Newly released tapes reveal intimate reflections by Woody Guthrie

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: Nearly 60 years after his death, American folk icon and social activist Woody Guthrie is experiencing a resurgence of interest.

Last week, Guthrie’s publishing company released a new album featuring never-before-heard recordings, a mix of original songs and intimate spoken reflections. Meantime, on stages around the world, some of the biggest names in folk and rock are adding Guthrie classics back into their set lists, underscoring his enduring influence.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown has more for our series Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy as part of our canvas coverage.

(Music)

Jeffrey Brown: Woody Guthrie in a way we have never heard him before, his voice weakened by illness recording his American classic, even adding a few previously unheard verses in his Brooklyn, New York, apartment, all captured on a two-channel tape recorder surrounded by the sounds of everyday life and his wife and small children.

Woody Guthrie, Musician: That’s about I got to say.

Voice: Can I say hello?

Woody Guthrie: Hello.

(Laughter)

Anna Canoni, President, Woody Guthrie Publications: I never knew my grandfather.

Jeffrey Brown: Anna Canoni is Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter and the current president of Woody Guthrie Publications.

Anna Canoni: This is the first time I ever got to hear my grandfather as if he was just my grandfather,the intimacy of being in a home with a musician who just kind of picks up a guitar and plays while you’re in the middle of a conversation.

Jeffrey Brown: A conversation taking place on the new release “Woody at Home Volume 1 and 2.” In addition to well-known favorites, the album from recordings in 1951 and 1952 includes 13 never-before-heard songs and covers a wide range of topics from war and politics to love.

It also contains three tracks of Guthrie talking, including to his music publisher, Howie Richmond.

Woody Guthrie: Howie, I’d like to talk to you a couple of words about this idea of changing songs around.

Jeffrey Brown: The recordings were made to protect Guthrie’s rights to his songs and allow his publisher to share them with others in the music industry.

Anna Canoni: It’s rough and raw and intimate. There’s really nothing fancy about it. You really feel like you’re in the same room with him, kind of a fly in the wall.

Jeffrey Brown: British singer-songwriter and activist Billy Bragg’s relationship with Woody Guthrie goes back decades playing his music and helping bring it to new audiences. And Bragg was one of the first people Anna Canoni sought feedback from on the new release.

Billy Bragg, Singer-Songwriter and Activist: I heard someone trying to make sense of the life that they were living in New York in the early 1950s, reflecting not just what was happening around them, but what was happening in the home, what was happening in their day, what was happening in their life.

You either think of him out on the road covered in dust, or, if you know a little bit about him, in the Merchant Navy in the Second World War, but you certainly don’t imagine him sitting around looking after the kids in his house in Coney Island.

Jeffrey Brown: Guthrie was born in 1912 in Oklahoma and as a young man during the Depression moved around the country, including to Los Angeles, where he hosted a radio show. He served in the Merchant Marines and Army in World War II and then came to New York, all the while crafting songs of life in America, often of the poor and dispossessed.

The years in New York would be some of Guthrie’s most prolific and see a growing influence, eventually on several generations of musicians, famously including Bob Dylan, a relationship dramatized in the recent film “A Complete Unknown.”

Timothée Chalamet, Actor: I wanted to meet Woody.

Jeffrey Brown: He also began to show signs of Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder, that would lead to his early death at age 55.

To restore the tapes, Canoni worked with Steve Rosenthal, a four-time Grammy-winning producer.

Anna Canoni: The audio technology that we used, it was able to take a mono recording…

(Singing)

Anna Canoni: … and separate out into Woody’s guitar, Woody’s voice, background noises, and a hum, so that all that emerges is really just Woody.

Jeffrey Brown: Guthrie’s writing about the marginalized and oppressed has made his songs a staple ingredient of protest movements since the 1950s.

Billy Bragg: He represents the kind of big, brass spike that birthed the singer-songwriter tradition that I am a part of. So, in that sense, Woody is perhaps one of the first alternative songwriters. He wasn’t just writing songs for commercial purposes. He was writing songs to put across a set of ideas that he strongly believed in.

Jeffrey Brown: All the more so amid today’s political and social upheavals, as musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and songwriter and social activist Ani DiFranco are playing his songs to protest Trump administration policies.

Ani DiFranco, Singer-Songwriter: Woody was awake. I think Woody was compassionate and trying to bestow love and truth. Politically speaking, we are in very perilous and desperate political times. So I think a timeless voice of unity and equality and justice like Woody’s is very important now.

Jeffrey Brown: The new album contains the only known recording by Guthrie of one of his most famous songs, “Deportee,” written in 1948 about 28 migrant farmworkers who died when the plane deporting them back to Mexico crashed.

Ani DiFranco: It’s an especially timely song, now more than ever.

I think there are many kinds of protest songs. But I think the classic protest song is galvanizing and motivating, you know, a song that sees and recognizes a social political problem and motivates people to address it, to confront it, to overcome it.

Jeffrey Brown: Billy Bragg has also been performing more of Guthrie’s music since the start of Donald Trump’s second term.

Billy Bragg: In these times, he represents a patriotic American who stood up for what he believed in. But currently one of the songs from Woody’s repertoire that I’m using to address the things that Donald Trump is doing is “All You Fascists Bound to Lose.”

I’m trying to make an argument in that we don’t slip from autocracy into something much deeper and much darker.

Jeffrey Brown: For Anna Canoni, the political meshes with the personal.

Anna Canoni: You know, he’s singing songs about injustice, racism, greed, corruption. It was Bob Dylan, right? He said, you can listen to a Woody Guthrie song and actually learn how to live.

I have been following that line kind of so hard that I have looked through almost every single lyric my grandfather has written to figure out the kind of person I want to be. I love using Woody as a tool in my tool belt to go through life, and I think a lot of musicians do too.

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown.