This land is still your land: Woody at 100

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (1912-1967) wrote songs such as “This Land is Your Land” that became the soundtrack of an era and permanent fixtures of American identity. To mark the centennial of the iconic folksinger and artist, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings released Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection. Compiled by Smithsonian Folkways archivist Jeff Place and the Grammy Museum’s Robert Santelli, Woody at 100 includes 57 tracks on three CDs, encompassing many of Guthrie’s most famous songs, six previously unreleased songs, and some rare radio broadcast recordings. Woody at 100 offers a uniquely insightful and fresh look at the Guthrie’s life, work and legacy through  the vast amount of archival artifacts reproduced in the pages of the box set’s book.

Most Americans are familiar with Guthrie’s music; the archives of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage holds a vast collection of his recordings—acetate, reel-to-reel tape, first-pressings. The archives’ holdings of Woody Guthrie materials also contain boxes of Guthrie’s original artwork: doodles, watercolors and pen-and-ink drawings, in addition to hand-written and typed lyrics, letters, notes and more. As Place explains, Guthrie’s music should be seen in the context of his entire creative life. “He was an expressive guy—there’s just tons of output. He started with art before music.” There are political statements and sketches from daily life; pieces both comic and subversive. The visual art adds extra perspective to Woody’s personality and is inseparable from the creativity and artistic vision associated with his music. Sharing these  artifacts with the public has been a project that Place had been working on for years. “We started talking about doing this 20 years ago, and the centennial seemed like the perfect opportunity to share this material.”  Reproductions of Guthrie’s original artwork, such as an oil painting of Abraham Lincoln (currently on loan), watercolor paintings made to accompany his songs for children’s albums, and boxes full of dynamic pen and ink drawings, are carefully incorporated in the Woody at 100 release.

“We use use the collections at  the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives to create things—we want to diffuse and to share so thousands of people can see the artifacts and interact with them, instead of having them sit passively on a shelf while only a few scholars see them each year,” Place explains. For example, Woody at 100 allows readers to read the original typed lyrics to “Belle Star Blues,” a song Woody never recorded, and then look at the newspaper clipping from December 2, 1942, annotated by Guthrie, that inspired the song. A particularly fascinating artifact is a book on American political history, which Guthrie, well known for his political activism in support of the common man, covered with hand-written comments. One choice note about  Alexander Hamilton reads, “Great man but not a great American.”

Why is it so important to share this material? “It’s the ‘Wow!’ moment,” says Place. As familiar as “This Land is Your Land” is to any schoolchild, this powerful song takes on a new resonance when you can hear the music, see Guthrie’s original artwork and read his handwritten notes on the lyrics in Woody at 100, a tribute to an American legend.