"Those are the leftovers of my husband's business," Irene Harris explained to her neighbor Luria Sutera in 1999, describing the heavy cardboard storage barrels, cordoned off by wood and wire, stacked in her Brooklyn tenement storage space. "He was in the record business. When I die, I am going to leave you my collection of records in the basement, and there is some Woody Guthrie down there that no one has ever heard."
View Full ImageLester Balog
Woody Guthrie, 1940.
Guthrie, a towering singer and activist whose "Dustbowl Ballads" and ubiquitous "This Land Is Your Land" form the bedrock of modern American songwriting, would have turned 97 this summer. Huntington's disease all but silenced him in the late 1950s, eventually claiming his life in 1967, at age 55.
The barrels, holding some 2,000 nickel-plated copper discs, had stood unperturbed for decades, abandoned by Herbert Harris, owner of the long-defunct Stinson Record Co. In 1944 Harris, with partner Moe Asch, bankrolled the holy grail of American folk music—a series of Woody Guthrie sessions resulting in hundreds of recorded masters, a cultural watershed that reverberates to this day.
What Mrs. Harris and Mrs. Sutera—both now deceased—couldn't have known that day in 1999 is that, provided some gentle restoration, the dimly remembered stacks of metal would sound transcendent, instantly rendering obsolete decades of shoddily reproduced recordings released under Guthrie's name. Freed from nth-generation work tapes and speed-impaired reproductions, Guthrie's music shines anew.
After a circuitous, five-year ordeal of legal sleuthing and aural renovation, Rounder Records just released a four-disc, 54-track boxed set—"My Dusty Road"—culled from Guthrie's basement trove.
"[On] a lot of the old tapes, he sounded like a chipmunk," says Nora Guthrie, Mr. Guthrie's daughter and director of the Woody Guthrie Archives. "I remember my father's voice very well. He had a very beautiful resonance in his tone. And I'm very happy and touched that the world is going to get to hear the voice that I remember."
"The Asch/Harris recordings captured this unique and unprecedented American moment," explains Rounder's Bill Nowlin, co-producer of "My Dusty Road." "Clearly, many of Woody's songs—'This Land is Your Land' foremost among them—have proved enduring."
Tune In
Absent the assorted muffles, warps and hiss running through scores of old LPs and CDs, Mr. Guthrie's guitar tone—from melodic Carter Family-style cadences to raucous country/blues—rings with renewed clarity, while his voice, reflecting heretofore undetected nuance and shading, is startlingly alive. The newfound luster and immediacy yanks Guthrie out of the history books and plops him (and, sometimes, his friends singer/guitarist Cisco Houston and harpist Sonny Terry) down on your couch for an old-fashioned hootenanny.
Though Guthrie's 1944 Asch/Harris recordings have come to represent folk music's big bang, the circumstances of their creation are threadbare. Taped at the producers' tiny New York studio, booked at off-hours, the results came out in dribs and drabs on albums and 78 rpm records. Guthrie, meanwhile, was in between tours of the Merchant Marines during World War II.
"People have to remember," says Ms. Guthrie, "that the times were so difficult—what with a Depression, a Dust Bowl and a war. People were constantly on the move and relocating. So these are all, originally, kind of bootleg recordings to some extent."
In the 1930s, Guthrie had emerged in Depression-ravaged California as the hillbilly poet of homeless Okies, the workingman and the downtrodden. That period culminated in the recording of the "Dustbowl Ballads," a series of 78-rpm albums released by RCA Victor in 1940 (as well as the Library of Congress recordings, musical performances and interviews recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax that were belatedly released in 1964). Guthrie's gritty everyman songs—such as "Do-Re-Mi" and "I Ain't Got No Home"—spoke directly to the disenfranchised in ways popular music didn't dare.
In the 1940s in New York, Guthrie formed the interracial Headline Singers, with Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and collaborated with Pete Seeger and other luminaries in the Almanac Singers. By the time of the Asch/Harris sessions, he was a walking encyclopedia of indigenous American music.
"The idea was to record everything you wrote, or sang, or remembered," says Ms. Guthrie. Political broadsides, traditional ballads, guitar rags, country blues, square-dance jigs, musical flashbacks to figures like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family—all were fair game.
"I was my own recording engineer," Asch, later founder of Folkways Records, reminisced in 1978. "There was one mike, we set it up and they just sang, one song after another. Every one was perfect. And if there was a mistake, that was all right too. You couldn't cut off a mistake like you can with tape—this was acetate. We all felt that the spirit was in the record."
Despite later stereotypes (arising perhaps from fossilized sound quality), many of the masters hardly register as doleful or self-serious. Defiant joy, warm good humor and a goofy playfulness abound, interspersed with kernels of aphoristic wisdom.
"Going Down the Road (I Ain't Gonna Be Treated This Way)," a signature Guthrie composition used in John Ford's Depression-era epic "The Grapes of Wrath," is especially illustrative. Driven by Terry's honking harp bursts, Guthrie and Houston fall into convivial harmony. The lyric—vowing defiance in the face of persecution—is bolstered by riotous whoops and hollers; in short, a piteous predicament begets a celebration.
"This wasn't an artifice constructed to sell records," explains Mr. Nowlin. "You can hear that Woody, Cisco and Sonny are friends simply having fun exploring songs they know, and even making up a few. The old folk songs become grist for something else—a rock 'n' roll way of doing things."
Still, Guthrie was never one to back away from a withering indictment of society's injustices: A compassionate moralism runs through every note he played. "There's a musical legacy that—simply stated—you can write what's on your mind," Ms. Guthrie observes. "Not too many people did that before Woody. So that has branched out, and that's a whole story and a legacy in and of itself. It's a really, really big tree," she says, citing acolytes like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Bono and a cast of thousands.
"Now I'm getting email from students in Iran," continues Ms. Guthrie, "saying 'Woody's been a great influence to us, and we're gonna write our own songs, and stand up for what we believe in.' It seeps through, and it takes on new faces and new names and new languages, and just keeps transforming. So in that sense, like [singer/songwriter] Billy Bragg once said, 'Woody's not a link in the chain. Woody's the stake in the ground.'"—Mr. Torn writes about rock, pop and roots music.
View Full ImageLester Balog
Woody Guthrie, 1940.
Guthrie, a towering singer and activist whose "Dustbowl Ballads" and ubiquitous "This Land Is Your Land" form the bedrock of modern American songwriting, would have turned 97 this summer. Huntington's disease all but silenced him in the late 1950s, eventually claiming his life in 1967, at age 55.
The barrels, holding some 2,000 nickel-plated copper discs, had stood unperturbed for decades, abandoned by Herbert Harris, owner of the long-defunct Stinson Record Co. In 1944 Harris, with partner Moe Asch, bankrolled the holy grail of American folk music—a series of Woody Guthrie sessions resulting in hundreds of recorded masters, a cultural watershed that reverberates to this day.
What Mrs. Harris and Mrs. Sutera—both now deceased—couldn't have known that day in 1999 is that, provided some gentle restoration, the dimly remembered stacks of metal would sound transcendent, instantly rendering obsolete decades of shoddily reproduced recordings released under Guthrie's name. Freed from nth-generation work tapes and speed-impaired reproductions, Guthrie's music shines anew.
After a circuitous, five-year ordeal of legal sleuthing and aural renovation, Rounder Records just released a four-disc, 54-track boxed set—"My Dusty Road"—culled from Guthrie's basement trove.
"[On] a lot of the old tapes, he sounded like a chipmunk," says Nora Guthrie, Mr. Guthrie's daughter and director of the Woody Guthrie Archives. "I remember my father's voice very well. He had a very beautiful resonance in his tone. And I'm very happy and touched that the world is going to get to hear the voice that I remember."
"The Asch/Harris recordings captured this unique and unprecedented American moment," explains Rounder's Bill Nowlin, co-producer of "My Dusty Road." "Clearly, many of Woody's songs—'This Land is Your Land' foremost among them—have proved enduring."
Tune In
Absent the assorted muffles, warps and hiss running through scores of old LPs and CDs, Mr. Guthrie's guitar tone—from melodic Carter Family-style cadences to raucous country/blues—rings with renewed clarity, while his voice, reflecting heretofore undetected nuance and shading, is startlingly alive. The newfound luster and immediacy yanks Guthrie out of the history books and plops him (and, sometimes, his friends singer/guitarist Cisco Houston and harpist Sonny Terry) down on your couch for an old-fashioned hootenanny.
Though Guthrie's 1944 Asch/Harris recordings have come to represent folk music's big bang, the circumstances of their creation are threadbare. Taped at the producers' tiny New York studio, booked at off-hours, the results came out in dribs and drabs on albums and 78 rpm records. Guthrie, meanwhile, was in between tours of the Merchant Marines during World War II.
"People have to remember," says Ms. Guthrie, "that the times were so difficult—what with a Depression, a Dust Bowl and a war. People were constantly on the move and relocating. So these are all, originally, kind of bootleg recordings to some extent."
In the 1930s, Guthrie had emerged in Depression-ravaged California as the hillbilly poet of homeless Okies, the workingman and the downtrodden. That period culminated in the recording of the "Dustbowl Ballads," a series of 78-rpm albums released by RCA Victor in 1940 (as well as the Library of Congress recordings, musical performances and interviews recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax that were belatedly released in 1964). Guthrie's gritty everyman songs—such as "Do-Re-Mi" and "I Ain't Got No Home"—spoke directly to the disenfranchised in ways popular music didn't dare.
In the 1940s in New York, Guthrie formed the interracial Headline Singers, with Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and collaborated with Pete Seeger and other luminaries in the Almanac Singers. By the time of the Asch/Harris sessions, he was a walking encyclopedia of indigenous American music.
"The idea was to record everything you wrote, or sang, or remembered," says Ms. Guthrie. Political broadsides, traditional ballads, guitar rags, country blues, square-dance jigs, musical flashbacks to figures like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family—all were fair game.
"I was my own recording engineer," Asch, later founder of Folkways Records, reminisced in 1978. "There was one mike, we set it up and they just sang, one song after another. Every one was perfect. And if there was a mistake, that was all right too. You couldn't cut off a mistake like you can with tape—this was acetate. We all felt that the spirit was in the record."
Despite later stereotypes (arising perhaps from fossilized sound quality), many of the masters hardly register as doleful or self-serious. Defiant joy, warm good humor and a goofy playfulness abound, interspersed with kernels of aphoristic wisdom.
"Going Down the Road (I Ain't Gonna Be Treated This Way)," a signature Guthrie composition used in John Ford's Depression-era epic "The Grapes of Wrath," is especially illustrative. Driven by Terry's honking harp bursts, Guthrie and Houston fall into convivial harmony. The lyric—vowing defiance in the face of persecution—is bolstered by riotous whoops and hollers; in short, a piteous predicament begets a celebration.
"This wasn't an artifice constructed to sell records," explains Mr. Nowlin. "You can hear that Woody, Cisco and Sonny are friends simply having fun exploring songs they know, and even making up a few. The old folk songs become grist for something else—a rock 'n' roll way of doing things."
Still, Guthrie was never one to back away from a withering indictment of society's injustices: A compassionate moralism runs through every note he played. "There's a musical legacy that—simply stated—you can write what's on your mind," Ms. Guthrie observes. "Not too many people did that before Woody. So that has branched out, and that's a whole story and a legacy in and of itself. It's a really, really big tree," she says, citing acolytes like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Bono and a cast of thousands.
"Now I'm getting email from students in Iran," continues Ms. Guthrie, "saying 'Woody's been a great influence to us, and we're gonna write our own songs, and stand up for what we believe in.' It seeps through, and it takes on new faces and new names and new languages, and just keeps transforming. So in that sense, like [singer/songwriter] Billy Bragg once said, 'Woody's not a link in the chain. Woody's the stake in the ground.'"—Mr. Torn writes about rock, pop and roots music.
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