Woody was a writer of songs of course, a lot of them. His son, Arlo, used to say people could wall paper their apartments with the amount of scraps that his father put ink and pencil to.
Woody's daughter, Nora, has invited numerous artists to view the volumes of material that Guthrie has left behind, most of which has never been set to music let alone recorded. Arlo and countless other artists have covered Woody's more famous and popular works. Nearly every kid in the United States knows "This Land is Your Land" thanks to it being part a thousands of elementary school choir concerts. But, there's more to Guthrie than just that, and more artists are discovering and have discovered that for themselves and, thankfully, for the rest of us.
Both Bragg and Wilco recognized how much Guthrie has meant, not just to folk music but music is general. He is in the fabric of rock, punk, country, and pop.
And they are not the only ones. Mermaid Avenue introduced people to forty-seven new songs by Guthrie. New Multitudes (Deluxe Edition) by Jay Farrar, Will Johnson, Anders Parker, and Yim Yames (AKA as Jim James of My Morning Jacket gave us another twenty-three pieces that reveals the depth of Guthrie's skills to make highly personal observations and well as social commentary.
He could also write poignant and touching love songs as evidenced in The Works by Jonatha Brooke.
The clearest connection to American music that Guthrie has, as Pete Seeger properly recognized, is folk. More accurately, probably, is the connection to country, the music of the folk. Not the sanitized pablum of today's Nashville sound, but, rather, the Oklahoma dustbowl country, the stuff of the Carter family to which his mother listened. The sound of cowpokes and Appalachia, the sound of bluegrass. The sound of Guthrie's folk of his day.
That's captured in Del & Woody by the Del McCoury Band. The song "The New York Trains" was nominated for a Grammy as Best American Roots Song in 2014.
Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen and others have sung Guthrie's songs. Some of them while Guthrie was still alive.
These new songs are by artists whose careers hadn't even started by the time Guthrie's was ending. Heck, some of the artists I mentioned here weren't even alive when he died in 1968.
That's how good he was.
These 100 or so new pieces are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Thousands of pages of Guthrie's writing sit waiting at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. One can hope that Nora Guthrie can find more artists to take a look at his words and make us listen to him again.
