Woody Guthrie: My Dusty Road

South Carolina had rejected black suffrage, despite a US Supreme Court ruling that black citizens were eligible to vote in all elections.

Woody Guthrie was in the Stinson recording studio, singing his heart out.

There with him was the premier black harmonica-player Sonny Terry and Cisco Houston, who had been a merchant seaman with Guthrie, been torpedoed with him, been rescued and visited Britain with him for a time.

The recordings the three of them made during those days in April, with titles like Hard Travelin', the outlaw ballad Pretty Boy Floyd, and of course This Land Is Your Land, have entered into the collective conscious of singers all over the world, based mainly on scratchy, lo-fi LPs, poorly mastered onto CDs.

But last year, in a dusty Brooklyn basement, a veritable Aladdin's cave of music was discovered, including 54 78rpm metal masters of those recordings, mono of course, but crystal clear as a mountain stream.

They have just been released by the US Rounder label as a boxed set in a very classy presentation - some might say rather too classy for the man who claimed his voice was nothing fancy on a stick.

It's spread over four CDs when they could easily have been squeezed on to two CDs, presented in a mock-up of a suitcase, complete with handle and latches, with a 68-page book and reproductions of Woody's own lyric sheets.

Personally, I'd prefer to download the individual tracks from Amazon (a snip at 69p per song) and burn them onto CD myself, but it must be said that the total Rounder package is well worth the £35.78 you'll pay for them online. You'll have a collector's first edition which will make you the envy of all your friends for years to come.

Quite apart from the stunning virtuosity of Woody's compositions, which range from kids' songs (My Daddy Flies That Ship in the Sky) to traditional cowboy songs (Buffalo Skinners), with a rich selection of anti-fascist and anti-nazi agitational material (Tear the Fascists Down, to the tune of Bile That Cabbage Down), and even a Hank Williams tear-jerker which sounds like a Victorian parlour ballad (A Picture From Life's Other Side), these recordings convey the atmosphere of a live hootenanny or jam session.

It's three masters of their craft a-goin' and a-blowin' like there was no tomorrow, Cisco providing sweet tenor harmonies, and Sonny hooting and hollerin' in the spaces in his mouth-harp work. There are also guitar rags and breakdowns which would not normally find their way on to a commercially released record.

I don't know if the tracks are burnt in chronological order, but the diffident, exploratory notes of Woody's guitar introduction to the first track, This Land, sounds for all the world as if they hadn't yet quite got it together as they settled down in front of the studio's single mic to get going and change the face of popular music for ever.

Woody was like one of those woodland insects who collect stuff and carry it back to their lairs, or perhaps a squirrel or a bear laying down nutrition before hibernation. He was no kind of a purist. Everything was grist to his mill.

Need a song about the sinking of the US warship Reuben James? Well, why not adapt a Carter Family tune, Wildwood Flower?

And, come to think of it, why not copy the Carter Family guitar "scratch" hammering-on technique to create the simplest and most copiable accompaniment ever?

As Pete Seeger said of Woody's deceptive simplicity: "It takes genius to be simple. Any damn fool can be complicated."

These songs are profound, they touch parts of your brain and your spirit no other music can, they are revolutionary in their implications, both politically and culturally, and most of all they are fun. Get them and enjoy!

You can download individual tracks from Amazon UK, or buy the boxed set from here