Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Last year we were a bit “off calendar” in honoring one of our favorite American Masters, this year less so. The good news is that his music and his relentless work on behalf of less fortunate people and the communities they were part of is so vast that, luckily for us, it will take some time to exhaust the full measure of his recordings.

For decades, we’ve had the Smithsonian recordings (with the help of Alan Lomax and Moe Asch) to thank for preserving both the musical and oral history of the nation. In honor of this less symmetrical birthday Rounder Records has released additional works from the archives, this time focusing on the part of Guthrie’s canon that was written for the American government.

In the Library of Congress recordings, the young musicologist and historian Alan Lomax made recordings of songs and stories in the 1940s of many of the country’s most colorful and important musicians, including Guthrie.

Along with John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” it is one of the single greatest resources for understanding Depression-era Oklahoma: how the pioneer spirit reacted when confronted with crushing poverty. It is also the first comprehensive articulation of Guthrie’s wise-rambler persona. He had already been on the radio at KFVD, in Los Angeles, where he began to make the transition from traditional country and folk music to more pointed political material, and the Library of Congress sessions reveal that he had a broadcaster’s sense of how to lead into a song, or trail out of one.

He also had a commanding storytelling style, filled with cherry-picked details and a deceptively offhanded delivery. After “Railroad Blues,” for example, Guthrie recalls his first encounter with the song:

That was the “Railroad Blues” that the colored boy was playing as I walked past the barbershop door. It was on a warm summer’s day, and I was laying up there barefooted and I just had my shoes off a couple of months and they were just about tough enough then to where I could run through cockleburs and broke bottles and wade through the liquor bottles up and down the back alleys after whiskey got to be pretty popular.

This moment of musical sympathy, Guthrie explains, took place against a backdrop of inequality and resentment: it was, he says, a “common everyday feeling down in that part of the country, for some strange reason, was the idea that some people were born a little bit better than others, and that some are supposed to work pretty hard, and others are supposed to coast through life.”

Read the entire review here.