CD review #4: Old Souls

Amram pays tribute to Guthrie and Ochs

Old Souls: The Songs of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs by David Amram Quintet (Guthrie Legacy Records, 2025)

IT IS FASCINATING how the shadow of Bob Dylan falls squarely across a new recording project fronted by the Beat Generation legend David Amram, jazz virtuoso, symphonic composer and creator of movie soundtracks.

Amram, who worked alongside Dylan on Allen Ginsberg studio ventures, foregrounds Woody Guthrie, maybe Dylan’s greatest hero, and Phil Ochs, Dylan’s impressive but frustrated rival, on a collection entitled Old Souls.

The release sees a veteran performer, who backed Kerouac musically in a1957 debut jazz poetry reading and penned the score for the famed Beat picture Pull My Daisy in 1959, re-interpret compositions by songwriters linked to high-profile social movements from the 1930s through to the 1960s.

So, what happens when a 95-year-old multi-instrumentalists addresses a gathering of gems from the American folk tradition? In short, Amram has always been an extraordinarily versatile player and a skilful adopter of genres of different kinds and varied histories.

His French horn originally led his playing campaign – he utilised it behind Kerouac at that very early New York reading – but piano and penny whistle alongside a huge range of ethnic instruments embroider his shows today. He really knows no bounds.

Further, Amram is more than just a talented reader of the notes: he is something of a sonic archaeologist, some might say a practising ethnomusicologist, because he revels in the vast number of streams that feed US music – from indigenous native sounds to country and Latin styles, blues and rock – and the soundscape of the globe more generally.

Here the main man, as leader of a tight quintet, brings a quiet, calm humanity to the five Guthrie tunes and a single item from the Ochs archive in a set that is closer to an EP than an LP, to utilise an older parlance. His singing voice can hardly be characterised as always true but it is strikingly honest. There is a highly respectful integrity to these fresh takes and the accompanying music is an eclectic delight.

The Guthrie examples veer from the teary-eyed nostalgia of ‘Oklahoma Hills’ – the composer’s origin story in words and melody – to the comic-yet-serious ‘Peace Pin Boogie’ and the touching Dustbowl trails of ‘Pastures of Plenty’.

‘Talking Subway’, Guthrie again, might initially appear to reference the talkin’ blues regularly adopted by him and certainly bequested to Dylan, but it’s a darker and more jazzy critique of the rumbling bowels of the city’s transport underground.

Finally, Amram switches course to bring Ochs’ ‘When I’m Gone’, a mournful, somewhat resigned, yet twinkle-in-the-eye work-out, to new life, a piece that even has hints of gospel revivalism in its tongue-in-cheek nod to the final, fatal facts of death. Some more of the mighty Ochs would not have gone amiss.

Joined on record by four other fine talents with Justin Poindexter’s guitar providing particularly sinuous and ear-catching lines, Amram might be at the wrong end of a very long life but he has a spirit unsullied by such inconvenient numbers.

He wrings every sweet drop of joy from the hot spring of existence and Old Souls underlines that relentlessly upbeat philosophical approach. Woody and Phil would, for sure, have been fortified.

Editor’s note: To purchase Old Souls on CD, visit the official Woody Guthrie site here

See also: ‘Live review #8: David Amram’, October 28th, 2025; ‘Book review #18: The Many Worlds of David Amram’, November 11th, 2023; ‘Beat Meetings #12: Simon Warner & David Amram’, September 5th, 2023; ‘Beat bastion and musical maestro’, June 30th, 2021