Waxahatchee Covers Woody Guthrie’s ‘Talking Dust Bowl Blues’

Waxahatchee has contributed a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Talking Dust Bowl Blues” for the upcoming album Home In This World: Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads, a reimagined version of the legendary folk musician’s 1940 collection Dust Bowl Blues.

Katie Crutchfield channels Guthrie’s talk-singing voice throughout the song, as she recounts the daily hardships of living through the Dust Bowl: “Way up yonder on a mountain road/I had a hot motor and a heavy load/I’s a-goin’ pretty fast, there wasn’t even stoppin’/A-bouncin’ up and down, like popcorn poppin’.”

Home in This World will include Crutchfield’s cover alongside an eclectic mix of other artists, including country and Americana acts like Lee Ann Womack, Colter Wall, the Secret Sisters and Chris Thile as well as indie artists like Mark Lanegan, Swamp Dogg and the Felice Brothers.

Home in This World was the brainchild of producer Randall Poster, who has organized numerous tribute albums and worked as a music supervisor on The Queen’s Gambit, Tiger King, the Questlove-directed doc Summer of Soul, and an upcoming Velvet Underground doc. (He also supervised the music for Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling.) The compilation is due out September 10th.