More Woody Guthrie Songs? Yes, From a Trove of Homemade Recordings.

By Jon Pareles
July 14, 2025
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)” — 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, 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.

The 13 new songs, previously known only as written lyrics, 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,” denouncing him 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.”

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