From the Record Shelf Dept.: I looked this up online to remind myself of the CD set and – hey! What a handsome job of packaging! I was sent a promotional copy to review, which came in a conventional jewel case with a PDF of program notes. And to make matters worse, Metroland magazine never even ran the review I wrote, so it’s reproduced below. As of this writing, you can get it from woodyguthriecenter.org for a hundred bucks, from Amazon for $65, and from a Discogs seller for about $35 bucks.
EVERY NOW AND THEN, something turns up unexpectedly. Caravaggio's “The Taking of the Christ” was unearthed, but I still await a complete print of Orson Welles’s “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Meanwhile, a stash of Woody Guthrie recordings was discovered in a Brooklyn storage bin, part of the inventory of Stinson-label records that fell into limbo following a tangled series of bankruptcies and family disputes.
One of the unfortunate characteristics of the Guthrie legacy is that his recordings were produced fast and cheap, and many of them, drawn from dubs of dubs, sound like crap. Some of the songs from these sessions went to original co-producer Moe Asch’s Folkways label, which had a way of making everything sound terrible, and are now available through the Smithsonian-Folkways label. More on that in a moment.
Here, on the other hand, is a set taken directly from metal masters that sat virtually unmolested since they were recorded in April 1944. The sound isn’t audiophile-quality clean, but restoration engineer Doug Pomeroy (responsible for sparkling projects for Mosaic Records and for Bluebird’s “Secret History of Rock and Roll” series) has brought out a tonal depth, including an impressive range of high-frequency material, that you wouldn’t associate with Woody’s recordings.
Guthrie was a Merchant Marine on shore leave during the week in April, 1944, when he laid down an astonishing 250 tracks, many of them with Cisco Houston and Sonny Terry. Over 60 of those sides got the quality-rerelease treatment in a 1999 Smithsonian-Folkways four-CD set that also included a number of other Guthrie recordings from the period. The songs sound far better than any of the earlier Folkways LPs, but still bear the scars of overplayed masters.
Those April 1944 sessions present Woody was at a peak of his writing and performing career. Despite the speed with which these recordings were made, they are the accomplished work of a seasoned artist. So the new Rounder set becomes a very important component of the Guthrie canon, not only illustrating his artistry but also freezing a moment in time when these songs, many of them still familiar, were still evolving.
Disc One lives up to its moniker of “Woody’s Greatest Hits” with versions of “This Land Is Your Land,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” two takes of “Going down the Road” and the previously unreleased “Bad Repetation” (sic) among the offerings. “Woody’s Roots” includes traditional songs like”Stackolee,” “Chisholm Trail,” “John Henry” and Guthrie’s reworkings of “Stewball,” “Buffalo Skinners” and more.
Some of the songs on Disc Three, “Woody the Agitator,” were inspired by the then-current war: “Tear the Fascists Down,” “When the Yanks Go Marching In,” but they’re mixed with classic union songs and a two-part tribute to Harriet Tubman. The final CD presents 15 recordings in which Guthrie is joined by Houston and Terry, including three previously unreleased sides (“Guitar Rag,” “Brown’s Ferry Blues” and “Sonny’s Flight.”)
It’s an intense listening experience, especially when you augment it with a careful reading of the detailed program notes. Taken thus, the brief playing time of each CD doesn’t seem like a shortfall, although I’d like to know the fate of the Stinson recordings that didn’t make it into this set.
My Dusty Road
Woody Guthrie
Rounder Records
– 7 November 2009
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