Lost Treasure: Recovering and Releasing Woody Guthrie’s Home Recordings, Part 1

15/09/2025 14

The cover of Woody At Home—Volumes 1 & 2

Iconic American folk singer, songwriter and activist Woody Guthrie posthumously added a new title—recording engineer—to his long list of accomplishments in August with the release of Woody at Home—Volumes 1 & 2. The new collection features 22 unreleased recordings, 13 of them previously known only from the published lyrics, that were drawn from approximately 140 songs that Guthrie recorded at home in Brooklyn in 1951 and 1952.

In 1951, TRO Music, Guthrie’s longtime publisher, gave him a Revere T-100 Crescent tape recorder—a mono consumer machine that ran at 3-¾ inches per second to capture material that could be released as sheet music and pitched to other artists. He went on to fill 32 reels of Scotch 111, marking the first time he had ever worked with tape, having previously only recorded to wire or lacquer disc, common formats at the time. These tapes, archived by Guthrie’s publisher (now TRO Essex Music Group), are likely his final recordings, although there is a rumored studio session that may yet be unearthed.

Steve Rosenthal, co-producer of Woody At Home—Volumes 1 & 2, alongside the Ampex 350 tape machine with half-inch headstack used for the tape transfers.PHOTO: Courtesy of Steve Rosenthal. — Steve Rosenthal, co-producer of Woody At Home—Volumes 1 & 2, alongside the Ampex 350 tape machine with half-inch headstack used for the tape transfers. PHOTO: Courtesy of Steve Rosenthal.

“The point of this project is to show Woody as a working songwriter; we’re sharing his process here,” says Steve Rosenthal, a multi-Grammy Award-winner, former owner of New York’s Magic Shop recording studio, and co-producer of this latest release. Woody at Home is his sixth project with the Guthrie family. “I’ve known about these tapes for over 20 years,” he says, but it was only with the recent emergence of commercial demixing tools allowing the separation of the guitar and vocal that their release became feasible.

Sean McClowry, a transfer and restoration specialist and owner of Attic Studio in New Jersey.PHOTO: Emily Pinkerton. — Sean McClowry, a transfer and restoration specialist and owner of Attic Studio in New Jersey. PHOTO: Emily Pinkerton.

THE TAPE TRANSFER

The first step was to transfer the selected songs. Rosenthal worked with New Jersey-based Attic Studio owner Sean McClowry, a restoration and transfer specialist, to find the machine best suited to the character of the tapes, experimenting with combinations of decks, headstacks and electronics.

“We did a shootout with five or six different tape machines and landed on the Ampex 350,” McClowry reports. An all-tube machine, like Woody’s, the 350 is period-accurate, adds McClowry, who settled on a half-track headstack. The tapes were transferred to Pro Tools at 192 kHz using a Mytek Audio Brooklyn converter. Because of the Revere machine’s limitations, there was very little audio above 8 kHz. Also, Guthrie’s aging splices frequently separated and had to be repaired.

“We had to be delicate with these tapes,” McClowry says. “When we needed to fast-forward, we would just play the tape at seven-and- a-half inches per second.”

“Woody only had the one microphone, and where he placed it would vary, so Sean would tweak the playback level song by song,” Rosenthal adds, along with an aside: “One of my favorite things is that Woody’s going to get All Music and Discogs credits as a recording engineer. Isn’t that amazing?”

Woody Guthrie.PHOTO: Courtesy Woody Guthrie Publications. — Woody Guthrie. PHOTO: Courtesy Woody Guthrie Publications.

The original tapes and this new release may be mono, but don’t think for a second that the mix process was easy or quick. For one thing, the balance between the guitar and vocal can change within a song, but a bigger issue is the 60 Hz hum that varies in intensity depending on where Guthrie placed the mic relative to the tape machine.

“The process took a massive amount of trial and error and then refinement,” notes Jessica Thompson, who mixed and mastered the recordings at her facility in San Francisco. To rebalance the voice and guitar, Thompson initially ran the songs through RipX DAW demixing software.

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“That’s when I discovered, serendipitously, that the RipX tool put the hum on the bass track,” she laughs. “So that was hilarious and magical and wonderful all at once.” That said, “There was still plenty of hum between sung syllables at the very beginning and end of phrases, because these are not perfect, precise tools. The only way to address that properly, elegantly and invisibly was straight-up hard labor.” Pulling each song into iZotope RX, she says, “I literally went millisecond by millisecond, drew lines around the residual hum, then hit the gain reduction.”