In 1951, Woody Guthrie’s publisher gave him a newfangled piece of equipment: a Revere T-100 Crescent home tape recorder. It was primitive: mono and running at a noisy, lo-fi, 3 ¾ inches of tape per second, with a little mono microphone. Yet it allowed Guthrie to record his songs without visiting a studio, without recording engineers or time pressures, while he was at home in Beach Haven, Brooklyn, keeping an eye on three young children.
On Aug. 14, Guthrie’s estate will release “Woody at Home, Vol. 1 and 2.” It collects 20 songs and two spoken-word interludes, including a version of “This Land Is Your Land” that adds extra verses, as well as 13 newly unveiled songs. Guthrie’s own version of “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” — a song that became a folk-revival standard with a new melody by Martin Hoffman but that Guthrie had only recorded at home — is being released on Monday, his birthday.
Guthrie is revered nowadays as a model for singer-songwriters: plain-spoken, casually tuneful, pointedly topical or slyly humorous. As a storyteller, he was able to compress narratives into terse rhymes while he empathized with an extraordinary range of narrators. And he was hugely prolific: He wrote lyrics for more than 3,000 songs.
“Woody represents the American spirit in such a noble and fierce way,” said the historian Douglas Brinkley, who is working with the Guthrie family on a collection of lyrics. “You learn to live and love and work, to fight to have a democratic society and to never feel you’re too highfalutin, or that your money makes you better than somebody else. We’re just discovering this tape and some of these lyrics, but they still have zest to them — and they matter.”
Woody’s daughter Nora Guthrie, a lifelong advocate and guardian of her father’s work, said, “In looking through 3,000 lyrics, only a handful are about his personal life.” She spoke via video from the offices of Woody Guthrie Publications in Mount Kisco, N.Y.; Anna Canoni, her daughter, is the company’s president. “He uses ‘I’ all the time, but he’s an actor. I’ve never run into a songwriter that was able to put himself into so many different characters.”
In the 1950s, Guthrie didn’t have a label that wanted to release his recordings. His publisher, Howie Richmond of TRO Music, urged Guthrie to sketch out new songs that could be pitched to other performers or printed as sheet music — and with the new recorder, he did. In 1951 and 1952, he filled 32 reel-to-reel tapes with songs and conversational messages.
“Woody was someone that loved to be the first at something,” said Canoni, who oversaw the new album. “It was a brand-new invention that had just come out, so he was absolutely fascinated with it. And he had a curiosity to share as much music as possible.”
As it turned out, the tapes would be Guthrie’s last recordings before he was debilitated by Huntington’s chorea. Until his death in 1967, he spent much of his later life in hospitals. The publishing company, now TRO Essex Music Group, kept the tapes through the decades, stored in good condition. But until recently, the Guthrie estate felt the music was too poorly recorded for public release.
“Since there was only one microphone, there was a real problem with the balance between Woody’s guitar and Woody’s vocal,” said Steve Rosenthal, who produced the album. Guthrie is credited as the original recording engineer.
Recently, audio software has arrived that can separate different instruments within a mono track. After trying many antique reel-to-reel tape machines, Rosenthal found a restored Ampex 350, originally built in 1950, that made the tapes sound best for playback to make digital copies. Software then separated Guthrie’s voice from his guitar; it also mistook a 60-Hz hum for a bass line and neatly separated that as well. From there, Rosenthal and the mastering engineer Jessica Thompson rebalanced Guthrie’s voice and guitar, bringing them into vivid close-up.
Guthrie’s voice, with its Oklahoma drawl, is familiar from his studio recordings. But on the home recordings, it’s lower and warmer, not projecting for an audience or for studio technicians. “What I love about it is the gentleness of Woody’s voice — the quietness that exists, and the softness,” Canoni said. “I felt it was very powerful to hear, today, where the song emerges.”
The recordings include the sounds of children, cars, notebook pages being turned and guitar parts still being roughed out. “Sometimes he’s trying to work through the arrangement as the tape is rolling,” Rosenthal said. “There are times where it feels like he’s not completely set in how he wants to sing it or what the guitar pattern is. And then after five or 10 or 20, 30 seconds, he starts to lock in to how he wants to present it. To be able to hear that process from Woody Guthrie is just amazing.”
The alternate verses for “This Land Is Your Land” reveal Guthrie still tinkering with a song he had written a decade earlier. In a voice note among the tapes, which is included on the album, Guthrie reminded his publisher that he saw all of his songs as works in progress. “I have never yet put a song on tape or a record, or wrote it down or printed it down or typed it up, or anything else that I really thought was a through and a finished and a done song, and it couldn’t be improved on, couldn’t be changed around, couldn’t be made better,” Guthrie said.
The 13 new songs, previously known only as written lyrics, underline the variety of Guthrie’s songwriting. One standout is “Backdoor Bum and the Big Landlord,” a parable about two characters trekking toward heaven. The bum has practical skills — building a fire, cooking a stew — while the landlord weighs himself down with gold, expecting to buy his way into salvation. In a Woody Guthrie song, that doesn’t happen.
(Guthrie’s landlord at Beach Haven was Fred Trump, the president’s father. Guthrie wrote a song, “Old Man Trump,” denouncing him for segregation. )
In other tracks, Guthrie sings about racism (“Buoy Bells from Trenton”), battling fascism (“I’m a Child to Fight”), migrant farm labor (“Deportee” and “Pastures of Plenty”), corruption (“Innocent Man”), faith (“Jesus Christ”), science (“One Little Thing an Atom Can’t Do”), and victims of war and inequality (“I’ve Got to Know”) — topics that are far from obsolete nearly 75 years later. “Woody at Home” could make Guthrie seem less remote for listeners raised on home-recorded TikTok demos and bedroom pop.
“The job for me is just to allow Woody to be himself and to keep exposing new generations and new audiences to how he said things and what he said,” Canoni said. “Every new generation is a new opportunity.”
Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. He studied music, played in rock, jazz and classical groups and was a college-radio disc jockey. He was previously an editor at Rolling Stone and The Village Voice.
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