A 20th-century troubadour. A 21st-century tribute.

Raymond Bisha introduces Michael Daugherty’s This Land Sings: Inspired by the Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. The work celebrates The Dust Bowl Troubadour’s folk songs of love, wandering and social justice through Daugherty’s own original songs and instrumental music. These were composed after he drove for several weeks along the desolate, barren and dusty back roads of Texas and Oklahoma, where Woody once roamed, while listening to everything that he recorded during his brief lifetime. Woody Guthrie was a folk movement figurehead, continuing as a major influence on numerous internationally successful artists with recordings that have been re-released innumerable times, generating an unflagging interest in anything attached to his name.