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There are umpteen collections of the music of legendary folkie storyteller, agitator and Dylan role model Woody Guthrie, and almost all of them sound like they were recorded in a refrigerator box. But this one qualifies as genuine news. The back story is a crate-digger's wet dream: cardboard drums filled with pristine 78-rpm metal masters, given up for lost long ago, were found in the basement storage bin of a Brooklyn apartment belonging to an Italian lady who inherited them from the daughter-in-law of a business partner of Folkways Records guru Moses Asch.

The 54 songs on My Dusty Road, most of them familiar, are part of roughly 250 tracks — many featuring second guitarist Cisco Houston and harmonica man Sonny Terry — recorded over a six-day marathon in New York in 1944, during the thick of World War II. The sound quality is astonishing. On songs such as "This Land Is Your Land," "Stackolee" and "Pretty Boy Floyd," fingerpicked melodic fills emerge from surface noise, vocals step up to shake your hand. It's the sound of Guthrie as a man, not a ghost. In addition to extravagant packaging (four discs and a couple of archival postcard repros in a hobo-style cardboard valise), there are a half-dozen unreleased tracks. The most impressive are "Tear the Fascists Down," a no-shit bit of wartime cheerleading, and "Bad Repetation" [sic], a nudge-winker about romantic problems — one of the occupational hazards for a trouble-courting troubadour never afraid to sing exactly what was on his mind


Is there such a thing as required listening in popular music? And is it possible that the music of a man who single handedly changed the course of pop culture with his songs can come alive again with a clarity and sound that feels like it was recorded TODAY? One cannot say enough about Woody Guthrie and his position in the world of great American music. I intend to invite my friend Bobby D over to review some of these songs for that there radio show he does. And then there's my seven year old son, a railroad song fanatic beyond reproach. He needs a track or two. Folkies? Welcome. Country? Thank you. Alt. ditto. A great man named Gram Parsons once set out on a quest to build on the tradition of Cosmic American Music. The songs and voice of Woody, especially as witnessed on this (slightly too preciously packaged but what the heck) boxed set is a key ingredient to that journey.

[Amazon User]




Disc One: Woody’s “Greatest” Hits

My Dusty Road - Greatest Hits - Disc 1 (Rounder)

All the songs on these four discs were recorded on April 16, 19, 20, 24, and 25, 1944, plus an unreported later date that month, in the cramped New York City studio of Asch Records. Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston were between merchant marine voyages; their friend, blind Sonny Terry, was living on a meager Social Security check and what he could pick up playing harmonica around town. Over those five days, they recorded approximately 250 tracks, some songs with multiple takes. Those discs were apparently divided equally between partners Moe Asch and Herbert Harris, when they dissolved the company. Asch would make extensive use of his 125 tracks when he launched Folkways Records. Harris later issued a handful of his cache on his Stinson label.

Disc 1 Track Listing

   1. This Land is Your Land
   2. I Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way
   3. Talking Sailor
   4. Philadelphia Lawyer
   5. Hard Travelin’
   6. Jesus Christ
   7. The Sinking of the Reuben James
   8. Pretty Boy Floyd
   9. Grand Coulee Dam
  10. Nine Hundred Miles
  11. I Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way
  12. My Daddy
  13. Bad Repetation 



Disc Two: Woody’s Roots

My Dusty Road - Woody's Roots - Disc 2 (Rounder)

In the face of so many, many songs and ballads Guthrie wrote – estimates range from 1200 to 1500 and higher – it is easy to forget that he was also a folk singer, that he learned traditional songs aurally most of his life. Steeped in the so-called “roots music” of the Southwest, Guthrie infused those qualities in much of what he wrote later, and thus assured the success of songs such as those on Disc I.

Guthrie learned some songs and stories from his mother, from Uncle Jeff Guthrie, from his father who regularly sang in the church choir, from the man who shined shoes at Jigg’s barbershop in Pampa. Later he picked up fiddle tunes from his best friend, Matt Jennings, and from the pickup square dance bands he played with around Pampa and Amarillo, Texas. He learned songs from 78 rpm records and over the radio, many of them traditional songs reworked, if at all, to secure a copyright, songs by the Carter Family, by Vernon Dalhart, by Fiddlin’ John Carson, and half a hundred others. He learned songs from traveling medicine shows and touring country bands. All of these he fused in a style uniquely his own. As a youngster in Okemah, Oklahoma, a young man in Pampa, Texas, even as an adult playing with his good friend Huddie Ledbetter in New York City or listening to Library of Congress field records at Alan Lomax’s insistence in Washington, Guthrie absorbed an uniquely American tradition.

Disc 2 Track Listing

   1. Poor Boy
   2. Worried Man Blues
   3. A Picture From Life’s Other Side
   4. Buffalo Skinners
   5. Hard Ain’t It Hard
   6. Stewball
   7. Stackolee
   8. Gypsy Davy
   9. Little Darling Pal of Mine
  10. What Did the Deep Sea Say?
  11. Chisholm Trail
  12. Put My Little Shoes Away
  13. Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?
  14. John Henry



Disc Three: Woody the Agitator

My Dusty Road - The Agitator - Disc 3 (Rounder)

In New York City, Guthrie fell in, or was snatched up by The Almanac Singers, an ever-shifting amalgamation of pro-Union, anti-Jim Crow singers. The central figures were a lanky five-string banjo player, Pete Seeger; a portly, folksy Arkansan who sang bass, Lee Hays; and Millard Lampell, a facile and clever songwriter who tended to sing the melody line. For the last ten years, they had seen “oppressed people and therefore oppressors,” as Hays argued; now they lifted their voices in protest and defiance.

Disc 3 Track Listing

   1. I’m Gonna Join That One Big Union
   2. Hangknot, Slipknot
   3. Gonna Roll the Union On
   4. The Ludlow Massacre
   5. Sally Don’t You Grieve
   6. Harriet Tubman’s Ballad, part 1
   7. Harriet Tubman’s Ballad, part 2
   8. Tear the Fascists Down**
   9. When The Yanks Go Marching In
  10. You Can Hear My Whistle Blow
  11. Union Burying Ground
  12. You Gotta Go Down and Join the Union



Disc Four: Woody, Cisco and Sonny Jam the Blues, Hollers, and Dances

My Dusty Road - Woody Cisco & Sonny - Disc 4 (Rounder)

After their second voyage in the merchant marine, Guthrie persuaded Moses Asch to record as many songs as he could get down on the scarce aluminum masters. Asch was taking a big gamble based on a hunch; Guthrie was important as a songwriter, and Guthrie would sell enough records to make the gamble worthwhile.

Guthrie, being Guthrie, offhandedly invited his shipmate, Gilbert “Cisco” Houston, and Sanders “Blind Sonny” Terry to join him in what would be an impromptu jam session in the Asch studio during the last weeks of April, 1944. On many tracks, Terry, a true virtuoso on the harmonica, shone brightly. As Guthrie later wrote:

Sonny Terry blew and whipped, beat, fanned and petted his harmonica, cooed to it like a weed hill turtle dove, cried to it like some worried woman come to ease his worried mind…. He put the tobacco sheds of North and South Carolina in it and all of the blistered and hurt and hardened hands cheated and left empty, hurt and left crying, robbed and left hungry, pilfered and left starving, beaten and left dreaming. He rolled down the trains that the colored cannot drive, only clean and wash down. He blew into the wood holes and the brassy reeds the tale and the wails of Lost John running away from the dogs of the chain gang guards, and the chain gang is the landlord that is never around anywhere. (American Folksong [New York: Oak Publications, 1961], p. 7.)

Disc 4 Track Listing

   1. Train Breakdown
   2. Do You Ever Think Of Me? (aka At My Window)
   3. Guitar Rag
   4. Square Dance Medley (Cripple Creek, Buffalo Gals, Old Joe Clark, Red Wing, Ida Red, Chilly Winds, Sandy Land)
   5. Guitar Breakdown
   6. Raincrow Bill
   7. Ain’t Nobody’s Business
   8. Stepstone
   9. Ezekiel Saw the Wheel
  10. Bile Them Cabbage Down
  11. Danville Girl
  12. Guitar Blues
  13. Brown’s Ferry Blues
  14. More Pretty Girls Than One
  15. Sonny’s Flight