Advance music for Woody At Home, the fascinating collection of songwriting demos Woody Guthrie recorded in his family’s Brooklyn apartment in 1951 and 1952, hit my inbox in early August.
Normally that’s vacation season. But this year, Americans were right in the middle of (another) Congressional frenzy over the Epstein files, with the equally frenzied frenzy over the government shutdown still on the horizon.
Given the blizzard of current events, the timing of Woody At Home, released on August 14, felt almost eerie. And not coincidental. Here was previously unreleased music from the prototypical topical singer, the man who showed Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and so many others effective ways to call attention to injustice through music. It registered as a sharp “pay attention” elbow to the gut. From a wry agitator, speaking from the Great Beyond.
I listened right away, or started to. Didn’t get far. Stopped at Track 3 of Volume 1, “Howie, I’d Like to Talk To Yuh,” an extemporaneous mumble/ramble intended for his publisher, Howie Richmond, who’d gotten Guthrie the reel-to-reel recorder.
Full disclosure: It was August. The bar graph of my news intake would have looked like a series of abrupt panic spikes and steep drops. Needed Eno not a wise sage talking into a tape recorder in 1951, with kids playing in the background. I had to pause this listening; hearing Guthrie sitting there in the apartment that was owned and operated by Fred Trump, musing in his blunt way about everyday human cravenness, was no summertime escape.
[A few years later, with his 1954 song “Old Man Trump,” Guthrie would excoriate his landlord’s discriminatory policies:
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
He stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project ]
“Old Man Trump” is not on this set of demos; according to Wikipedia there is no known recording of Guthrie singing it. But there is “Backdoor Bum and the Big Land Lord,” an allegory about a resourceful drifter helping an inept landlord who lacks basic survival skills. Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, has said she suspects “Backdoor Bum” was at least partly inspired by Fred Trump.
In addition to being an entertaining story, this track from Woody At Home provides strikingly compassionate audio counterpoint to the clip Trump posted on October 2, which celebrates government cuts and baits his adversaries with bizarre imagery set to an AI-altered version of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” (For what it’s worth, the band did not authorize use of its intellectual property; some iterations of the video replace the tune with generic AI slop fake music.)
The above is just one of the near-daily reminders of how unbalanced (vindictive?) our discourse has become, how the fundamental notion of doing the right thing has been trampled in a wanton spirit of retribution perpetuated by the President of the United States.
The point hit hard a few weeks ago, when I returned to Woody At Home and heard Guthrie singing about migrant workers who “come with the dust and go with the wind” on “Pastures of Plenty.” It’s a brilliant song, offering notes of humility and gratitude for the abundance of the land, and for the laborers whose work brings that abundance to the people. People whose hard work is being disregarded and trivialized by those presently in power.
The key to this — and actually many of these sketches — is how non-confrontational they are. Guthrie sounds serene expressing his convictions. He’s sure of himself but doesn’t have to shout, doesn’t flood the tape with emotional energy. He is documenting the spark of the song, the first flash of a tale, and recognizes that at this stage, the narrative shape matters more than stuff like tone.
But the tone he uses – small, unassuming, at times almost whispery and ghostlike – resonates with a palpable old-soul wisdom. It magnifies the concerns he’s written about as it calls from a less heated moment, when meaningful civic discourse did not sound like the pained overtalking squall of cable news. It values respectful communication above scoring cheap political points. Quaint notion.
Then there’s “Deportee (Woody’s Home Tape),” which Guthrie wrote in 1948 after a plane crash that killed 28 migrant farm workers. Its stanzas contain lines that could have been spoken this year by any of those forcibly removed from work – and denied due process – by physically abusive ICE agents: “I don’t have a name, and I ride this big airplane…they just call me one more deportee.”
Maybe the most cosmic moment is “Einstein Theme Song,” which imagines Professor Einstein inventing “a theory that would do away with the race hate…and all this Jim Crow stuff.” “He said this whole world is just like a little rubber ball,” Guthrie explains. “You could stick a hat pin through it, and no hat pins would point East and no hat pins would point West or any direction. So you couldn’t be from any of them places, and you couldn’t hate anybody else who was from those places.”
Made perfect sense when Guthrie said it in the early 1950s. How about right now?
Thanks for reading!
Thank you for this TM.