Okemah, Okla.'s most famous export, that scrawny kid born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, might have turned 100 this July if Huntington's disease hadn't wasted him back in 1967. It's strange to consider even the vague possibility of a centenarian Woody Guthrie living among us; for starters, he always seemed old even when he was young, wizened and weary before his time, by both circumstance and his own design. Despite the campfire accident that crippled his guitar arm in the early 1950s and the neurological ravages of his final decade, Guthrie squeezed a good bit out of his 55 years, almost as if he knew he wasn't too long for this world; he was so prolific-- in words and songs and performances of those songs-- that it sometimes seems like he never left at all.
His odd non-absence has been especially felt in this year. In celebration of his century milestone, the Grammy Museum and the Guthrie Family (which oversees the Woody Guthrie Foundation, which in turn oversees his publications and his archives) have partnered for a spate of concerts and conferences and new releases (14 books, tribute records, and documentaries, at last count). The Smithsonian, which boasts an extensive Guthrie archive of its own, has thrown down, too, with the release of a Folkways box set, Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection, which features the most notable of his hundreds of known recorded songs winnowed down to two discs and a third filled with unreleased tracks.
Woody at 100 may be the most successful attempt to capture Guthrie's sprawling essence, but it's hardly the first. In the decades since his death, Guthrie's songs have been released and re-released in a weird cycle of glut and famine. The endless official and unofficial repackaging of his few dozen best-known songs has been occasionally balanced by the discovery of some old crate bearing thought-lost recordings, mostly of those same few dozen titles, subsequently gussied up and sold as a new entrée into his canon. The full list of Guthrie's known recordings may loom like an ever-swelling crag to all but the most dedicated completists, but all the heft is just a byproduct of the craft. If the bulk of his catalog seems to comprise endless variations on the same four or five dozen songs recorded however and whenever by whoever wanted to give him studio time (and a little cash), that's because this was not only the nature of Guthrie's career but the defining characteristic of folk musicians, especially in the days before the LP was king: making portable, flexible music forever seeking out and open to its audience-- no matter how many vaguely dissimilar versions of "Pretty Boy Floyd" it would leave archivists to sort through down the line. (And still, even with Nora Guthrie regularly handpicking artists to transform her father's unfinished works into full-blooming songs, we haven't yet heard it all, and may not ever.)
At 57 tracks, Woody at 100 clocks in somewhere between the two most prominent existing Guthrie collections: Smithsonian Folkways' 105-track, four-volume Asch Recordings, which came out in the late 90s, and Rounder's My Dusty Road, 54 tracks recorded for the defunct Stinson label unearthed from Brooklyn basement storage and released in 2009. Woody hits some midpoint, too, between the expansiveness of the Asch sessions and the novelty factor of the Rounder set (which came packaged in a faux-tattered ramblin' man suitcase). The bulk of Woody at 100 is pulled from the Smithsonian archives, recorded with Moses Asch or earlier with John and Alan Lomax.
There are the old favorites, the usual suspects: "Pastures of Plenty", "Gypsy Davy", "Bad Lee Brown (Cocaine Blues)", the dustbowl version and the WWII version of "So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh", the talking blues and the Pacific Northwest odes, the tributes to old sunken ships, and the laments for murdered miners. Twenty-one tracks are seeing release for the first time here, all from radio broadcasts taped in the early 40s; most of the songs are well-known-- "Tom Joad", "Wabash Cannonball"-- but there are six new excavations. Two come from the four tracks thought to be his earliest recordings, made at the Los Angeles radio station KFVD in 1939 (or maybe 1937; the book includes an essay by historian Peter LaChapelle that explores the session's uncertain origins): "Them Big City Ways" and "Skid Row Serenade" are straightforward enough as Guthrie songs, lamenting the tricky business of urban life (as usual, he sounds more at home on "Skid Row").
And then there's the crackly final track, one of the new songs, "Goodnight Little Cathy", a lullaby Guthrie cut for tiny daughter during a 1946 session with Asch. The audio quality is not great-- it sounds like it's being played on a Victrola cranked by a ghost in the middle of a sandstorm-- but that seems somehow appropriate. Not long after he made the recording, Cathy was killed in a freak house fire (stunningly, Guthrie's sister was killed, and his father badly wounded, in two unrelated fires when he was a kid). Is there any way this song could not feel haunted?
The real point of Woody at 100 may not be the songs at all. The set's three discs come slotted into the back of a coffee table-ready book-- a hefty tome, thick and square as a stack of vinyl sleeves, like a lap-sized Smithsonian tour with its own built-in soundtrack. The pages are sprinkled with Guthrie's ecstatic stick-figure doodles and scrawled snippets of lyrical bric-a-brac ("Take it easy/ But take it," one suggests); there's his original lyric sheets typed and handwritten, letters and telegrams, family photos and whole spreads filled with his pen and ink drawings, his watercolors, his etchings, all as loosely-rendered and bitingly specific as his songs.
The book is anchored by a lengthy biographical sketch by co-producer Robert Santelli, the Grammy Museum's executive director (who also penned This Land Is Your Land: Woody Guthrie and the Journey of an American Folk Song, one of the books released for the centennial), and a track-by-track breakdown from Jeff Place, co-producer and Smithsonian folklife archivist. Place neatly fits each song into the scope of Guthrie's career, right down to where and when the tracks were recorded. It's a heroic exegesis, and it's not so much a biography of each song but a genealogy; in the long tradition of folk musicians and the short tradition of a cultural bowerbird, Guthrie was a proud pilferer, borrowing melodies from traditional songs as well as his contemporaries. Place notes each of these instances, from "Ramblin' Man" and its tune borrowed from Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene" to the uncountable debts to the Carter Family.
A noted failure of My Dusty Road was the overly tidy organization of its contents into four themed discs. "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," Pitchfork's Stephen M. Deusner wrote of the forced compartmentalization. But in the world of Woody at 100, everything about Guthrie's career seems fluid, boundaryless, as if considering him just as a great American musician and not also as a man of letters and a painter, too, has maybe been a huge mistake. (We may get another chance to remedy this: Days before Guthrie's would-be 100th birthday, July 14, it was announced that Johnny Depp, along with author Douglas Brinkley, would be editing House of Earth, his lost novel, for a 2013 release.)
Even within his music, Guthrie himself drew so few solid lines, such as those that usually designate between protest songs and children's songs; in his lifetime he released nearly as many records meant for kids as records of his "serious" work, which feels somehow significant, but also like a pointless distinction. "My Daddy (Flies a Ship in the Sky)" is a pre-WWII rallying cry (and a lesson in what big people do all day); "All Work Together" is a little ditty about helping your mama and daddy with housework (and about banding together despite domestic political disputes to defeat fascism). There's something dark and heavy about being a little kid and something wildly, giddily preposterous about being a grown-up; Guthrie seemed to know this, and it freed him.
Or maybe it's just impossible for me to separate the idea of childhood from the idea of Woody Guthrie, or at least from the idea of his most famous song. Even in his lifetime, "This Land Is Your Land" was included in schoolkids' sheet music and taught along the flag-waving anthems it quietly railed against. When his own kids, Nora and Arlo, joined a new elementary school in New York City, they were gobsmacked to find that they were the only ones who didn't know the words. The song was ground into me from the start, too, during every sing-along led by anyone with half a memory of their own childhood spent singing the same song. I was taught the version that on Woody at 100 is titled "This Land Is Your Land (Standard Version)", the one that skips the beautiful stanza about trespassing, which is included on "This Land Is Your Land (Alternate Version)", which opens the first disc: "Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me/ Was a great big sign that said "Private Property"/ But on the other side, it didn't say nothing/ This land was made for you and me."
Hearing those words for the first time, I might as well have been hearing the whole song for the first time. It was like being a child again and realizing that a teacher or a parent is a whole weird complex person extending in every direction beyond the tiny crosshairs your small brain has trained on them, that indeed their entire glorious mass has been shimmering there right in front of your face the whole time but was obscured by either your own smudged eyes or just the huge bulk of its own self-- some unwieldy, unknowable beast you'll keep prodding and pointing at in some hopes of making sense of it someday, maybe in the next century.
