The Klezmatics: Wonder Wheel Program Description

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Wonder Wheel (Lyrics by Woody Guthrie)
With Special Guests Susan McKeown & Boo Reiners
Release Date: July 2006
Label: Jewish Music Group

Wonder Wheel, a record seven years in the making, reflects Woody Guthrie’s political stance and social agenda into a larger, global mirror, and brings a 20th century American figurehead to a 21st-century audience. The Klezmatics vibrantly bring Woody’s lyrics to life, filling them with Eastern European, klezmer, Latin, Celtic, Afro-Caribbean and folk flavor, giving them a universal life of their own. Featuring Celtic vocalist Susan McKeown and multi-instrumentalist Boo Reiners and produced by GoodAndEvil (Sex Mob, Elysian Fields, Felix Da Housecat), Wonder Wheel is an intense combination of the familiar and the exotic. But above all, it’s completely natural, all-encompassing, and intensely human.
These Coney Island-wrought lyrics add a less-known urban dimension to a man seen as the avatar of dust- bowl ballads. But, like thousands of his songs, they were left unrecorded, their music forgotten, until now.

Wonder Wheel is the first all-English language record of The Klezmatics’ eight acclaimed albums and one of Woody’s first foirees into world music. It’s a lively musical dialogue between artists who fervently agree about social justice, peace, and the spiritual power of music to unite, bind to a cause, and transcend any borders, musical or otherwise. Wonder Wheel reflects a time in Woody’s life where he was tremendously prolific and inspired: raising a family in Conery Island with wife Marjorie Mazia, surrounded by old friends Pete Seeger and Lead Belly as well as his mother-in-law, legendary Yiddish poet and activist Aliza Greenblatt.