Box Set Honors Woody Guthrie Centennial

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings announced the release of a new box set titled Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection. The collection is scheduled for release on July 10, 2012, four days before the iconic folk musician would have turned 100 years old. Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection is a detailed commemorative collection of songs, photos and essays on one of the United States of America’s most cherished 20th-century songwriters.

‘Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection’ consists of a large size 150-page book containing three CDs with 57 tracks. The set includes Woody’s most significant recordings such as the complete version of “This Land Is Your Land,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Hard Travelin’,” “Jesus Christ,” “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore,” and “Riding in My Car.” The collection also features 21 previously unreleased performances and six never-before-heard original songs, including Woody’s first known — and recently discovered — recordings from 1939.

The Smithsonian Folkways archives hold the largest collection of Woody’s recordings.

Woody Guthrie

Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie (1912–1967) wrote songs that became the soundtrack of an era and permanent fixtures of American identity. His early Dust Bowl (a period in the 1930s of critical dust storms that caused severe ecological and agricultural destruction to American and Canadian prairie states) ballads, along with more than 3,000 work songs, labor union and labor songs, political and philosophical songs, anti-war songs, anti-Nazi songs, love songs and children’s songs, marked the pulse of hard-hit people in times of economic depression and war.

Many Americans have embraced Woody’s emblematic song “This Land Is Your Land” as the United States’ second national anthem. Woody was a traveler, itinerant worker, radio performer, military enlistee, thinking man, gifted visual artist, a husband and father, and prolific writer who left his mark on music, culture and politics. He struggled with family tragedies, poverty and personal demons.