A Picture From Life's Other Side

03. A Picture From Life’s Other Side
(Charles E. Baer/public domain)

Track 3 – A Picture from Life’s Other Side (MASTER MA 82)
Guthrie seemingly carried about the country a fair number of late Nineteenth Century parlor songs, some from his mother, Nora, some from recordings he heard over the radio, some from other singers. The homiletic “A Picture from Life’s Other Side” is one such. Written in by harles E. Baer, it was recorded first by Smith’s Sacred Singers in 1926.
Some eighteen “covers” followed, including cuts by such important country and western singers as Vernon Dalhart and Bradley Kincaid. (Those masters, according to Meade, Spottswood, and Meade, Country Music Sources: A Biblio-Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Southern Folklife Collection, 2002), pp. 297-298) were released, under a farrago of artistic noms de commerce, as many as fifty-one times.)
Obviously the song struck a chord with the public – and with Guthrie.

Here he plays an unadorned mandolin and sings lead, while the usually comfortable Houston
strums a 3/4-time guitar and strains to sing harmony.