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Woody Guthrie's Unrealeased Recordings See Light

by candice.tsuei | August 2, 2009 at 07:52 pm

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"Come back Woody Guthrie to us now!"

A collection of previously unreleased recordings by Woody Guthrie is to be released on August 25.

“It was as if he was a few feet away,’’ says Woody’s daughter Nora Guthrie, of hearing the recordings for the first time. “Truthfully, for years I never got why Woody himself was such a popular performer. They’re good songs, but on recordings his voice always sounded muffled. It’s like I’m able to hear it for the first time now, and it all makes sense to me.’’

The recordings were discovered from some cardboard barrels found in the basement of a Brooklyn apartment belonging to a woman named Lucia Sutera. She inherited these recordings as a part of the remains of a 1940s record label from her neighbor, Irene Harris, after she died.

That neighbor, Lucia Sutera, said Harris mentioned prior to her 1999 death that unreleased Guthrie recordings were among the items stored in her storage bin.

Roughly 2,000 metal discs were found in Irene Harris’s storage bin. About 150 of those are Woody Guthrie recordings, and the rest are by a host of folk, blues, and jazz artists who recorded for the Stinson label, among them Lead Belly, Art Tatum, Mary Lou Williams, and Burl Ives.

After years of restoration and cataloguing, a four-CD collection, "My Dusty Road," possibly the finest-sounding Guthrie recordings ever surfaced, is to be released on August 25 by Rouder Records.

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