The Singing Guthries

Don't miss Arlo Guthrie at the KiMo on April 3.  This show is going to sell out!

This year is the centenary of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie of Oklahoma, father of Arlo Guthrie, the hippie musical activist and performer. David Dunaway, KUNM disc jockey and Pete Seeger's biographer who has also interviewed Arlo multiple times, will talk about the Guthrie legacy and play excerpts from interviews with father and son. Author of Singing Out: An Oral History of America's Folk Music Revivals, How Can I Keep From Singing: Pete Seeger and his new Route 66 Companion, Dunaway provides background and fresh insights for a deeper understanding of the singing Guthrie family. Autographed copies will be available for purchase.

For those interested in epic music biographies, political activism, and the folk music revival—or anyone looking for a truly American story, Seeger's biography reveals how the son of a respectable Puritan family became a consummate performer and American rebel. Updated with new research and interviews, unpublished photographs, and thoughtful comments from Pete Seeger himself, How Can I Keep From Singing? is an inside history of a man whom Carl Sandburg called "America's Tuning Fork." In this award-winning biography, the only work on Seeger, David Dunaway parts the curtain through hundreds of interviews with Pete, his family, friends, and fellow musicians to present a compelling portrait of a most remarkable performer, composer, and activist.

Intimate, anecdotal, and spellbinding, Singing Out offers a fascinating oral history of the North American folk music revivals and folk music. Culled from more than 150 interviews recorded from 1976 to 2006, this captivating story spans seven decades and cuts across a wide swath of generations and perspectives, shedding light on the musical, political, and social aspects of this movement. The narrators highlight many of the major folk revival figures, including Pete Seeger, Bernice Reagon, Phil Ochs, Mary Travers, Don McLean, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Ry Cooder, and Holly Near. Together they tell the stories of such musical groups as the Composers' Collective, the Almanac Singers, People's Songs, the Weavers, the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Freedom Singers. Folklorists, musicians, musicologists, writers, activists, and aficionados reveal not only what happened during the folk revivals, but what it meant to those personally and passionately involved. For everyone who ever picked up a guitar, fiddle, or banjo, this will be a book to give and cherish.

For the last thirty years, David King Dunaway has documented the work of Pete Seeger, resulting in How Can I Keep From Singing? The Ballad of Pete Seeger, published by McGraw Hill in 1981 and revised, updated, and republished by Villard/​Random House, 2008. Author of a nine volumes of history and biography, Dunaway's specialty is the presentation of folklore, literature, and history via broadcasting. He's been active in radio since 1972, but over the last dozen years he has been Executive Producer of award-winning national radio series for Public Radio International. He is currently a DJ for KUNM-FM and a professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.