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

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/arts/music/woody-guthrie-tapes-woody-at-home.html

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A new, intimate album will include 13 previously unheard songs and a rewrite of “This Land Is Your Land.”

Musician Woody Guthrie poses for a portrait with his guitar circa 1941.

July 14, 2025Updated 1:58 p.m. ET

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 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.

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With the help of newer audio software and antique reel-to-reel tape machines, engineers have been able to make the tapes sound best for playback to make digital copies. Credit...Vincent Alban/The New York Times

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.”