Home in This World: Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads

With planet Earth facing myriad apocalypse-inducing crises, Home in This World: Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads, is a timely project. It is a track-by-track reinterpretation of the first and most successful commercial recording by the legendary folk singer-songwriter-activist, which was originally released on Victor Records in 1940.

The brainchild of Randall Poster, a celebrated film and TV music supervisor, Home in This World features an eclectic line-up of artists, each of whom contributes a version of one of Guthrie’s 14 songs, which chronicled the devastating impact of the human-caused dust storms that ravaged the American and Canadian prairie lands in the 1930s. Contributors to the cause include Lee Ann Womack (‘Dusty Old Dust’), Chris Thile (‘Tom Joad, Part 1’), John Paul White (‘Pretty Boy Floyd’), The Secret Sisters (‘Dust Cain’t Kill Me’), Waxahatchee (‘Talking Dust Bowl Blues’) and Shovels & Rope, whose brilliantly imaginative take on ‘Dust Bowl Blues’ opens the album. A stripped-to-the-bones arrangement features Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst harmonising above a three-note guitar lick, their voices slightly off-kilter and cracking, as if worn out and caked with dust. In similarly eloquent musical language Home in This World speaks to the present through the prism of hard lessons long since learned.