By Brad Ramsay
Summer Reporter

This land is your land, this land is my land, from Woody Guthrie to his tribute album.

"'Til we outnumber 'em" is a tribute to the songs of Woody Guthrie performed by such artists as Bruce Springsteen, Ani Difranco and the Indigo Girls.

The album starts off with "Hard Travelin' Hootenanny." This is an upbeat folk song sang by the entire cast of artists. The song embodies who Woody Guthrie was and what he stood for. It describes people working blue-collar jobs and sitting in jail. With lyrics such as "I've been hit with some hard harvestin'/I thought you know/workin' hard in Kansas City way down the road/Putting out hay, stacking that hay trying to make about a dollar a day."

It seems to epitomize Guthrie's constant fight for equal rights by telling the stories of different types of people and their "hard travelin'". It has an interesting flow to it that immediately puts the listener in a love it or hate it position.

Bruce Springsteen performs "Riding in my car". The listener can tell this is a song from an entire era as Springsteen stumbles through onomatopoeia of 1920's car sounds. Springsteen does the song justice just by the sheer passion he displays about the subject manner and the respect he has for the author, Guthrie.

A portion of the CD is made up of a series of vignettes either quoting or describing Guthrie. Peter Glazer reads an excerpt from "people I owe" written by Guthrie, entitled "payback."

Glazer's voice enunciates, what seems like the right words. One can almost hear the voice of Guthrie saying, "The amount that we owe is all that we have, and the only way I can pay back all of you good walkers and talkers is to work and let my work help you to do your work."

It is here, in his own words, you understand, why Guthrie did what he did for a living.

The Indigo Girls featuring Ani Difranco cover "Ramblin' Round." This is a song of a wander who can never settle down. They seem to fall short of capturing the original essence the song was intended to relay. When Difranco sings, "Sometimes the fruit gets rotten/it falls down on the ground/Hurry every mile for every peach/as I go ramblin' round," it sounds so depressing that they lost track of the hope the rambler encompasses.

All in all "'til we outnumber 'em" is a pleasant experience to listen to. In the future, when a tribute album is released, I would like to hear at least a track from the artist, to get a better feel about who they were and why they were embraced by so many.

Guthrie's aura is present in this album, but Guthrie, himself, is absent.