Lost Treasure: Recovering and Releasing Woody Guthrie’s Home Recordings, Part 2

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RE-MIXING VOICE AND GUITAR

As for the mix, “I’m really trying to make the listener feel like they’re sitting next to Woody on the couch,” Thompson explains. “I have the good fortune of being married to a guitar player, so I know what that sounds like. I just tried to find a balance that felt real, and sometimes that was done phrase by phrase.”

However, with the “bass track”—the 60 Hz hum—removed, there were artifacts in the room ambience, she says, which were addressed by bringing the track into the mix and rolling it off below 3 kHz. “I let the algorithm add back in the ambience from the bass track with the guitar and vocal tracks, and that mathematically resolved, so you hear the original ambience of the recording without the artifacts left over from demixing.”

Whatever the historical project, Rosenthal likes to retain what he calls the “timestamp”— audible aspects such as a limited frequency response or background noise that reflects the recording’s origin.

“It’s important to be true to when the recording was made,” he says with conviction. “It’s important that the frequency response of the recording is not manipulated.” For Woody at Home, that also meant not editing out the sounds of Guthrie’s three kids talking and running around the small apartment.

“That makes you feel close to him and his creative process,” Thompson observes. On the other hand, Guthrie clearing his throat, as another example, was edited out. “Those are decisions that I made based on whether it feels part of the experience or it pulls you out of it.”

THE NEVER-ENDING LEGACY

The songs for the new release were chosen by Rosenthal and his co-producers, Woody’s daughter Nora Guthrie (who can be heard as a youngster on the tapes) and her daughter, Anna Canoni, president of Woody Guthrie Publications.

Guthrie witnessed the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, World War II and the Korean War, and the timeless, universal themes of his lyrics— racism, corruption, inequality, fighting fascism and war—resonate to this day. The first song released to streaming, on Guthrie’s birthday, July 14, was “Deportee,” about migrant farm labor. (The song was popularized by Pete Seeger and has been covered by Dolly Parton, Joni Mitchell, the Byrds, Billy Bragg and others.)

Today, an artist typically goes into the studio to record the definitive version of a song, but Guthrie was constantly tinkering with his material. Indeed, “This Land Is Your Land,” arguably his best-known song, appears on this collection with new words added.

“I think it’s important for people to know that his songs were never fixed; they were never finished,” Rosenthal stresses. “That is a very different way of thinking about songwriting and opens up the chance for young songwriters to go at these 22 songs and say, ‘Here’s the way I think these songs should be presented.’”

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As Guthrie himself explains in a recorded message to his publisher included in the new collection, “I have never yet put a song on tape or a record, or wrote it down or printed it down or typed it up, or anything else that I really thought was a thorough and a finished and a done song, and it couldn’t be improved on, couldn’t be changed around, couldn’t be made better.”