Thomas Bull - A Fast Running Train Whistles Down (2022)

So when is an album of songs by Woody Guthrie not an album of songs by Woody Guthrie? When it’s an album of reimagined Woody Guthrie songs. Let me explain. The title is taken from a chapter in Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound For Glory (from which Thomas Bull quotes on the inner sleeve of A Fast Running Train Whistles Down – Songs by Woody Guthrie), using the hiatus of gigs during lockdown to set aside his job as a booking agent for heritage acts and record his own material, Bull has taken a mix of classics and more obscure numbers and, accompanied by bassist Joe Downard, Max Revell on percussion and Dan Walsh on restrained banjo, basically revised some of the original lyrics for a contemporary audience.

A case in point is the opening Hard Travelin’ which slows down the tempo and pretty much rewrites the whole song while keeping the sentiment intact. Equally taken at a slower pace, a five-minute This Land Is Your land follows on which he does the same to a lesser extent, switching around words here and there, this drawing on the original 1940 version with its (rearranged) verses about no trespassing signs and hunger.

It’s followed by Ramblin’ Man, the first of three recorded interviews with Guthrie from the Library of Congress, which he has set to backing music, an inspired touch that affords background for those who may know the songs but not be as conversant with the life.

He returns to the music with the chugging rhythm of Two Good Men, which, staying pretty much faithful to the original, relates the story of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian shoe factory workers in Boston who were controversially convicted of the murder of two clerks in a payroll robbery and sent to the electric chair, although their real crime was being union organisers, rather given away by the judge referring to them as ‘anarchist bastards’.

Again remaining faithful to Guthrie’s words, driven by a handclaps march beat and Walsh’s circling banjo notes, Buffalo Skinners again has a historical backdrop, here the exploitation of hired hands hired to drive buffalo back in 1883, the drover coming to an ugly end after refusing to pay the wages.

This Guy Has A Guitar is the second interview, talking about his time out in the wheatbelt and oil fields, working on a root beer stand that also sold under-the-counter bottles ‘of another description’, playing on the guy’s guitar when there were no customers and drifting into making music.

Only slightly tweaked (though it could have done without yee hoos in the background), the fingerpicked Big City Ways is Guthrie’s view of how life in the city on poor wages, run by the finance companies, grinds down the working man (“the banker got his furniture and the auto company got his car”).

A repeat drum thump, banjo and hand percussion power Hard Ain’t It Hard, which juggles the verses but otherwise, written from a female perspective, stays true to a lament about loving unfaithful men.

The last song returning to the evergreens with the weary I Ain’t Got No Home and, while he again alters some words and surprisingly omits the second verse (“Rich man took my home and drove me from my door”) that perfectly captures Guthrie’s empathy for the dispossessed.

It ends with the third interview excerpt, The End Of The World, Guthrie recalling the dust storms of the 1930s that devastated the farmlands of Amarillo, Texas, where “the wheat grows, the oil flows and the farmer owes” and, in particular, one he witnessed on April 14, 1935, that came up like “the Red Sea closing in on the Israel children” and blocked out all the light, feeling like this was indeed the end of the world. Now purists might regard some of the ‘liberties’ taken as sacrilege. Still, even they should recognise Bull’s affection for the source material and appreciate his aim of bringing the timelessness of Guthrie’s words and politics to a new generation.