A New Woody Guthrie Album Will Release 13 Songs Never Heard Before, 58 Years After His Death
- - - A New Woody Guthrie Album Will Release 13 Songs Never Heard Before, 58 Years After His Death
Victoria EdelJuly 17, 2025 at 12:42 AM
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Woody Guthrie
A new Woody Guthrie album is being released, 58 years after his death
Woody at Home, Vol. 1 and 2 is based on recordings he made at home beginning in 1951
The recordings would be Guthrie’s last, as he spent the last years of his life hospitalized due to Huntington’s disease
Decades after his death, new Woody Guthrie music is coming.
The Woody Guthrie estate will release a new album, Woody at Home, Vol. 1 and 2, on Aug. 14. It will include 20 songs and two spoken-word interludes performed by the late folk music legend. That includes a new version of his seminal protest song “This Land Is Your Land,” plus 13 songs that, previously, could only be experienced through Guthrie’s written lyrics.
Back in 1951, Guthrie received a Revere T-100 Crescent home tape recorder from his publisher. It allowed him to record music at home for the first time. His publisher wanted him to work on songs they could sell to other performers or as sheet music, per The New York Times. Guthrie filled 32 tapes with songs and messages.
Those home recordings ended up being the singer’s last. Guthrie had inherited Huntington's disease from his mother, and he spent many of his last years hospitalized in New Jersey and New York. He died in 1967 at age 55.
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Woody Guthrie in 1940
But his publishing company kept the recordings in good condition over the decades. The Guthrie estate felt they weren’t in good enough condition to release. “Since there was only one microphone, there was a real problem with the balance between Woody’s guitar and Woody’s vocal,” Steve Rosenthal, who produced the album, told The Times.
But, similarly to The Beatles’ 2023 song “Now and Then” (which used recordings John Lennon made at home), new audio software allowed them to clean up the tapes and bring Guthrie’s voice forward.
The first track from the album, “Deportee,” was released on July 14 in honor of Guthrie’s 113th birthday. The song became a folk revival standard with a new melody by Martin Hoffman, and this is the only recording Guthrie made of the song.
As for the alternate lyrics to “This Land Is Your Land,” in one of the voice notes on the tapes, Guthrie says, “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 through and a finished and a done song, and it couldn’t be improved on, couldn’t be changed around, couldn’t be made better.” Guthrie wrote the original lyrics in 1940 in response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." In 1944, during World War II, he dropped verses that were more critical of the United States.
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Tony Kraber (left) and Woody Guthrie in 1945
Guthrie was dramatized in 2024’s A Complete Unknown, with Scoot McNairy playing the folk hero during his hospitalization. “In going into it, there was not a lot of footage of Woody Guthrie, so I leaned on a ton of photos of him from that time in his life at Greystone [Psychiatric Hospital],” McNairy told Salon in January.
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Guthrie remains one of the most influential people in American music. He was inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame in 1970 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. In 2012, he received the Songwriters' Hall of Fame Pioneer Award.
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