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Woody at Home, Vol. 1 and 2 is a new album of 22 previously unreleased songs by folk singer Woody Guthrie, known for “ This Land Is Your Land ,” one of the most important songs in U.S. history. The tracks protest against racism, facism, and corruption — which isn’t surprising for an artist who had “this machine kills fascists” written on his acoustic guitar.
Anna Canoni, Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter and president of Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc., tells KCRW that her grandfather’s songs reflected the hardships and experiences of people he watched, worked with, and lived with.
With “This Land is Your Land,” Guthrie was literally traveling from California to New York at the start of 1940, witnessing people’s distress that was left out of singer Kate Smith’s “ God Bless America ,” a song that was popular on the radio at the time, Canoni explains. His track also asks people to re-evaluate: “Is this land made for you and me, or is it just for some of us? Is it for those who have private property, or is it also for those who need public lands, and public works, and public media?”
The newly released version of “This Land is Your Land,” compared to the 1951 edition, includes the lyrics, “I can see your mailbox, I can see your doorstep, I can feel the wind rock on your tip-top tree tops. … I'm helping my farmer to scatter my new seed. I'm showing my builder how to build your love house. You just got to keep dancing, and I got to keep singing, because this land was made for you and me.”
Canoni says, “It's really a song about the workers, the farmers, the builders, and the people. Now this is not the final version of the song. … It's an unreleased version, but we wanted to share it to show Woody's process. … He's working through different iterations of lyrics and verses. What he resolves to is the version that we know.”
All the songs on Woody at Home, Volume 1 and 2 were recorded at Guthrie’s apartment, using a portable recording machine that came out in 1950, which his publisher gave him. “He recorded old songs, new songs, covers of songs. He just loved the opportunity to record in his own home, and so these are really rough, these are raw, these are intimate,” Canoni says.
Guthrie recorded all the songs on one track, as opposed to today’s method involving separate tracks for guitar, bass, drums, etc. Canoni credits music engineer Steve Rosenthal, who used advanced technology to separate and re-level the guitar and the vocal tracks, so “what remains is 100% Woody Guthrie. There is no editing or changing or anything to the audio.”
Guthrie recorded “Deportee (Woody's Home Tape)” after a plane crashed in Los Gatos on January 28, 1948, killing 28 migrant farm workers. When Guthrie read about the incident in The New York Times, he was “exhausted” by the omission of names of most of the people who died, Canoni explains.
“Only the four Americans on the plane were named. And the other 28 passengers were here as part of the U.S.-Mexico Bracero program. And when the plane crashed, they were only listed as deportees. So really outraged by the insensitivity of and the abandonment of these people.”
How did Guthrie develop his political sensibilities? “He went through the Dust Bowl, the Depression, the Great Migration. He worked through World War II on the Merchant Marine ships. So Woody witnessed so much that he really, as an observational writer, is saying, ‘I need you all to see what's happening with the people,’” Canoni explains.
Woody Guthrie lived at 49 Murdock Court. Courtesy of Nick Loss-Eaton Media.
At one point, Guthrie’s landlord was Fred Trump, the president’s father. Guthrie witnessed a lot of racial discrimination at the apartment building where he lived in Beach Haven, New Jersey, and scathingly wrote about it in the song “Backdoor Bum and the Big Landlord,” Canoni says. “Although Woody does not name who the bum is and who the landlord is, I think it's probably not a big leap to figure out what he's inferring.”
She adds, “A thread you can see throughout all of Woody's songs … he wants to be there for the people, and how can we help come together, and don't let the big guys fracture us and make us feel like we're divided?”
Guthrie wrote “I'm A Child Ta Fight” right before he shipped out with the Merchant Marines in March 1943. At the time, he was living in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
“One of the things I love sharing about my grandfather's songs is the way forward. It's not just what the hardship is, but … how do we move forward? What's the action? And so I like including some of these feisty songs just to remind us that … we can get up, and we can fight, and we can move forward together.”
Woody Guthrie appears with his family. Courtesy of Woody Guthrie Publications. |
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