The Annual Thanksgiving Tradition: Alice’s Restaurant

I wrote about Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant last year. So doing it a second year in a row qualifies it as a tradition of this blog now.

Why is Alice’s Restaurant associated with Thanksgiving? From Wikipedia:

“Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” [sic] (commonly referred to simply as “Alice’s Restaurant“) is one of singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie’s most prominent works, a musical monologue based on a true story that began on Thanksgiving Day 1965, and which inspired a 1969 movie of the same name. In an interview for All Things Considered, Guthrie said the song points out that any American citizen who was convicted of a crime, no matter how minor (in his case, it was littering), could avoid being conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War.

Radio stations around the United states seem to play it around 12:00 noon every Thanksgiving. The song is a rollicking 18:33 journey through Arlo Guthrie’s classic guitar and great storytelling.

Below is a screenshot of the video. Embedding of the video has been disabled by request. Click the picture, and you’ll be taken to the video on YouTube.

Happy Thanksgiving!