When George-Warren goes out to the Grammy awards in L.A. in February, it will not be her first time in attendance. She was nominated in 2001 as co-producer of a CD set entitled R-E-S-P-E-C-T: A Century of Women in Music. Failing to win the award in the category of Best Historical Album was bearable, since she lost to the producers of a Louis Armstrong recording. She went to the presentation ceremony again in 2009, when Gene Autry was given a posthumous Legend Award, and she was asked to write an essay about him for the program.
In 2013, she will go the awards with her husband, Robert Burke Warren, a.k.a. children’s musician Uncle Rock, and their son, Jack Warren, of the up-and-coming local band Tofu Decoy.
Elizabeth Mitchell was baking Christmas cookies with her daughter, “covered in flour, rolling out dough, when my father called” to tell her about her nomination. “I didn’t even know the nominations were happening,” she recalled. “I had disengaged from the process. I got pretty giddy and excited. I’m 20 years into doing music for children, and this is great!”
A vocalist and guitarist who has recorded numerous albums for kids, many of them with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Mitchell performs with her husband, Dan Littleton, and their daughter, Storey, now 11, in a band called You Are My Flower. “Storey sings three-part harmony with us and plays the alto recorder, ukulele, and harmonica,” her mother explained. “We’ve been inspired by other musical families — the Carter family, the Wainwright-McGarrigles — there’s no other sound quite like the sound of a family making music together.”
Woody Guthrie wrote songs for his own daughter, Cathy Ann, when Guthrie was a stay-at-home dad in Coney Island in the 1940s. Since discovering a copy of Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child, Composed and Sung by Woody Guthrie, in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, record bin when she was 24, Mitchell has recorded a Guthrie tune or two on almost every one of her CDs. In honor of this year’s centennial of his birth, she decided to put together a whole album of his children’s songs.
“That record spoke to me when I was 24,” she explained. “I was teaching at the time, tuned in to the world of childhood, but even if I hadn’t been, these songs have such amazing poetry and music. They bring things down to a simple and elemental level, yet with complex, unique imagery that only Woody Guthrie could conjure up, of tenderness and real love expressed in unexpected ways.”
For example, the lullaby “Sleep Eye” includes the lyrics
Eyes-y close, eyes-y close, eyes-y close
my little sugar
One hand asleep, two hands asleep, go
to sleepy-y little sleep eye.
Even the song titles embody what Mitchell calls “fragments of sweetness and mystery [that] touch our souls.” Little Seed includes such songs as “Grassy Grass Grass,” “Little Sack of Sugar,” “1 Day, 2 Days, 3 Days Old,” and “Rattle My Rattle.”
“I had a great time this spring reading all the Woody Guthrie biographies I could read when I worked on the liner notes,” said Mitchell. “I wanted people who have a casual knowledge of him to know about his journey as a father, which is less known than his political life.”
Among her reading was a book by Joe Klein about Guthrie’s song “This Land is Your Land.” “It was popularized because public school teachers in New York City included it in their curriculum,” Mitchell explained. “It was being sung by New York schoolchildren before anyone else knew it.”
Also appearing on Little Seed are Woodstock musicians Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, their daughter Ruthie Ungar, and Amy Helm. Dean Jones of Dog on Fleas accompanies one song, and Justin Guip, the main recording engineer at Levon Helm Studios, helped out with recording and mixing.
Mitchell used to host Kids’ Rambles at Levon’s, and Uncle Rock played there with her once, so she got to know Holly George-Warren, whom she will no doubt see when her family heads out to the awards ceremony in February.
“It’s a wonderful community here,” Mitchell enthused. “We moved here eight years ago, and I feel so fortunate.”
