Album Review: Woody Guthrie, ‘Woody at Home – Volumes 1 & 2’
Any time is a good time to listen to Woody Guthrie’s songs, and his lyrics resound more loudly than ever in the United States in 2025 when any semblance of the love of the poor and disenfranchised has turned to hate. The current political administration tramples on due process and the rights of immigrants, announcing that this land belongs only to the wealthy and the privileged who are willing to destroy everything around them—human and natural—in order for them to preserve their wealth and racial identity. Guthrie’s lyrics and music enliven our own current struggles and fights against unjust, immoral, and illegal political and cultural forces.
Woody at Home—Volume 1 & 2 (Shamus Records) thus arrives at the perfect time. Guthrie’s keen passion for justice and his searing indictments of corrupt leaders and the soullessness of society ring loudly through his plainspoken, gravely vocals. This new collection contains twenty-two previously unreleased tracks, including thirteen songs that Guthrie never recorded elsewhere and previously unheard home recordings of “Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done,” “Pastures of Plenty,” and “Jesus Christ.” He recorded these songs himself into one microphone on a reel-to-reel tape machine at the Guthrie family’s two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, NY in the early months of 1951 and 1952, so we hear the noises and sounds of everyday life in the background. On one of the tracks, we hear Guthrie speaking about the tapes to his music publisher Howie Richmond, to whom he sent them: “I just want to tell you fellers that I’m awful glad sending this batch of songs to you. This sounds like about the best tape I made so far . . . I was here at home watching the kids by myself. So the kids tapes I’m sending you, the ones with me and the kids on them, I don’t want you sending them back or anything like that. I just want you to keep them and play them, and see the place from whence all good folk songs breed and spring.”
“This Land is Your Land (Woody’s Home Tape)” opens the album with Guthrie’s bluesy folk fingerpicking and his somber vocals. This recording features new verses, including the lyrics “You just keep a-dancin’ while I keep a-singin’/ This land was made for you and me.” One of the sparest and most poignant songs on the album, “Jesus Christ” depicts a society that has abandoned the acts and values of Jesus in favor of the actions of the rich, the bankers, the landlords, and the cops. He points out that if Jesus came to New York City and “preached was to preach like he did in Galilee,” he would be crucified and laid in the grave. Given the Christian nationalism infecting national politics in the United States in 2025, Guthrie’s song rings as true now as it did in 1951, for if Jesus came to Washington D.C. politicians would arrest him and deport him. In the spoken word piece “Howie, I’d Like to Talk to Yuh,” Guthrie reminds his publisher that all of these things on the tapes he’s sending are “highly gearshift-able, changeable.” The album contains a never-before-heard version of Guthrie singing a heart-rending, sparse version of “Deportee (Woody’s Home Tape)” that captures the aching despair of the song more effectively than most versions of it. The collection closes with an anthem for our time, “You Better Git Ready,” which emboldens listeners for the fight against fascism, declaring that “compared to the Nazis, Hell’s too tame.” We could easily be singing these words every day as we confront the rise of fascism in the U.S. in 2025.
Woody at Home—Volume 1 & 2 gives us a chance to hear Woody Guthrie unvarnished, taking his time and recording at his leisure. The collection offers a call to stand as Guthrie did with those living on the borders of society, to welcome the stranger to our tables with open arms, and to fight the winds of authoritarianism with the power of music and poetry.
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Woody at Home—Volume 1 & 2 is available HERE.
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