Around the coun­try today, along with a food-coma induc­ing serv­ing of turkey, ham, stuff­ing and all the trim­mings, a great many of you will be fol­low­ing anoth­er tra­di­tion: lis­ten­ing to Arlo Guthrie’s 1968 song “Alice’s Restau­rant.” Accord­ing to one YouTu­ber, when her kids were young, she’d “sit them down togeth­er and play this/torture them with it from begin­ning to end.” The replies sug­gest she’s not alone. Some­where a child has now grown up and is pass­ing the song down to a younger gen­er­a­tion.

“Alice’s Restau­rant” is about Thanks­giv­ing in the same way that it’s about a restau­rant owned by Alice–very lit­tle. Instead, it’s a long shag­gy but true tale about Guthrie and his friend Rick Rob­bins help­ing their friends out after a Thanks­giv­ing din­ner that “couldn’t be beat”. With trash fill­ing up the gut­ted for­mer small-town Mass­a­chu­setts church where Alice and her hus­band were liv­ing, the two fill up their VW van with the refuse and ille­gal­ly dump it in the back woods. Guthrie gets arrest­ed, tak­en to court, and fined for lit­ter­ing, only to have his new crim­i­nal record lat­er dis­qual­i­fy him for the draft.

That’s the des­ti­na­tion, but it’s the jour­ney that makes the song, an 18-plus minute “talk­ing blues” that Guthrie would have learned from his dad, folk leg­end Woody Guthrie. Woody in turn learned it from a 1920s coun­try and Blues musi­cian called Chris Bouch­illon, who talked his way through songs because his singing voice wasn’t all that good. And the sim­ple pick­ing style Guthrie traces from Mis­sis­sip­pi John Hurt to Pete Seeger and Ram­blin’ Jack Elliot all the way back to the moth­er­land: “In its infan­cy, that’s an African style approach to a six-string gui­tar and I have always loved it,” he told Rolling Stone.

Guthrie start­ed writ­ing the song, titling it “Alice’s Restau­rant Mas­sacree,” an eso­teric word mean­ing a series of absurd events. He work­shopped it in cof­fee hous­es and live venues, adding to it, tak­ing bits out that weren’t work­ing, play­ing with the time, from 18 min­utes all the way up to 35. In Feb­ru­ary of 1967 Guthrie was invit­ed to play live on New York City’s WBAI-FM. The record­ing became a hit, and helped the non-prof­it sta­tion fund-raise, broad­cast­ing the song when a total dol­lar amount was hit. When the song got too much air­play, they also fund-raised to stop play­ing the song.

Then came the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val, where the day­time crowd of 3,500 loved it so much that Guthrie returned for the evening set to play it to 9,500, joined on stage with a who’s‑who of folk leg­ends includ­ing Pete Seeger and Oscar Brand. This was a big deal for an 18-year-old musi­cian. The album came in Octo­ber of that year, where the song took up a whole side. A movie adap­ta­tion appeared two years lat­er, with the actu­al peo­ple from the song–including police chief William Oban­hein (Offi­cer Obie in the song) and the blind Judge James Hannon–playing them­selves in the movie.

The song might not have its stay­ing pow­er if it wasn’t for its themes of resist­ing author­i­ty and bureau­cra­cy, pos­si­bly even more than the anti-war mes­sage at its end.

“I’ve remained dis­trust­ful of author­i­ty for my entire life,” Guthrie told Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine, “I believe it’s one of the great strengths of a democ­ra­cy, that we take seri­ous­ly our role as the ulti­mate author­i­ties by our inter­est and our votes. Younger peo­ple have always had a rebel­lious streak. It goes with the ter­ri­to­ry of grow­ing up.”

Guthrie retired from tour­ing, and had retired the song even ear­li­er than that. But it lives on every Thanks­giv­ing in many house­holds. As he told Rolling Stone, that’s a fine lega­cy:

“Hey if they’re gonna play one song of yours on the radio one day a year, it might as well be the longest one you wrote!”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Two Leg­ends, Lead Bel­ly & Woody Guthrie, Per­form­ing on the Same Radio Show (1940)

William S. Bur­roughs Reads His Sar­cas­tic “Thanks­giv­ing Prayer” in a 1988 Film By Gus Van Sant

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 13 Tips for What to Do with Your Left­over Thanks­giv­ing Turkey

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

What made Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an such a great gui­tarist? If you ask Metallica’s Kirk Ham­mett, a devot­ed stu­dent of the blues, it’s “his tim­ing, his tone, his feel, his vibra­to, his phrasing–everything. Some peo­ple are just born to play gui­tar, and Ste­vie was def­i­nite­ly one of them.” This may come as dis­ap­point­ing news to gui­tar play­ers who want to sound like SRV but weren’t born with his genes. Ham­mett assures them it’s pos­si­ble to approx­i­mate his style, to some degree, with the right gear and mas­tery of his sig­na­ture tech­niques. Ham­mett lays out the SRV reper­toire thor­ough­ly, but there is no sub­sti­tute for the source.

SRV’s dual edu­ca­tion in both the British blues and the Amer­i­can blues of his heroes gave him “less reser­va­tions and less rea­sons to be so-called a ‘purist,’” he says in the video above. He then pro­ceeds to blow us away with imi­ta­tions of the greats and his own par­tic­u­lar spin on their tech­niques.

You could call it a gui­tar les­son, but as his stu­dent, you had bet­ter have advanced blues chops and a very good ear. As he runs through the styles of his idols, Vaugh­an doesn’t slow down or pause to explain what he’s doing. If you can keep up, you prob­a­bly don’t need the lessons after all.

Although com­pared, favor­ably or oth­er­wise, to his idol Jimi Hen­drix dur­ing his life and after his trag­ic death at 35, Vaugh­an also “incor­po­rat­ed the jazz stylings of Djan­go Rein­hardt, Ken­ny Bur­rell and Wes Mont­gomery,” Gui­tar mag­a­zine notes, and was “a keen stu­dent of Mud­dy Waters, Albert King, Fred­die King, Chuck Berry, Lon­nie Mack and Otis Rush.” Mud­dy Waters, in turn, was a great admir­er of Vaugh­an. “Ste­vie could per­haps be the great­est gui­tar play­er that ever lived,” the blues leg­end remarked in 1979. But like his hero Hen­drix, Vaughan’s tal­ent could be over­shad­owed by his addic­tions. “He won’t live to get 40 years old if he doesn’t leave that white pow­der alone,” Waters went on.

The drugs and alco­hol near­ly killed him, but they didn’t seem to cramp his play­ing. The video above comes from a Jan­u­ary 1986 sound­check, the same year Vaughan’s sub­stance abuse hit its peak and he entered rehab after near­ly dying of dehy­dra­tion in Ger­many. He would get sober and sur­vive, only to die in a heli­copter crash four years lat­er. While his ear­ly death may have some­thing to do with the way he has been dei­fied, what comes through in his albums and per­for­mances thir­ty years after he left us is the brute fact of his orig­i­nal­i­ty as a blues play­er.

Per­haps the the most con­cise state­ment of this comes from John Mayer’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induc­tion speech:

There is an inten­si­ty about Stevie’s gui­tar play­ing that only he could achieve, still to this day. It’s a rage with­out anger, it’s devo­tion­al, it’s reli­gious. He seam­less­ly meld­ed the super­nat­ur­al vibe of Jimi Hen­drix, the inten­si­ty of Albert King, the best of British, Texas and Chica­go Blues and the class and sharp shoot­er pre­ci­sion of his old­er broth­er Jim­mie. Ste­vie is the ulti­mate gui­tar hero.

If you’ve ever had rea­son to doubt, see it for your­self above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How B.B. King & Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an Dealt With Break­ing Strings Onstage Mid-Song: A Mas­ter­class in Han­dling Onstage Mishaps

Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an Plays the Acoustic Gui­tar in Rare Footage, Let­ting Us See His Gui­tar Vir­tu­os­i­ty in Its Purest Form

What Hap­pens When a Musi­cian Plays Ste­vie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy” on a $25 Kids’ Gui­tar at Wal­mart

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When the warm, war­bly, slight­ly-out-of-tune sounds of the ear­ly Moog syn­the­siz­er met the del­i­cate fig­ures of Bach’s con­cer­tos, suites, pre­ludes, fugues, and airs in Wendy Car­los’ 1968 Switched-on Bach, the result rein­vig­o­rat­ed pop­u­lar inter­est in clas­si­cal music and helped launch the careers of sev­en­ties Moog syn­the­sists like com­pos­er of instru­men­tal hit “Pop­corn,” Ger­shon Kings­ley; occultist and com­pos­er of TV themes and jin­gles, Mort Gar­son; and pio­neer­ing dis­co pro­duc­er Gior­gio Moroder. These were not the kind of musi­cians, nor the kind of music, of which Car­los approved. She was mor­ti­fied to have her album mar­ket­ed as a nov­el­ty record or, lat­er, as instru­men­tal pop.

The reclu­sive Car­los’ inter­pre­ta­tions of Beethoven and moody orig­i­nals defined the sound of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing. This sound­track work may be one of the few things Car­los has in com­mon with leg­endary BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop com­pos­er and cre­ator of the eerie Doc­tor Who theme, Delia Der­byshire. But where Car­los’ film scores evoke an omi­nous, oth­er­world­ly grandeur, Derbyshire’s sound­tracks, made for radio and tele­vi­sion, use more prim­i­tive elec­tron­ic tech­niques to con­jure weird­er, and in some ways creepi­er, atmos­pheres.

The 1971 com­pi­la­tion album BBC Radio­phon­ic Music, for exam­ple, con­tains music from three of the Workshop’s most promi­nent composers—Derbyshire, John Bak­er, and David Cain—and fea­tures one of her most famous themes, “Ziwz­ih Ziwz­ih Oo-Oo-Oo,” which crit­ic Robin Car­mody described as “her most ter­ri­fy­ing moment, tum­bling into a night­mare, the sound of child­hood at its most chill­ing.” The work she did for the Radio­phon­ic Work­shop was not intend­ed to be par­tic­u­lar­ly musi­cal at all. Work­shop employ­ees were instead expect­ed to be tech­ni­cians of sound, employ­ing new audio tech­nolo­gies for pure­ly dra­mat­ic effect.

“The only way into the work­shop was to be a trainee stu­dio man­ag­er,” Der­byshire remarked in a 2000 inter­view. “This is because the work­shop was pure­ly a ser­vice depart­ment for dra­ma. The BBC made it quite clear that they didn’t employ com­posers and we weren’t sup­posed to be doing music.” Nonethe­less, she applied her tape loops, oscil­la­tors, and oth­er musique con­crete tech­niques to at least one clas­si­cal piece, Bach’s “Air on a G String.” The result­ing inter­pre­ta­tion sounds entire­ly dif­fer­ent from Car­los’ elec­tric Bach. It is, Car­mody writes, “an ice-cold noc­tur­nal rewrite… the stuff of a sev­en-year-old child’s most unfor­get­table night­mares.” The piece does not seem to have been made for a BBC pro­duc­tion. Der­byshire her­self dis­missed the record­ing as “rub­bish,” though she admit­ted “it has a fair num­ber of admir­ers.”

Soon after its release, in a 1:44 snip­pet on the com­pi­la­tion album, Der­byshire left the Work­shop to pur­sue her own musi­cal direc­tion. She com­posed music for the stage and screen, then became dis­il­lu­sioned with the music indus­try alto­geth­er. The avail­abil­i­ty of the ana­log syn­the­siz­ers pop­u­lar­ized by Car­los’ record had ren­dered her way of mak­ing music obso­lete. But as the many recent trib­utes to Derbyshire’s lega­cy tes­ti­fy, her work has been as influ­en­tial as that of the ear­ly ana­log synth com­posers, on every­one from the Bea­t­les to con­tem­po­rary exper­i­men­tal artists. Der­byshire’s play­ful weird­ness has been oft-imi­tat­ed over the decades, but no one has ever inter­pret­ed Bach quite like this before or since.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Doc­u­men­taries Intro­duce Delia Der­byshire, the Pio­neer in Elec­tron­ic Music

The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry of How Delia Der­byshire Cre­at­ed the Orig­i­nal Doc­tor Who Theme

Lis­ten to an Archive of Record­ings by Delia Der­byshire, the Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer & Com­pos­er of the Dr. Who Theme Song

Wendy Car­los’ Switched on Bach Turns 50 This Month: Learn How the Clas­si­cal Synth Record Intro­duced the World to the Moog

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness