ABOUT WOODY AT HOME
“There never was a sound that was not music. There’s no real trick of creating words to set to music—once you realize that the word is the music and the people are the song.” - wOODY GUTHRIE
Woody Guthrie arrived in New York City on February 16, 1940, armed with a satchel of lyrics he had written. In the days of big band and Tin Pan Alley, folk music was just beginning to get established in Greenwich Village. After being rejected by the major publishing companies on Tin Pan Alley in New York, Woody got his first publishing deal in 1950 with a new startup, TRO, founded by music publisher Howie Richmond. As Howie recalled, “Woody was a hero to me before I ever met him and before I was a publisher. I heard Woody perform on a number of occasions before meeting him at a hootenanny in New York. He sensed my enthusiasm for his work. My goal was to hear everything he wanted to play. It was love and joy for me, from my heart. He came up to my office on 52nd Street and spent a couple of hours sharing his incredible repertory with me.”
By 1950, two-channel tape recorders allowing recordings in stereo appeared in the United States for the first time. Able to get his hands on one of the new machines, Howie sent the recorder to Woody in Brooklyn to further encourage his output. Woody, his wife Marjorie and their three children had relocated to a red brick apartment in Beach Haven, Brooklyn in October 1950. Using his new tape recorder from “the safety of my home,” Woody spoke, rambled, sang, and gave new context and intimate reflections into his songs using the single mic reel-to-reel machine. The first tape was submitted to TRO in January of 1951, and Woody immediately asked for more. “When tape machines came on the market, Woody began sending me tapes he had made at his home in Brooklyn, often several reels a week,” Howie said. “With Woody’s music, all it needed was to be shared.”
For Woody, to be at home producing his music at his leisure allowed a different focus and sense of safety. Writing was an obsession for Woody. His inspirations might come from a newspaper article, a movie, a conversation, or just from observing people. His lyric sheets are filled with quips, notes, and anecdotes that give insight into his personality, motivations, and process. Being a songwriter was more a matter of having something to say than developing special skills for Woody. One of the most prolific songwriters of his era, Woody’s output was constant. Pete Seeger once said, “Anything worth discussing was worth a song to Woody.”
“Any event which takes away the lives of human beings, I try to write a song about what caused it to happen and how we can all try to keep such a thing from happening again. I can’t invent the news every day. Nobody can. But I can do my little job, which is to fix the day’s news up to where you can sing it. You’ll remember it lots plainer if I can make it easy for you to sing the daily news at your job or else at your play hours.”
“Woody wanted his songs and recordings to succeed, believing they were as good as any other popular songs and recordings of the day,” Howie said. “But Woody was writing songs about the struggles of ordinary people faced with hard luck and tough times. He touched every subject fearlessly and honestly and gave hope to those in greatest need.”
In July 1952, Woody was first admitted to Brooklyn State Hospital. In and out of hospitals for the next few years, Woody finally received a diagnoseddiagnosis of Huntington’s chorea in 1956, a disease that he had inherited from his mother, Nora Belle. He would spend the rest of his life in and out of hospitals, including Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey (1956–1961), Brooklyn State Hospital (1961-1966), and finally Creedmore Hospital (1966-1967), where he passed.
His last of the home tapes—the last Woody Guthrie recordings made—were sent to TRO in December 1952. In total, 32 tapes and more than 300 recordings of Woody at home were submitted.
Notes on the Transfer and Restoration Process
by Steve Rosenthal, Jessica Thompson, and Sean McClowry
Woody Guthrie’s original tapes were made in his home using a consumer tape recorder that played and recorded at a very slow speed, 3 3/4 inches per second. To restore as much fidelity and character as possible in a way that matched the tenor and spirit of Woody’s songs, several combinations of tape heads and settings were researched.
After testing the tapes on multiple reel-to-reel tape machines, the best sonic match was a fully -restored Ampex 350 Tape Recorder from the same years that Woody’s tapes were first recorded. The Ampex 350 was introduced in 1950 and quickly became one of the most important early professional tape recorders of its era. Ampex, one of the original technology companies located in what would become Silicon Valley in California, made professional audio recorders that used vacuum tubes and large, heavy transports. To transfer the Woody tapes, a fully restored Ampex 350 Tape Recorder was played through a Mytek Brooklyn Analog to Digital Converter and recorded at 24 bit/192kz into Avid Pro Tools, where we could take advantage of digital editing and restoration software while staying true to the original sonic character heard uniquely on the original tapes.
Mastering tools primarily consisted of two pieces of software developed using technology with deeply sophisticated algorithmic processing. A stem separation tool to "unmix" the sounds into their own stems, or tracks, which allowed a rebalance of the guitar and vocals. (Woody was not a recordist, and these were not studio recordings, so sometimes his vocals drowned out his guitar strumming.). Another tool was used that neatly pulled out most of the 60-cycle hum that washed over the original recordings and separated it into its own “bass” stem. Woody’s recordings are mono, and they truly capture a moment in time. However, those moments were buried under the detritus of having been recorded onto a slow speed quarter-inch analog tape over 70 years ago. With the worst “noise” out of the way, and the guitars and vocals better balanced, a gain was used to sculpt and refine the recording. A spectral editor further helped attenuate a single fundamental from an overzealous guitar pluck, or tuck in a vocal that came out a bit too exuberantly. Very little equalization or compression was used.