ARCHIVES NEWSLETTER
Spring / Summer 2007

The original wire reels. Photograph by Bradly Brown.

The keywords at the Woody Guthrie Archives these days are recovery and restoration. It seems that in addition to our ongoing research and programs, our energies have mostly gone to working with special projects that either recover or restore long lost historical moments. Witness, for example, Music Inn, the newly released film documentary about, well, the Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, where folk and jazz musicians gathered in the early 1950s to perform music and engage with each other and their ideas about music. Think of it as a Folk-Jazz heaven, where Woody Guthrie and Rev. Gary Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Ornette Coleman, Sarah Vaughn and Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong all performed and work-shopped their art in the relaxed New England countryside, as eager scholars and students listened raptly to the masters—a veritable think-tank of musical cultures. As it turns out, Guthrie was there for the first performance, which is prominently featured in the film. The Woody Guthrie Archives contributed a rare live recording of Woody, Pete Seeger, and others singing a raucous version of “Ladies Auxiliary.” It’s a story that truly needed to be told, and told well, which the film does.

Speaking of history, our 1949 Woody Guthrie wire recordings recently underwent an extensive restoration project to transfer, process and master this most rare find. With the help of what I call the “A-Team” (A for Audio), Woody’s live recordings will soon be available for your listening pleasure! Recovery and restoration—that pretty much says it all!

Jorge Arévalo Mateus
Curator

Archives Projects

We are pleased to announce Ron Briley and Guy Logsdon, Ed. D, as recipients of the 2006 BMI Woody Guthrie Research Fellowship. Briley will focus on Guthrie’s political ideology as a means to completing his book, tentatively titled To Seek a Better World, while Logsdon will delve into Guthrie’s connection to Oklahoma, to be published in a book tentatively titled Woody’s Roots: His Oklahoma Hills. Both writers will begin their research in the summer months. We look forward to welcoming them to the Woody Guthrie Archives.

Thanks to continued support from the BMI Foundation, we have completed scanning Guthrie’s loose-sheet song lyrics, almost two thousand items! This project continues as we digitize our collection of Guthrie’s notebooks.

The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949, a rare live concert recording, will be available in September. This exciting new release has been in the works for several years, and promises to deepen our understanding of Guthrie as a performing musician.

Exhibitions and Programs

Our new presentation, Global Woody: Language, Culture, History and Harmony, will premiere at the Green Street Arts Center in Middletown, Connecticut on September 28th. Look for details on our News and Events page if you are interested in attending.

Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966, featuring rare material from the Archives, has now moved from the Morgan Library in New York City to the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The exhibit has received rave reviews, and during its run at the Morgan Library was supplemented with a lecture from Nora Guthrie, who highlighted her father’s connection to Dylan and many other musicians.

We were pleased to be able to provide a photograph of Woody Guthrie to the Bell County Museum’s exhibit Rhythm & Rhyme: Music in Central Texas, currently on display through June.

New Productions and Publications

The past few months have seen a flurry of significant Guthrie-related publications and productions. The University Press of Mississippi published Mark Allan Jackson’s book, Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie. Jackson conducted extensive research at the Archives in preparation for this publication, the first book-length study of the cultural and political significance of Guthrie’s lyrics.

As mentioned above, Music Inn, a documentary film about the unique teaching and performance space located in Lenox, Massachusetts, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film features rare photographs of Guthrie at a July 1950 performance at the Music Inn, as well as rare live recordings from the Archives. Congratulations to the film’s producers, Ben Barenholtz, Stephanie Sharis, Naomi Bombardi-Wilson and George Schuller for this accomplishment!

Peter LaChapelle published his book, Proud to Be an Okie: Migration, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Country Music in Los Angeles, which includes a chapter on Guthrie based on research at the Archives.

Beluthahatchee Blues: An Interview With Stetson Kennedy, by Jorge Arevalo, our Head Archivist and Curator, has been published in Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan). An exploration of Guthrie’s relationship and experiences with activist and folklorist Stetson Kennedy, the interview highlights a little-known period of Guthrie’s life and songwriting.

Guthrie’s original lyrics for This Land Is Your Land will be reproduced in a special edition of Time Magazine, Time’s Illustrated History of the United States, 1900-2007. Look for it on newsstands in May.

Fanfare for the Little Guy, an essay on Guthrie by our good friend Robert Cantwell, is scheduled for publication in 2008 in a book tentatively Feasts of Unnaming: Essays on Ethnomimesis.

To accompany Guthrie’s induction into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 2006, the Oklahoma Heritage Association produced a short biographical video with material from the Archives. Along with a portrait, this video will be on permanent display at the museum in Oklahoma City.

A BBC One series titled The Guitar will highlight several photographs from the Archives, illustrating Guthrie’s important role in the instrument’s history.

Recent Researchers and Visitors to the Archives

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), a Guthrie fan, spent an afternoon in the archives.

Musician Tim O’Brien visited us, along with his wife Kit, to look for new Guthrie lyrics

Musicians James and John Abrams, along with their parents and other family members, visited the Archives to learn more about Guthrie’s life and songs.

Michael Taft, Head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress, stopped in to visit the Archives.

Martin Butler returned for another visit to put the finishing touches on his thesis on Guthrie’s Dust Bowl songs for the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Maya Kosok, a student at Temple University, visited us to research Guthrie’s responses to World War II.

Nora Guthrie and Senator Harry Reid	Kit O'Brien, Nora Guthrie, and Tim O'Brien

Special Accessions

We are grateful to all those who have donated material to the Archives over the last few months. Carol Huntsman gave us a rare 78 rpm recording of Guthrie’s Ballads From the Dust Bowl. Our good friend Bill Murlin donated a transcription of a recently-discovered copy of a radio play titled The Mightiest Weapon, produced by the United States Department of the Interior, which contains three of Guthrie’s recordings made for the Bonneville Power Authority. As mentioned above, Guthrie is now a member of Oklahoma’s Hall of Fame. We now have his official induction medal, along with a commemorative plaque, in our collection.

Applications for Conducting Research at the Archives:

Encouraged by the range of scholarship, creativity, and inspiration that the Woody Guthrie Collection offers, the Archives welcomes researchers, scholars, artists, musicians, publishers, filmmakers, and those pursuing interests related to the life, works, and times of Woody Guthrie.

Interested researchers must complete an Application for Research Form. Successful applicants are invited to set up an appointment with the archivist on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays between 10:30 AM to 5:30 PM.

We encourage visitors to look at the Online Collection Finding Aids on our website before visiting the archives. At this time, due to limited staff time and to protect the delicate collection, we are unable to accommodate general interest visits. We hope that our ever-improving website will satisfy general interest.

For further information or questions, please contact the archivist.