This Land Is Your Land: The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1

What’s remarkable about listening to Woody Guthrie all these decades later isn’t just his ingenuity but his range. Recorded in the mid-'40s by Folkways Records founder Moses Asch, the music here represents the purest distillation of Guthrie's work, filled with talking blues (“New York Town”) and serenedes (“Hobo’s Lullaby”), kids’ stuff (“Car Song”) and anything but (“This Land Is Your Land”). An effortless storyteller, Guthrie understood his characters—rich, poor, hero or outlaw—not just as isolated lives but tiles in the mosaic of America; every one of us, from the struggling Okie to the spit-shined lawyer, connected.