Every year it seems someone finds a lost treasure in a mundane place: a Pollock at a flea market, a rare edition of Darwin stacked on a toilet, a Michelangelo gathering dust in the attic. In addition to perhaps filling a hole in an artist's catalog that we didn't even know was there, such occurrences garner enough headlines to make us think we could be sitting on top of similarly undiscovered treasures. That's the story behind My Dusty Road, which begins with the kind of phone call we all wish we got. In 2003, an archivist named Michael Creamer heard from a cousin who said he had been contacted by a woman in Brooklyn claiming to have rare, unreleased recordings of Woody Guthrie. She had, in fact, inherited the masters from the long-defunct Stinson label, which was founded by Herbert Harris and Moe Asch and had been active during the first half of the 20th century. Harris' widow had left the collection to her neighbor, Lucia Sutera, who left it stored in the basement of her apartment building.
As he writes in the liner notes to My Dusty Road, Creamer couldn't let himself believe that such rare Guthrie recordings actually existed, but when he eventually rummaged through the piles of nickel-plated copper discs, he found more than 50 performances from the mid-1940s. In fact, due to the durability of the materials and the means of storage, they were of surprisingly crystalline sound quality, which was all the more unexpected considering Stinson had a reputation among collectors for releasing shoddy records during wartime vinyl rationing. Even the Guthrie recordings that Stinson actually released don't sound this good.
For that alone, My Dusty Road, which collects the bulk of those sessions, is a treasure for historians and Guthrie fans alike. And Rounder has packaged them as such: the set arrives in a small, roadworn suitcase containing reproductions of the folkie's business card, a postcard from Florida to his wife back in New York, and a notice of booking from 1947. There are also novella-length liner notes that not only recount Guthrie's career but document in technical detail the process of discovering, organizing, remastering, and releasing these recordings. And then there's the music itself. Rather than adhere to the order of the original sessions, the tracks have been organized thematically across four discs: "Woody's Greatest Hits", "Woody's Roots", "Woody the Agitator", and "Woody, Cisco & Sonny", which features fellow folkie Cisco Houston and blues harmonica player Sonny Terry.
Collecting some of his more popular songs, "Woody's 'Greatest' Hits" finds an instructive balance between patriotic flag-waving and outraged dissent. He extols American ingenuity on "Grand Coulee Dam" and memorializes dead sailors on the forlorn "Sinking of the Reuben James", about a U.S. aid ship torpedoed by a German U-boat. Those songs bristle against outraged numbers like "This Land Is Your Land" (which 60 years later seems to have lost most of its socialist connotations) and two versions of "Goin' Down the Road (I Ain't Gonna Be Treated This Way)", a powerful cry for empowerment and equality.
That disc proves much feistier than "Woody the Agitator", a collection of protest and pro-union songs that sounds curiously subdued. Despite the famous image that adorns the cover (Guthrie and his guitar emblazoned with "This Machine Kills Fascists"), there's little of the truth-to-power indignation that made him a hero to generations of musicians and listeners. Guthrie conveys some disgust on "Hangknot, Slipknot", but the song has only the barest of verses and the repetition of the word "hangknot" becomes quickly tedious. Despite the righteous "Tear The Fascists Down" and "When the Yanks Go Marching In", most of these songs sound barely agitated at all.
Full of spirited run-throughs of songs he learned from his Uncle Jeff Guthrie and from his travels through the folk circuit, "Woody's Roots" and "Woody, Cisco & Sonny" comprise a more engaged and much more charming half of the box set. Guthrie offers a series of snapshots of poverty on the nineteenth-century parlor ballad "A Picture form Life's Other Side" and tall tales on "Stackolee", which finds a bit of humor in all that violence. By contrast, Houston's guitar trills beautifully on the funereal "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?" while "Hard Ain't It Hard" and the Carter Family's "Worried Man Blues" are mournful meditations on heartbreak marked by Guthrie's soulfully downcast vocals. Houston appears on most of the songs on "Roots", but their sessions with Terry sound more like a lark, launching into loose rags, medleys, and breakdowns with merry abandon. Terry is a dynamic addition to their dueling guitars, and his harmonica provides an organlike backdrop on "Do You Ever Think of Me (aka At My Window)" and doggedly chases the guitar on "Brown's Ferry Blues" as Guthrie calls out for him to repeat his solo.
That fourth disc presents a very different side of Guthrie than is glimpsed elsewhere on this set. In fact, the folkie comes across as a highly complex artist on My Dusty Road, with all of his affectations and contradictions fully intact and in some cases even reinforced. However, one wonders how the set would have fared if it re-created these sessions rather than imposing such artificial categories onto the music. It too neatly compartmentalizes Guthrie's populist preaching from his more playful performances, his outrage from his joy. The man himself was never so organized; that he could sing a grave union ballad after a nonsensical number makes him seem very real even so many years after his death, despite the pains he took to create and sustain his folkie persona. By dividing the sessions into what amounts to an overview of his career, My Dusty Road detracts from the recently discovered source material, making it both an incredible find and a missed opportunity.
