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Woody Guthrie, Woody at Home: Volume 1 + 2, 2025, TRO Essex Music Group, CD, Vinyl & Digital

Jamie Fenton

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1Woody Guthrie made it look all too easy. Coasting from sea to shining sea, he sang the kinds of songs that sounded more found than composed. Indeed, some Transatlantica readers might know a Guthrie song without knowing it as a Guthrie song:

  • 1 Quotations are taken from the liner notes to Woody Guthrie, Woody at Home: Volume 1 + 2, TRO Essex (...)

This land is your land
And this land is my land
From the Red Wood Forest
To the New York Island1

2The song’s rhyme of “my land” and “Island” is effortlessly characterful. The double stress on “Island” prompts the singer to adopt Guthrie’s western accent, watermarking the song even as it speaks anonymously of its tour of the nation entire. Catchy, easy-to-learn, eminently campfire-strummable, it was a song Guthrie must have known he was bound to lose.

  • 2 Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life. 1980. London: Faber & Faber, 2023, p. 503.

3It sits provocatively, therefore, as the opening track of 2025’s Woody at Home: Volume 1 + 2, a new record which hints at just how effortful a composer Guthrie in fact was. The double album features twenty-two tracks selected from a collection of home recordings Guthrie made on a reel-to-reel tape recorder for his new publisher, Howie Richmond, between 1950 and 1952. The simplicity of the recording machine, given to Guthrie by Richmond, clearly appealed to him as an inveterate scribbler, note-taker and sketcher, and he ended up sending Richmond “several reels a week” of songs and one-sided conversation, descanted by the background clatter of his Brooklyn family home. These tapes have been with the publisher, now the TRO Essex Music Group, since their creation, so the listener might be left wondering why they have only just been released. While we can but conjecture, there is a close coincidence with the return of folk music to the big screen and the awards circuit with the 2024 Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. The film is topped and tailed by scenes in Guthrie’s hospital room in Greystone Hospital (which Woody of course called “Gravestone”).2 There, Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan, overawed at first, humbled and deferent as the credits get ready to roll, sits by the bedside of a Guthrie whose long degeneration from Huntington’s Disease is collapsed down to a vague state of non-verbal semi-mobility. It is easy enough to see why the writers did not give Guthrie a voice in a film already fighting to hit the key moments within the runtime, and Scott McNairy’s performance is nicely understated, but not to even identify Guthrie’s illness as Huntington’s runs somewhat in the face of the advocacy work done in his name. In any case, the first song we hear in the film is Guthrie’s “Dusty Old Dust”, and the first song we hear Dylan sing is his “Song to Woody”, a piece which takes on some of Guthrie’s meandering guitar work to offer a toast to “the hearts and the hands of the men / That come with the dust and are gone with the wind”. With all of this Guthrie exposure in the mainstream, perhaps the TRO Essex Music Group were banking on more than a few film-watchers having gone home to look up more about the man behind the man behind the folk boom.

4The reason for delay might also have been technical. The restoration of the home-made tapes is superb, and the liner notes offer a gratifying amount of detail about the lengths the engineers went to in salvaging Guthrie’s playing from “the detritus of having been recorded onto a slow speed quarter-inch analog tape over 70 years ago”. The quality of the restoration can be made plain by comparing Woody at Home to 2007’s The Live Wire, a recording in full of a concert Guthrie gave in 1949, compered by his then-wife Marjorie (Greenblatt) Guthrie. To be sure, the base fidelity of Guthrie’s reel-to-reel might have been higher than the wire recorder which captured the concert, but the minimal quantity of hiss, wobble and warp in Woody at Home compared to The Live Wire is still remarkable: the product of almost two decades’ advances in digital audio editing. Indeed, the engineers went further than cleaning the signal and used algorithmic stem separation to “unmix” Guthrie’s guitar and vocals and “rebalance” them, in order to address his tendency to drown out his own strumming. All this technology and expertise comes together to offer the listener an album free of auditory rough edges. The tracks are all clean, clear, and consistent.

5Perhaps too consistent. The restoration is so pristine that it had me wondering exactly what the publishers of Woody at Home wanted the album to be. The track list, beginning with “This Land” and hitting all-timers like “Pastures of Plenty” and “Jesus Christ” on the first disc, makes sure to show off his best work before heading to deeper cuts. But if Woody at Home is meant to be an introduction to his music for new listeners, then it does not do very well at all, because most of the performances are either uninspired or downright poor. Guthrie was no recording engineer, as the liner notes lament, and deprived of an audience he sings without gusto, almost as if he does not want to be heard by his wife and children in the next rooms. And quite possibly he did not; the children were young and Marjorie was working all day at her newly-opened dance school — perhaps they wanted some peace and quiet. The result is a series of hushed, hesitant performances which do the songs few favours. More than once, Guthrie seems to forget the words. So, if the record is neither a useful introduction to Guthrie, nor even a satisfying rendition of his work, then what is it?

6The album includes two tracks of Guthrie’s one-sided conversation with Richmond, and on the first of these he makes sure his publisher knows that none of what he sends is finished:

But, 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 that every one’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. I just want you to know that all of these things are highly gear-shiftable, changeable. That’s about all I got to say.

  • 3 We got out to the West Coast broke,

7I’ll tell it “plain as I can tell you,” he says, before launching into a classic Guthrie paragraph where every clause cascades into a run of subordinates and alternatives, as if he is reluctant even to finish a sentence, let alone a song. He had already taken up a good stretch of tape in getting to the point, spending a minute explaining how hard it was to talk to Richmond in his office, “with ten or fifteen telephones ringing.” No hard feelings, though, because “that’s your business, is telephones, and I know how well you tend to them.” That is the joy of hearing Guthrie talk: when out of the run of riffs comes a knife-edge remark like “that’s your business, is telephones”. He put this talent to music in his “talking blues” songs, where each tightly-rhymed verse is followed by some spoken lines that cut through the folksiness with a bone-dry joke.3

8The relationship between Guthrie’s style of talk and his songwriting revealed by this two-minute snippet of chat is far more valuable than a substandard rendition of “Jesus Christ” cleaned of the noise which would at least have given it character, and the brief excerpts of talk offered on the album therefore leave me wondering why the publishers did not include more. It is unlikely that anyone outside the TRO Essex Music Group will hear the rest of the tapes for a long while, if ever, so the major takeaway of Woody at Home ends up being frustration. There are other oddnesses, too. At the end of the first spoken track, we hear Marjorie say “Can I say hello?” Quickly, sharply, Guthrie responds “hello,” as if annoyed at the interruption. This exchange is not included in the lyrics in the liner notes, which suggests that the compilers were keen to make a rigid distinction between what they deemed relevant to the album and what they did not. This flies in the face of what we know of Guthrie’s creative environment in the late 1940s and 50s. Since meeting Marjorie Greenblatt in 1942 Guthrie had been trying, with profoundly mixed success, to marry a domestic life with his itinerant urges. This is not to say that Marjorie was in any way a stymie on his creativity. For starters, she was a vital component of that creativity: it was Marjorie that encouraged Guthrie to commit to writing his autobiography and created the structure which allowed him to finish it. And beyond that, it is important to temper the mythology of Guthrie as a writer entirely immersed in experience. He built this myth himself, referring so often to the “walking and talking” at the root of his songs that we would be forgiven for thinking he composed on the road, to the rhythm of his feet and the rattle of the boxcars. And yet his archives quickly put the lie to that picture with their boxes upon boxes of typewritten prose and verse. I say verse, because passing few of the pages come with a reference to a tune; the typed page was where songs happened first for Guthrie, and often where they stayed. This transforms the corner desks crammed into the Guthries’ Brooklyn apartments into sites of composition as ubiquitous as the hard dusty roads of his earlier work. And so to be given hints of the soundscapes of this creative zone by Woody at Home – Marjorie’s voice, his mention of tapes of “me and the kids all banging their slips[?] together” – only to have this noise cleaned up or left out, makes for a hard listen.

9Before leaving the album be, it is worth looking at its headline feature: the only published recording of Guthrie singing “Deportee”, his ballad about the 1948 plane crash near Los Gatos Canyon in California. As well as four American citizens, the plane had been carrying twenty-eight migrant farm workers who were being deported to Mexico. All of them died in the crash. It is a provocative inclusion for an album released during the militarisation of US immigration policy, although the liner notes say nothing to this effect. The way Guthrie performs the piece, it is barely a song. There is a guitar line lilting along in sixes, but Guthrie frequently lingers on a chord while he searches for or spins out the words (the same habit that drove his wife’s colleagues up the wall when he was hired to play for their dances), and the melody, meanwhile, covers so little of the scale that it sounds more like talk. Joe Klein reports that Guthrie had earlier considered writing a ballad which simply named the victims of a disaster (in this case the sinking of the Reuben James), and here he upends and fulfils that idea in lines of profound intimacy:

  • 4 Klein, p.256.

Goodbye to you, Juan;
Goodbye, Rosalita;
Adios mis amigos, Jesus and Marie;
I don’t have a name when I ride this big airplane;
They just call me, “One more deportee”4

  • 5 This change can be found as early as 1968, on Pete Seeger, Pete Seeger Sings Woody Guthrie, 1968, F (...)

10The speaker straddles the before and after, bidding farewell to his friends in the chorus and describing the crash which killed him in the verse. It is a risky ventriloquism which subsequent singers of the song (including Seeger, Baez, Springsteen, and Guthrie’s son Arlo) have shrugged off, opting instead for “You won’t have a name when you ride this big airplane,” and thereby turning the song from a ghostly cry into a more straightforward elegy.5 Guthrie was never afraid to identify with the oppressed and speak as them as well as for them, and the lack of pretension in this spare room recording allows him, I think, to succeed. When he hits the final verse, he all but abandons melody to ask, through the tape and the decades:

Is this the best way
You can grow our big orchard?
Is this the best system to grow some good fruit?

11It is a line to stop you in your tracks, all the more so for its unfinishedness. The song as Guthrie semi-sings it is rough—its grammar needs fixing, the melody needs sharpening—but the creative ambition to sing it into a microphone hung on a clothes line while caring for three young children, whose clatter just about survives the restoration process, is remarkable, and a sign of what these tapes, although not necessarily Woody at Home, have to offer.

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Notes

1 Quotations are taken from the liner notes to Woody Guthrie, Woody at Home: Volume 1 + 2, TRO Essex Music Group, 2025.

2 Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life. 1980. London: Faber & Faber, 2023, p. 503.

3 We got out to the West Coast broke,

So dad-gum hungry I thought I’d croak,

An’ I bummed up a spud or two,

An’ my wife fixed up a tater stew —

We poured the kids full of it,

Mighty thin stew, though,

You could read a magazine right through it.

Always have figured

That if it’d been just a little bit thinner,

Some of these here politicians

Coulda seen through it.

(Woody Guthrie, ‘Talking Dust Bowl Blues’, Dust Bowl Ballads, 1940, Victor Records).

4 Klein, p.256.

5 This change can be found as early as 1968, on Pete Seeger, Pete Seeger Sings Woody Guthrie, 1968, Folkways Records.

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Jamie Fenton, « Woody Guthrie, Woody at Home: Volume 1 + 2, 2025, TRO Essex Music Group, CD, Vinyl & Digital »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/27925 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15i2r

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