Building a global clan Guthrie steps in for friend Seeer at Bangor benefit concert

He won’t be singing “Alice’s Restaurant,” the song that he’s best known for, when Arlo Guthrie performs on the riverfront in Bangor next week. Guthrie, 55, says that at 181/2 minutes, his trademark tune is “just way too long” for live audiences and he “can’t remember most of it.”

Guthrie’s stepping in to replace folk icon Pete Seeger, 83, who’s in failing health, at next week’s Concert for Our Future on the Bangor riverfront. Guthrie will headline a program of artists in a Tribute to Pete Seeger, a benefit concert for Peace through Interamerican Community Action to be held at 7 p.m. Thursday, July 11, in Bangor Waterfront Park, next to the Sea Dog Restaurant.

PICA is a nonprofit group that works toward supportive communities and social economic justice locally and across borders. The Bangor-based organization sponsors the Bangor-El Salvador Sister City Project, the Clean Clothes Campaign and Alliance and Youth Adelantando.

Seeger’s longtime performing partner Linda Richards and Inca Son will join Guthrie onstage. Inca Son is an Andean group that performs traditional music from El Salvador and Latin America.

The last time Guthrie appeared in northern Maine, he performed at a benefit concert with the Bangor Symphony Orchestra, on May 9, 1998. Recently, the singer-songwriter created a program of symphonic arrangements of his songs and other American classics titled “An American Scrapbook,” which he performs with orchestras around the country.

Seeger and Guthrie, however, have been performing and recording together for years. They recorded the 1982 live album “Precious Friend.”

Guthrie’s father Woody was a close friend of Seeger’s. The legendary troubadour of the Oklahoma dustbowl wrote such American classics as “This Land Is Your Land” and “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.” He died of Huntington’s disease in 1967.

Seeger teamed up with Woody Guthrie and other leftist musicians to form the Almanac Singers in 1940, seven years before Arlo Guthrie was born. As his colleague’s health failed, Seeger watched as Arlo and his three siblings grew up singing their father’s songs.

With the money he earned from “Alice’s Restaurant,” Arlo Guthrie bought land in western Massachusetts and established a family homestead. Two of his four children and all four of his and wife Jackie’s grandchildren live there. All the children – Abe, Cathy, Sara and Annie – are involved one way or another in the family enterprise, which is making music and attending to the business side of touring and recording.

“You have to put aside the normal family idea and think in terms of the clan tradition,” Guthrie told the Boston Globe last November. The Guthrie compound sits at the end of a dirt road in the Berkshire County town of Washington, population 593.

Seeger, who lives two hours north of New York City on the Hudson River, is part of the Guthrie clan. Seeger performed a new composition, described as a “jazzy, hip-hop … ballad” by the Chicago Sun-Times at an April performance at the Chicago Historical Society.

The song, “Take It From Dr. King,” will performed in Bangor by Guthrie with a chorus of youngsters from the Children’s International Summer Village and the Community Health & Counseling Service choir. Seeger wrote the song in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Pre-concert activities on Thursday, July 11, to be held from 4 to 7 p.m., will include a children’s workshop on the “global village” with David Smith, creator of the award-winning curriculum “Mapping the World by Heart.”

Smith is also author of “If the World Were a Village: A Book About the World’s People.” He believes that teaching children “world-mindedness” is vital to the well being of the planet.

Other performers that afternoon will include juggler Zachary Field, American Indian flutist Hawk Henries, a Wabanaki youth drum group, Ousman Jobarteh with West African music, and the Community Health and Counseling Services chorus. At the same time, the fourth Annual Clean Clothes Market Place will be open. Retailers and artisans will sell products manufactured under safe and humane working conditions. Wabanaki basket makers also will be on hand selling their wares and demonstrating weaving techniques.

Participating clothing retailers are members of PICA’s Bangor Clean Clothes Campaign, a community partnership to end sweatshops in the global clothing industry.

Tickets for the event are $15, for adults, $10 for seniors and students and $5 for children. Tickets are available at the Grasshopper Shop in Bangor, at Bull Moose music stores throughout the state and at other locations. For more information, call PICA at 947-4203 or visit the group’s Web site at www.pica.ws.