Woody Guthrie in The Wall St. Journal. Really.

It's His Land Once Again

by Luke Torn

"Those are the leftovers of my husband's business," Irene Harris ­explained to her neighbor Luria Sutera in 1999, describing the heavy cardboard storage barrels, cordoned off by wood and wire, stacked in her Brooklyn tenement storage space. "He was in the record business. When I die, I am going to leave you my collection of records in the basement, and there is some Woody Guthrie down there that no one has ever heard."

Guthrie, a towering singer and activist whose "Dustbowl Ballads" and ubiquitous "This Land Is Your Land" form the bedrock of modern American songwriting, would have turned 97 this summer. Huntington's disease all but silenced him in the late 1950s, eventually claiming his life in 1967, at age 55.

The barrels, holding some 2,000 nickel-plated copper discs, had stood unperturbed for decades, abandoned by ­Herbert Harris, owner of the long-defunct Stinson Record Co. In 1944 Harris, with partner Moe Asch, bankrolled the holy grail of American folk ­music—a series of Woody Guthrie sessions resulting in hundreds of recorded masters, a cultural watershed that ­reverberates to this day.

The rest at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574345093934463548.html?mod=googlenews_wsj