New Woody Guthrie Recordings Coming

From tapes, including first ever "Deportee."

Since Woody Guthrie is kind of the patron saint of this newsletter, a special posting tonight after word emerged—on his birthday—about home recordings from the early 1950s, twenty of which will soon be released, with thirteen not heard before. In fact, one was posted today, and it’s a bombshell: “Deportee.”

Just last month I posted here about that song, one of my favorites, and its back story about the actual plane crash of “unnamed” migrant farmworkers who were being returned to Mexico. It’s an important story, so follow this link.

In any event, the version released today is so important because it’s a song Woody never recorded himself. The Huntington’s disease that would cripple him until his death really set in before he could do that. But we learned today that, living on Long Island, he had bought an early reel to reel recorder and got a few dozen songs down, mainly for other artists to cover.

It was always assumed he only wrote lyrics for “Deportee,” since another songwriter added a tune later and received co-credit. But the Woody recording released today, below, though rough, does have a tune that sounds a bit like the later version. And a key change: told partly first-person as one of the migrants. Here are the hallowed “official” lyrics for the song, you can notes differences on the new tape:

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills.
Who are all these friends all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil—
And be called by no name except "deportees"

It will be on an album Woody at Home—Volumes 1 + 2 , out August 14. It includes “This Land Is Your Land” with added lyrics, another classic, “Pastures of Plenty,” and others just now surfacing. The tapes were known to Guthrie’s family but they considered them too ragged to be released—but modern audio cleanup devices have now made that feasible.

There is much much more to read about this, suddenly, as first Rolling Stone covered it at length, and then tonight at The New York Times, thanks to my old Crawdaddy colleague, Jon Pareles, please see it here. An excerpt from that story has a telling Trump connection.

The 13 new songs, previously known only as written lyrics, underline the variety of Guthrie’s songwriting. One standout is “Backdoor Bum and the Big Landlord,” a parable about two characters trekking toward heaven. The bum has practical skills — building a fire, cooking a stew — while the landlord weighs himself down with gold, expecting to buy his way into salvation. In a Woody Guthrie song, that doesn’t happen.

(Guthrie’s landlord at Beach Haven was Fred Trump, the president’s father. Guthrie wrote a song, “Old Man Trump,” denouncing him for segregation. )

In other tracks, Guthrie sings about racism (“Buoy Bells from Trenton”), battling fascism (“I’m a Child to Fight”), migrant farm labor (“Deportee” and “Pastures of Plenty”), corruption (“Innocent Man”), faith (“Jesus Christ”), science (“One Little Thing an Atom Can’t Do”), and victims of war and inequality (“I’ve Got to Know”) — topics that are far from obsolete nearly 75 years later. “Woody at Home” could make Guthrie seem less remote for listeners raised on home-recorded TikTok demos and bedroom pop.

His fantastic “Pastures of Plenty,” below, in his long-released version. Will be curious to hear it on the home recording when released.

As posted this morning:

My “Atomic Bowl” film film started to stream via PBS over the weekend (you can now watch here), began to hit major stations (list to come), and published as a companion book, and see major piece today at Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, whose writer asserts:

A haunting reminder of the threat of nuclear weapons. Initially suppressed by the US government, images and testimonials of the Atomic Bowl are worth revisiting today as the Trump admin hollows out nuclear expertise across the government….The story of the Atomic Bowl feels both surreal and familiar because sports and military propaganda are often linked.

Just two new cartoons for tonight: