Trad and folk great Andy Irvine had released Devoted, a new album on which he covers the songs of Woody Guthrie. We spoke to him about his long distance friendship with the late singer and why Woody will never go out of fashion
Right about the same time a young buck from Minnesota called Bob Dylan was making weekly pilgrimages to upstate New York to visit an ailing Woody Guthrie, another young buck thousands of miles away in London was also communing with the great folk singer and activist.
Andy Irvine, founding member of Planxty and trad and folk great, was in his late teens when he began writing letters to Guthrie as he lay in a hospital bed in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, battling Huntington’s disease.
Woody Guthrie
Guthrie, who finally succumbed in 1967, was the firebrand Oklahoma protest singer of dustbowl and depression USA. His rousing and often satirical songs about mass migration, political skullduggery, economic inequality, and the search for dignity still resonate decades later.
He remains a powerful throughline for musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg, while Carlos O’Connell of Fontaines D.C. has “this machine kills fascists emblazoned” on the front of his keyboard, inspired by the legend carved into Woody’s own battered old acoustic.
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Irvine, now years 84 years old and still very much on the road and recording music, had discovered Guthrie’s music a few years previously and, just like Dylan, it was to have a profound lifelong effect on him.
In fact, you might say he has composed his final letter to Guthrie with the release of Devoted, a new album on which he, his old friend Dónal Lunny, Bruce Molsky, Mike McGoldrick, and Rens van der Zalm, put a very Irish spin on Woody songs like Buffalo Skinners, Tom Joad and Mister Charlie Lindbergh.
Speaking from his home studio in Enniscorthy, Irvine takes up the story. “Writing that first letter was a last resort because the world was a much bigger place back then. There was no way of finding out where someone called ‘Woody Guthrie’ was. So I addressed the letter ‘Woody Guthrie, USA’ and I waited in hope but it came back six weeks later saying insufficiently addressed . . .
“Then after that everything happened quite quickly. First of all, I found a record of his called More Songs by Woody Guthrie by Cisco Houston, then I met Jack Elliot and I was introduced to Pete Seeger and he told me where Woody was . . .
“It would have been just before Dylan began visiting Woody. I was aware of Dylan from slightly earlier than most people and I think I was in touch with Woody before he was.”
The young Irvine dutifully began writing more letters but because Woody couldn’t write back due to his illness, a couple called Sid and Bob Gleason, who looked after him at weekends, replied on his behalf.
“Sid wrote back to me immediately and I will always remember her first letter said ‘Dear Andy . . . I hope you don’t mind me calling you Andy but Andrew sounds just a little bit official’. So I became Andy at that instance.”
It is another great example of the almost magical confluence of serendipity and fate that seems to have blessed Irvine throughout his life.
Born in London in 1942, he began life as a child actor on TV and film but is best known, alongside Christy Moore, Dónal Lunny, and Liam O’Flynn, as a founding member of Planxty, the seminal group that transformed Irish traditional music for a new generation.
Planxty
His long career also saw him join Sweeney’s Men when he followed his muse to Dublin in the mid-sixties and he also recorded one of the greatest Irish albums of all time, 1976’s Andy Irving & Paul Brady. He is credited with broadening the horizons of Irish music with the introduction of the rhythms and melodies of the Balkans that he gathered on his lifelong travels.
And now Devoted arrives at a time when Guthrie’s songs are as keenly relevant than ever, with a new tide of fascism and far right ideology unleashed. “It’s been like that for many years but it keeps getting worse and worse,” Irvine says. “It wasn’t a reason for making the record but I was aware of the fact that Woody has never gone out of fashion, the songs he wrote and the stories he told are as valid today as he were when he wrote them.”
There have been tribute albums of Woody songs before, most notably Folkways: A Vision Shared, which featured Springsteen, Wilco, Billy Bragg, and U2 but Irvine was set on making an indelibly Irish album of the great man’s work.
The playing on Devoted is, of course, beautiful as Woody’s sparse, one-chord, scratch guitar songs are rebuilt as pocket symphonies of sweet folk and trad. It brings it all back home as Appalachia goes back to its Celtic roots.
But what would Woody himself make of it all?
“Hahaha. I think he would say it is too complicated,” Irvine laughs. “Well, who can say but Woody liked simplicity and I am a bit the opposite. I like complicated so that may have been a criticism from him of this album. I hope and think he would have liked it.”
He adds, “When I’d write to him, I used to make tapes for him with Rambling Jack Elliot and Woody would sing along to them so I think he would have sung along to this record too.”
Sadly, he no longer has those tapes or the letters Woody sent to him. “Unfortunately not. I lost all those letters about forty years ago and when you mention it now, I feel like weeping.”
Woody still has a profound effect on Irvine, philosophically and politically – it even led to a very Bob Dylan moment for the young Irvine. “Yeah, yeah. I took him on 100%. Everything he said, I agreed with. I even pretended to be Woody once. I was hanging out in this small town in England because I was stalking a young lady.
“These two boys came up to me and said, ‘who are you and why are you hanging around?’ and I immediately put on this Oklahoma accent and said ‘my name is Woody . . . ‘ and they were thrilled – this guy from a long distance away who played the guitar and sang!
“It was a great friendship which nearly had a disastrous ending. We were stopped late at night, the two boys and me, by a plainclothes policeman and he said ‘who are you?’ And I thought ‘what am I going to say?’ and I heard myself saying, ‘I’m Woody from Oklahoma . . . ‘ He didn’t ask me for my passport or anything and told us to go home because it was late.
“My parents and me were staying in this house with friends and the next Sunday, I came downstairs and who was there – only the plainclothes policeman! It could have been a total embarrassment. He said, ‘haven’t I met you somewhere before?’ and I said, ‘oh no, nooooo, nooooo!’ I never pretended to be Woody again!”
When I remark that Mark Ellis aka Flood, the English music producer who has worked with Depeche Mode, U2, PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, seems a curious choice to produce Devoted, Andy has another surprise in store.
“He’s my son in law. He’s married to my daughter, Willow, so that made it a little bit easier,. I’ve never worked with him before and the sessions were really good. It took him a while to get into my head. He did come up with a few things that might have been good for someone else but weren’t right for me but he worked really hard. He’s a perfectionist.”
Out of the new generation of Irish acts – Madra Salach, the Mary Wallopers, Lankum, The Scratch and the more pop-attuned Amble and Kingfishr – who are carrying on Irish music traditions, he singles out Ye Vagabonds as a personal favourite.
“I’ve played with them a few times. I really have to listen to those other bands you’ve mentioned because people keep asking me about them and I haven’t got an answer.”
As a parting glass and to bring it all back home, I ask Andy did he see Dylan play Dublin in ’66?
“No, I didn’t. I was away and later everybody told me that all he was saying was ‘where’s Andy Irvine? Where’s Andy Irvine . . . ?’, which kinda thrilled me, as you can imagine. It sounds far-fetched but a number of people told me the same thing.
“But there was no way of getting in touch with the man so I missed him and that was that.”
Hasn’t Andy Irvine ever heard of the lost art of letter-writing . . . ?
Devoted is out now. Details of Andy’s upcoming tour dates are on andyirvine.com.