Woody Guthrie Sings Folk Songs in Bloomington, MN

In April 1944, 31-year-old
Woody Guthrie
discovered a recording outlet when he hooked up with record company owner
Moses Asch
, who agreed to let him cut a virtually unlimited number of masters informally.
Guthrie
simply would turn up at
Asch
's studios alone or with such friends as
Cisco Houston
,
Sonny Terry
Leadbelly
, and
Bess Lomax Hawes
, and record his repertoire of original and
traditional
songs. The repository soon grew to hundreds of titles, far more than even a major label, much less a tiny independent, could release contemporaneously. Over the decades,
did release many of the tracks, but by 1962, when he assembled the LP
Woody Guthrie Sings Folk Songs
, he still had a significant cache of unissued material like that found on this disc. In the ensuing 18 years, the
folk revival
had kicked in, and such artists as
Joan Baez
were taking
folk
music into the upper reaches of the charts.
was considered the godfather of the movement, and
played right into that, as he could be heard singing songs like
"The Rising Sun Blues"
(aka
"The House of the Rising Sun"
) and
"The Boll Weevil,"
the same songs that the new generation of folk singers were performing in coffee houses. In truth, with the combination of guitars, mandolin, harmonica, and fiddle, plus
Houston
's rough high harmonies, the arrangements often were more evocative of the
old-timey
country
string bands
of the '30s, such as
the Monroe Brothers
, than early-'60s
urban
. Then, too, although some of the songs were credited to
as a songwriter, this was not the
of
"This Land Is Your Land,"
but rather
the
singer. Still,
was an excellent representation of rural
music that consolidated
's position as the newly fashionable genre's main progenitor. ~ William Ruhlmann