On August 14, 2025, the dust-jacket comes off a hidden corner of American folk history when Woody At Home – Volumes 1 & 2 arrives via Shamus Records. For the first time, listeners will hear Woody Guthrie sitting at his own kitchen table in Brooklyn in the early 1950s, a two-channel reel-to-reel whirring while he thumbs through lyric sheets, nimbly shifts between talking-blues reverie and razor-sharp protest, and—between creaks of the apartment floorboards—offers up the kind of personal asides that never make it onto studio acetates. These are not museum pieces polished for the mantel; they are living, breathing artifacts, raw enough that you can almost smell the coffee on the stove.
The collection’s lead single, “Deportee (Woody’s Home Tape),” crystallizes why these tapes matter. Guthrie penned the song in 1948 after reading a wire-service story about a plane crash that killed twenty-eight Mexican farmworkers and four American crew members. The article listed the Americans by name, reducing the laborers to the single word “deportees.” Guthrie answered that erasure with a ballad that has since become a pillar of the protest canon—thanks to interpreters from Pete Seeger and Joan Baez to Dolly Parton and Bruce Springsteen—but until now only existed in other people’s voices. Hearing Woody deliver his own lyrics, still hot with outrage yet sung in a near-whispered empathy, feels like opening a time capsule whose contents are heartbreakingly contemporary.
Historian Tim Z. Hernandez, who eventually tracked down every one of the victims’ names, calls Guthrie’s home recording “a prophetic voice from the grave.” He’s right—especially in a year when immigrant families are again caught between barbed-wire soundbites and ballot-box grandstanding. Producer Steve Rosenthal and mastering engineer Jessica Thompson approached the fragile reels with both cutting-edge software and antique tape machines, teasing out every finger-slide and every breath while honoring the analog grit. The result is as intimate as sitting across a Formica table from Woody himself.
Guthrie’s at-home sessions weren’t limited to plaintive laments. He toggles between love songs, tall tales, and rafter-shaking anti-fascist rallying cries—including an early run-through of “All You Fascists Bound to Lose.” That particular refrain lands with extra heft in 2025, when America’s political theater is once again flirting with strong-man cosplay. (Here at Grateful Web, where “Make folk, not fascism” might as well be a masthead slogan, we’re happy to point out that Woody’s prediction still feels like a roadmap.)
The story behind the tapes feels almost mythical. In 1950, music-publishing entrepreneur Howie Richmond mailed one of the country’s first household stereo recorders to the Guthrie apartment in Beach Haven. Woody—already battling the early symptoms of Huntington’s disease—rounded up his kids’ crayons, scrawled set lists on scraps of paper, hit RECORD, and proceeded to lay out a masterclass in songwriting as social eyewitness. He narrates, rambles, and riffs on everything from dust-bowl exile to union struggles, treating the mic like a confidant. Nearly three-quarters of a century later, these sonic Polaroids finally get their gallery showing.
Woody Guthrie’s resume needs little burnishing: Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Songwriters Hall of Fame, International Folk Music Award for Lifetime Achievement, a GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award, and a catalogue topping 3,000 songs—among them the unofficial national anthem “This Land Is Your Land.” Yet Woody At Home reminds us that accolades were never the goal; conversation was. “A song ain’t nothing but a conversation you can have again and again,” Woody once wrote. In an era where “again and again” feels like the national news cycle, his kitchen-table monologues sound less like nostalgia and more like a call-and-response with the present.
The two-volume set lands on CD, vinyl, digital download, and all major streaming platforms. Pre-saves are already live, and Guthrie’s birthday release of “Deportee” is streaming now for anyone who needs a hymn of solidarity on repeat—which around here, with a certain former reality-TV landlord angling for an encore, is pretty much everyone.
So cue up the track, raise a glass (or a protest sign), and remember Woody’s promise: all you fascists are bound to lose. The old union troubadour is back in the room—guitar buzzing, heart on sleeve, and conversation wide open.
