woody guthrie
“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."
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born on July 14, 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma. Over the decades, his songs have run around the world like a fast train on a well-oiled track. They've become the folk song standards of the nation, known and performed in many languages throughout the world. He wrote over 3,000 songs in his lifetime, hundreds of which that have become staples in the canon of American music. He inspired several generations both politically and musically with songs such as "This Land Is Your Land."
“Woody is just Woody,” John Steinbeck wrote. “Thousands know him by no other name. He is a voice with a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.”
Project details
Woody at Home is a two-volume secret treasure trove of Woody Guthrie's home recordings—recordings that Woody was unable to release in his lifetime, a life cut short by Huntington’s disease. Never intended for commercial release, these raw and intimate home tapes were recorded in 1951-1952 at the family’s apartment in Beach Haven, Brooklyn. Woody made them as demo recordings to his new publisher. Woody sings about historic events, stories of the disenfranchised and ignored, love, and of course, the fight against fascism. This brand-new collection contains 22 unreleased recordings, including 13 new Woody Guthrie songs. Tracks include never before heard recordings of This Land is Your Land, I’ve Got to Know, Pastures of Plenty and the only Guthrie recording of DEPORTEE (PLANE WRECK AT LOS GATOS) with new music.
All tracks written, performed, recorded and originally engineered by Woody Guthrie on a one microphone reel to reel analog tape recorder at 3 3/4 IPs. Produced by Anna Canoni, Steve Rosenthal and Kathryn Ostien; Sound Restoration and Analog Tape Transfer by Sean McLowery, The Attic Studio; Mastering Engineering by Jessica Thompson. All photos courtesy Sabrina Asch Photography. Album Art by Amy Bennick.
woody guthrie quotes and materials
“A songwriter should more or less be the recording machine for other people’s worries, blues, mix-ups, and fights. Not only in small personal senses, but broad social ways and in the broader esthetic ways. To squeeze the kernel of useable good out of all his experiences… and then to report by written word what good is to be had in the worst of things and what bad is in the best.”
Signature and lyric sheet note, 1951. TRO Archives, Sabrina Asch Photography.
“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.”
1951 Lyric sheet note typed and signed by Woody Guthrie. Sabrina Asch Photography.
Woody home tapes and lyric sheets. Sabrina Asch Photography.
“I just want you to know, sort of plain as I can tell you, that I have never yet put a song on tape or 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. That is ten times more true of all these little sample tapes that I’ve been sending you, in such big numbers, because the very fact that they are in such big numbers…shows you everyone’s a sort of rough, dim hint, or little sometimes just a vague suggestion of what I really want to get at in a song…”