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MORE WOODY GUTHRIE SONGS? YES, FROM A TROVE OF HOMEMADE RECORDINGS.
 
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Jon Pareles
July 14, 2025
The New York Times
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_ A new, intimate album will include 13 previously unheard songs,
written, performed and recorded by Woody himself in a “home
studio” that eerily foreshadows TikTok. Among the songs is a rewrite
of “This Land Is Your Land.” _

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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 and Shamus Records 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)
[[link removed]]” — 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
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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.

 

[A lyric sheet showing typewritten lyrics and handwritten numbers.
Woody Guthrie’s signature is at the bottom. ]

The alternate verses for “This Land Is Your Land” reveal Guthrie
still tinkering with a song he had written a decade
earlier.Credit...Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc./TRO-Ludlow Music,
Inc. (BMI)

The 13 new songs, previously known only as written lyrics
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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,”
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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 [[link removed]] 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._

_Get the best of the New York Times
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newsletter. Gain unlimited access to all of The Times with a digital
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* Woody Guthrie
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* Music
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* folk music
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