Woody Guthrie, Woody at Home – Vol 1 + 2 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
How often do you get to hear new Woody Guthrie? Not very often. These recordings are taken from tapes recorded at his Brooklyn apartment circa 1951/52 that were sent to his publisher at the time. These were the days of publishing sheet music and such, at that’s what these were for. Basically transcribing. But the recordings were deemed too low of sound quality to release, until recently when leaps in sound separation technology allowed the Guthrie estate to go in and properly clean up the recordings, and balance his vocals and guitar. And they did a damn good job of it.
All 22 recordings are previously unreleased, with 13 of them being songs that previously had no known recordings by Woody Guthrie himself. Now, sometimes the performances are a little rough, and sometimes it’s just him singing lyrics or putting down ideas or notes, because, obviously, he wasn’t thinking the public would hear these. Only his publisher. But you get an unprecedented candid view of Woody Guthrie. This is so cliche to say, but you really feel like you’re a fly on the wall.
This is an absolute treasure trove. It really kind of humanizes him in a way that not much does. He’s so mythologized at this point that he sometimes feels more like folklore than a human himself. Even with the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, and the countless volumes written on his life, he’s still always felt elusive to me. But this made me feel closer than ever before.
Favorite song: “Pastures of Plenty”
