Ribbon of Highway~Endless Skyway: Mission Statement

Mission Statement

The Ribbon of Highway Endless Skyway Corporation, a 501c3, formed in 2005 to elucidate the music, poetics, and historical ruminations of Woody Guthrie. The main centerpiece of the corporation, the Ribbon of Highway Endless Skyway Concert, features a veritable “script” whereby Woody Guthrie’s songs are augmented by spoken word passages. The resulting story board effect, somewhat similar to an episode of Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” fascinatingly tells as much about present day America than the dust bowl years which fomented Guthrie’s legendary writings.

Thus The Ribbon of Highway Endless Skyway Corporation(RHESC) through these performances wishes to achieve the following goals:

         • to preserve Woody Guthrie’s oral, written, and musical heritage.
         • to outline the relevance of Woody Guthrie’s work, as a “folk music Mark Twain.”
         • to perform for a wide-range of educational institutions.
         • to provide said institutions with materials for augmenting History, English, and Music curriculums.
         • to provide libraries with a copy of the CD for use in the above said courses.

Over the last few years, the RHESC has enlisted the talents of such guest artists such as Guy Clark, Gillian Welch, Kris Kristofferson, Jackson Browne, Pete Seeger, Dave Bromberg, and Fred Hellerman. All of whom augment the story ably told by the following list of artists: Jimmy LaFave, Ellis Paul, The Burns Sisters, Terri Hendrix and Lloyd Maines, Slaid Cleaves, Eliza Gilkyson, Sarah Lee Guthrie, Johnny Irion, Kevin Welch, Michael Fracasso and Joel Rafael.

With such a bounty of popular artists involved in the tour, all of whom have individually garnered a wide-range of accolades, the significance of Guthrie’s work reaches a wide range of somewhat unsuspecting ears. Guthrie’s hard-driving, riveting satires and odes to the American wild have continually reappeared in music; serving as the catalyst for the 1970’s country outlaw movement, 1980’s punk, 1990’s Alt-country movement, and more recently in the 2000’s neo-folk revival. However through the Ribbon of Highway Endless Skyway Concert, these connections to Woody Guthrie’s populist voice become ostensibly clear.

The future, as the RHESC continues to grow and develop with the release of the live two-CD project, and concerts at various colleges, high schools, and junior highs become financially feasible, the scope and spectrum available for the show appears limitless. Just as Woody Guthrie probably would have hoped.