“Nursery Days” – Woody Guthrie

Album: Nursery Days

Artist: Woody Guthrie

Year: 1951

Genre: Folk

Grade: B+

It’s true that Woody Guthrie doesn’t have the most beautiful voice, and it’s also true that Guthrie’s songwriting isn’t the most complex, yet his wry wisdom and tuneful sense of humor always win out. Even when he’s singing children’s tunes — the simplest of the simple, Nursery Days, a 16-song collection of goofy rhymes with solo guitar accompaniment — Guthrie’s music remains compelling.

Like all the best folk music, simpler is better, and Guthrie’s incantatory repetition of nonsense phrases (“Put your finger on your finger and your finger on your finger/ Put your finger on your finger on your finger on your finger”) becomes a mesmerizing almost-profound chant, aided by the lush drone of a chugging acoustic six-string rhythm engine. The songs on Nursery Days are admittedly stupid, but that’s all they aspire to be anyway, which reveals just as much about Guthrie’s artistic philosophy as his classic 1940 LP, Dust Bowl Ballads: the modern-day contemporary folksinger should pride himself on his ability to sing about anything.

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