You Can (Still) Get Anything You Want …. Arlo Guthrie. Norwood Concert Hall. [review]

Abstract

There is something irrepressibly good-natured about Arlo Guthrie and he’s been like that for forty years.

Opening with "Chilling of the Evening", one of his earliest folk rock songs, he follows with a string band ditty from the Oklahoma hills. Guthrie, ever the raconteur, is also historian to the great days of American music. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Josh White, the Weavers, they all visited the Guthrie house where Woody and his wife Marjorie, herself famous as a bohemian dancer with the Martha Graham troupe, held court. Without affectation, Arlo recalls singing St James Infirmary with Cisco Houston as a kid of thirteen.

On stage, with his son Abe on keyboards and pedal steel player Gordon Titcombe, Guthrie still carries the world lightly in his hand.