing 

of picking up the garbage

on Thanksgiving 1965.

This year's "Alice" anniversary marks, not the birth of the album or song -- both came out in 1967 -- but the real-life incidents that inspired them. It was 50 years ago today -- Thanksgiving 1965 -- that 18-year-old Arlo, son of legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie ("This Land Is Your Land"), volunteered to haul some garbage for his restaurateur friend Alice and her husband Ray. Fans of "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (the track's official title -- "massacree" being Ozark-ese for a tall tale) know what happened next: an 18 1/2-minute whopper involving cops, a blind judge, a draft board and a memorable group of social rejects on "the group W bench."

This year, to mark the golden anniversary, Guthrie ("The City of New Orleans") is reviving his famous story-song in concert -- something he does only sparingly these days. Guthrie, who also has a new children's book, "Monsters," out for the holiday season, will be at NJPAC on Sunday.

"We're doing a really big show for the 50th anniversary - lights and multimedia effects and even a fog machine," Guthrie says. "It's a little crazy, especially for a folk singer. But it has been very well received so far."

Meantime, many radio stations today will be doing what they do every year -- playing the entire, lengthy track as a holiday treat. Guthrie's non-traditional Thanksgiving yarn has itself, over time, become a much-loved Thanksgiving tradition.

"It's taken on a life of its own," says Kenny O'Boyle, host of WFDU's "Let There Be Country," who will be playing it at noon today. "Obviously the fact that the incident happened on Thanksgiving has a lot to do with it."

Back in the 1960s, of course, the takeaway of "Alice's Restaurant" had less to do with Thanksgiving than Vietnam. The punchline of the song, you'll recall, is that Arlo's criminal status as a "litterbug" makes him unacceptable as a soldier. "In the Vietnam era, it had such a poignant message," O'Boyle says.

Nevertheless, there's a reason the song has become a kind of alternative anthem for the holidays, O'Boyle says.

"We all know not everybody gets along with their family so great," he says. "Some people dread Thanksgiving. How about a Thanksgiving with your friends, the people you relate to?"

In the song "Alice's Restaurant," and even more in the 1969 Arthur Penn movie version, starring Arlo as himself, new-agers got an alternate take on Thanksgiving -- a laid-back day to celebrate with your groovy friends in a wicked cool setting. Possibly even one as cool as the deconsecrated church (now the Guthrie Center in Great Barrington, Mass.) where Arlo and his pals had their famous "Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat."

The film version, which paints Alice and Ray's church as almost a proto-hippie commune, may push this a bit far, Guthrie thinks.

"The movie version of it was so believable that even my kids thought it was a re-creation of actual events," Guthrie says. "But it was nothing like what really took place. There were just a half-dozen friends who had been invited by Alice and Ray Brock. We sat around, sang some hymns and old ballads after dinner. I loved the old church where they lived, and I slept up in the bell tower that night."

Moreover, by the time the movie was made, 1969, the end of the hippie era was plainly in sight, and the "Alice's Restaurant" film has an elegiac vibe that Guthrie isn't entirely happy with.

'30-percent-true story' 

"I loved working with Arthur Penn who directed the movie," Guthrie says. "But I didn't like the way the movie eventually came out. It was kind of depressing, and in real life we were not depressing people. I think what happened is that they wanted to make a 90-minute movie based on a 20-minute song. So they had to make up a lot of stuff. They made up parts that had much less humor, and used 100-percent real people to tell a 30-percent-true story."

But the fact that the movie was made at all was just one more improbable chapter in the odd saga of "Alice's Restaurant" -- one of the stranger tunes ever to hit the Top 20 (No. 17 on the Billboard charts). A shaggy-dog story set to some folksy strumming, nearly 20 minutes long, with a chorus that might be mistaken for an advertising jingle, is not exactly the definition of radio-friendly -- then or now. It was an odd combination of circumstances, Guthrie says, that made "Alice's Restaurant" a hit.

"WBAI in New York was where the song first got recorded," Guthrie recalls. "Just because I had wandered in the station late one night, and sat down to goof off with Bob Fass, who was the host of a late night show. The song got played a lot as a fundraising effort for the station. Later that year, in the summer of 1967, I went to the Newport Folk Festival and was invited to sing before the largest crowd I'd ever seen. Again, no one was expecting much of me, I was just a kid. But the following day the headline in The New York Times read 'Festival His - Just for a Song,' or something like that. They liked it. Within a few weeks, I'd had a record in the works which came out later that year. ... After that, all hell broke loose."

In the end, the most important fan of "Alice's Restaurant" may have been the first. Guthrie family tradition has it that "Alice's Restaurant" was the last song Woody Guthrie heard before he died on Oct. 3, 1967. "That's true," his son says. "He got to hear the reference recordings -- what we called 'test pressings' in those days. He passed away very shortly thereafter, a few weeks before the record came out."

Muddy Waters in 1960 - By Paul Oliver

Muddy Waters said to me once: "When I sing the blues, when I'm singing the real blues, I'm singing what I feel. Some people maybe want to laugh; maybe I don't talk so good and they don't understand you know? But when we sing the blues - when I sing the blues it come from the heart. From right here in your soul, an' if you' singing what you really feel it comes out all over. It ain't just what you saying, it pours out of you. Sweat runnin' down your face".

He is not a markedly eloquent man in conversation, but he never wastes words and what he has to say is always directly to the point. In those few sentences he summed up his attitude to the blues, what the blues meant to him and the effect that creating blues had upon him. Anything else is in a way, superfluous. Or perhaps, anything that one has to say about Muddy Waters is an amplification of these observations of his, if it is to have any value at all.

In more than one sense he is the ideal blues singer, for he epitomizes the blues for so many different groups of people. He is eminently sincere in what he does. He has no artifice, though at times he can be puzzling because he is so quiet in manner when he is not working. So his blues have meaning for him and they have depth; depth as great as his own complex personality. For those who live .by the blues his blues are an inspiration, and for those who are blues enthusiasts like ourselves, his blues are satisfying. I make the distinction because there is no real comparison between the significance of the blues within the black community and its significance to us who are so very much outside it. This is not to argue that our interest is in any way invalidated, but that it is of a different order. Most serious blues enthusiasts over here will know more about blues and the lives, work and recordings of the singers than the people who throng the small Chicago clubs, but the latter are there by reason of an inner compulsion and desire to share the music. For them the blues singer of the stature of Muddy Waters is a hero-figure, a "Race Man" as he would have been called a decade ago, who symbolizes achievement and success in his field - that of entertainment rather than just "blues". The blues enthusiast here may deplore the cultivation of the singers by the folknik clubs, the college circuit, the jazz festival. But the black man doesn't for these are significant inroads into a fairly well protected white dominated part of society. For the Mississippi black- who knows and hears every Muddy Waters record and is generally referred to in a matter of minutes - he is the perfect example of the "local boy makes good", the black rags-to-comparative-riches of the Great American Dream.

More than a Memorial to the Voice of the Delta

Charley Patton’s Grave: More than a Memorial in Holly Ridge

Mississippi Folklife

The Grave of Leo "Bud" Welch

Calhoun County Bluesman Leo “Bud” Welch passed away December 19, 2017 at the age of 85. His funeral service was Saturday, Dec. 23 at 11 a.m. at Jackson Chapel MB Church in Bruce.

Welch achieved international success in the last few years of his life and received numerous honors, including a prominent place on the Mississippi Blues Trail marker in Bruce. He played music ever since picking up his first guitar at age 12.

“I love all types of music – country, gospel, rock and of course the blues,” Welch said during a 2015 interview while sitting in his one-room home near the Piggly Wiggly in Bruce.

During his more than 60 years of playing, Welch sat in with blues legends John Lee Hooker, Elmore James and B.B. King.  “I always admired B.B. and the way he plays his guitar,” Welch said. “I love the way he chords the strings.”

Welch never tried to emulate any of the blues legends he admired, instead relying on his own self-taught method.  “I just play like I play,” Welch said. “I’m not trying to be anybody else.”

Born in Sabougla, Welch taught himself to play on his cousin R.C. Welch’s guitar.

“Whenever he would leave, me and his brother Orlando would go over and get his guitar and take turns playing,” Welch said.

The earliest songs he recalled playing were “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “Navajo Trail.”

“I remember seeing Roy Rogers playing ‘Navajo Trail’ in a movie so I started playing around with it,” he said.

His first time on stage was for programs at Sabougla Grammar School, but he was truly noticed during a school performance in Pittsboro.

“We were playing up there when those people started going wild over the little boy playing guitar,” Welch said. “They were pointing at me and just going wild.”

He fell in love with the blues at a young age and began playing wherever he could, such as Otis McCain’s 3-day picnic in the Horsepen Community. He played around Grenada and landed a regular appearance on WNAG radio with Alfred Harris and the Joy Jumpers.

Other places he recalled performing were the Cotton Bowl and The Blue Flame in Carroll County.

He moved to Bruce as a teen and played frequently around the local cafes where people would provide him change.

“People would drop nickels, dimes and quarters in my pockets and even in the hole in my guitar,” Welch said. “I’d get home and have to shake all the money out of my guitar.”

He would play in a number of bands over the years including “The Rising Soul Band” with Rev. Tommie Daniel of Bruce; “The Spirituals” with Raymond “Slick” Tillman, Grady Gladney, James Foster and others; and the “Sabougla Voices” with Zoila and Betty Tucker, Marty Conley and Lovie Lipsey.

Welch continued to play most every Sunday in a church somewhere throughout his life. He most often played at his home church in Sabougla on the first and third Sundays of each month and at Double Springs in Webster County on the other Sundays.

He also hosted a show on W7BN each week entitled “Black Gospel Express.”

Up into his 80s, Welch never slowed down, playing as much as ever traveling deep into the Mississippi Delta weekly to play at clubs such as Ground Zero, Hambone’s and Reds.

“I still love playing the blues, and there’s a lot of people interested in the blues now that didn’t used to be,” Welch said. “Lot of the times I play there’s a lot more white people in the audience than black people.”

Welch can also play the harmonica and fiddle, but prefers the sound of his electric guitar for a few reasons. One is because it’s easier for him to hear after suffering some hearing loss from 30 years of cutting timber.

“I love gospel but I really enjoy playing those old blues songs, too,” he said. “People still love them. The blues are just a history of life. They make people feel good.”