Orem Library

Biographical film of Woody Guthrie and his travels across America during the depression years.

The life and music of legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie has influenced every generation that followed him. Thirty years after his death, his daughter, Nora Guthrie, who presides over a vast archive which includes Wood's unrecorded lyrics, decided to seek out a sympathetic contemporary artist to help look for the man behind the myth, a search which led to her collaboration with Guthrie acolyte Billy Bragg. Man in the Sand is the story of how Nora...

We still sing his songs. We still hum his tunes. And many of us still heed his message. Woody Guthrie, the political hillbilly and hayseed minstrel, has become part of the patchwork dreams and social conscience that compose America. His songs have been passed along from person to person to become modern anthems of hope and survival through challenging times. Behind Woody's music, however, was a life that was a tragedy, comedy, passion play, and soap...

When first unto this country: traces the emergence of roots music in America from its European and African origins through its maturation into American music genres including spirituals, blues, country and gospel. This land was made for you and me: explores a period in which different strands of roots music become visible and commercialized through movies, television, radio and records. The times they are a-changin': traces the continuing emergence...

Roots music icon Chris Strachwitz is a detective of sounds, an archaeologist of deep American music, the antithesis of the corporate "mouse music" that dominates the American ear. Born a German count, Strachwitz fled his homeland after World War II at 16. In the U.S., he began to carry his tape recorder from sharecropper shacks to roadside honkytonks, from cantina dives to wild blues clubs. His recordings on his indie label, Arhoolie Records, brought...

From 1963 to 1966, Murray Lerner visited the annual Newport Folk Festival to document a thriving, idealistic musical movement as it reached its peak as a popular phenomenon. Shooting in gorgeous black and white, Lerner juxtaposes performances with snapshot interviews with artists and their fans, weaving footage from four years of the festival into an intimate record of a pivotal time in music, and in American culture at large.