Woody’s Recordings from the Mid 40’s.
Rounder Records, in conjunction with The Woody Guthrie Archives, will inaugurate the new Woody Guthrie Legacy Series with a 4-CD boxed set, My Dusty Road this August.
The original metal masters for these songs, recorded in the mid 1940s by Herbert Harris and Moses Asch, had languished for years in the Brooklyn basement of an elderly woman, stacked in cardboard barrels. Reissue co-producer Michael Creamer, who had learned of the cache from his cousin, took a few of the discs to the renowned mastering engineer Doug Pomeroy. The clarity and presence of the sound was revelatory.
When Guthrie’s daughter Nora heard them for the first time she said – Wow! Just the fact that I could hear the music so clearly was ‘wow’ enough. But then, this soft flow of old feelings followed, as I heard my father’s voice start to fill the room and I absolutely remembered it, and then he was right there with me. These recordings are treasures.
The boxed set includes 54 songs on 4 compact discs, including 6 previously unreleased tracks as well as Guthrie’s hits such as This Land is Your Land, Going Down the Road (I Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way), Talking Sailor, Hard Travelin, The Sinking Of The Reuben James and Pretty Boy Floyd, to name a few.
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