Newly released home tapes by Woody Guthrie are revealing
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by Bruce Sylvester / Troubadour, Thursdays 2 – 4 pm
A populist poet laureate for America past and present, Oklahoma native Woody Guthrie (1912-67) was progressively deteriorating from hereditary Huntington‘s chorea in 1950 when his publisher, Howie Richmond of TRO Essex, gave him a just-introduced two-track home tape recorder for his new songs, revisions of older ones, philosophizing, and personal messages.
Over 1951 and 1952, prolific Woodrow Wilson Guthrie sent Richmond 32 tapes with over 300 cuts done in his Brooklyn living room. Seven decades later, new Woody at Home, Volumes 1 and 2 (Shamus) shares 22 of them with us. Thirteen compositions are on no other disc. Regardless of countless covers of freshly timely Deportee over the decades, here is the only rendition that Woody himself ever recorded. It has verses I had never heard on its covers.
He believed that no song was ever finished. His were constantly evolving. This Land Is Your Land has lines found nowhere else. Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done (a look at heroism of ordinary people down through history) has lines I had never encountered before. My Id and My Ego shows his playful eroticism. Spoken-word Einstein Theme Song imagines a humanitarian talk with the genius as they rode the rails – a prime means of Depression Era travel when early Guthrie songs were birthed.
The intimate feeling of these informal home recordings is astounding. As is the audio quality, a major accomplishment. Besides lyrics, the booklet accompanying the disc details the remastering proesss. Steve Rosenthal, Jessica Thompson, and Sean McClowry write in Notes on the Transfer and Restoration Process:
Woody Guthrie’s original tapes were made in his home using a consumer tape recorder that played and recorded at a very slow speed, 3 3/4 inches per second. To restore as much fidelity and character as possible in a way that matched the tenor and spirit of Woody’s songs, several combinations of tape heads and settings were researched.
After testing the tapes on multiple reel-to-reel tape machines, the best sonic match was a fully -restored Ampex 350 Tape Recorder from the same years that Woody’s tapes were first recorded. The Ampex 350 was introduced in 1950 and quickly became one of the most important early professional tape recorders of its era. Ampex, one of the original technology companies located in what would become Silicon Valley in California, made professional audio recorders that used vacuum tubes and large, heavy transports. To transfer the Woody tapes, a fully restored Ampex 350 Tape Recorder was played through a Mytek Brooklyn Analog to Digital Converter and recorded at 24 bit/192kz into Avid Pro Tools, where we could take advantage of digital editing and restoration software while staying true to the original sonic character heard uniquely on the original tapes.
Mastering tools primarily consisted of two pieces of software developed using technology with deeply sophisticated algorithmic processing. A stem separation tool to “unmix” the sounds into their own stems, or tracks, which allowed a rebalance of the guitar and vocals. (Woody was not a recordist, and these were not studio recordings, so sometimes his vocals drowned out his guitar strumming.). Another tool was used that neatly pulled out most of the 60-cycle hum that washed over the original recordings and separated it into its own “bass” stem. Woody’s recordings are mono, and they truly capture a moment in time. However, those moments were buried under the detritus of having been recorded onto a slow speed quarter-inch analog tape over 70 years ago. With the worst “noise” out of the way, and the guitars and vocals better balanced, a gain was used to sculpt and refine the recording. A spectral editor further helped attenuate a single fundamental from an overzealous guitar pluck, or tuck in a vocal that came out a bit too exuberantly. Very little equalization or compression was used.
One minor warning: the CD booklet may be hard from some people to read due to print size. Aside from that, the package is phenomenal.

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Happy Birthday Stevie Wonder!
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by John Funke / Backwoods, Saturdays 10 am – noon
Happy Birthday to Stevie Wonder, the man who has gifted us with his presence throughout our lives. Creating, singing, and playing music that touches the spirit, he is indeed the whole package! Here he is sending out a favorite on the Dick Cavett Show in 1970. Wishing you many happy returns, Stevie!
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Van Gogh at the MFA
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A friendship Vincent Van Gogh formed in his final years is the cornerstone of a new MFA show.
by Bruce Sylvester / Troubadour, Thursdays 2 – 4 pm

The Bedroom, oil on canvas, by Vincent Van Gogh, 1889. The Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection
Wild slashes of brush strokes and vibrant color marked some Vincent Van Gogh paintings, though there were other sides to his work too. In 1888 the emotionally troubled Dutch artist left the artistic hotbed Paris to move to the relative calm of Arles in southern France. After months of social isolation, he made friends with a postman, Joseph Roulin, in a cafe and went on to do a series of 26 portraits of him, his wife and three children.
Thirteen of them are the cornerstone of a new show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits, where we glimpse bits of his daily world in the two years leading up to his suicide at age 37 in 1890.
As the MFA tells us, “We don’t know why Van Gogh decided to move to this particular town in Provence, but the slower pace of life and lower cost of living in southern France were likely appealing, as were the brighter sunlight and warmer weather.” The yellow house where he lived and worked was destroyed by World War II bombing, but we see his painting of it along with pictures of his bedroom and chair.
We enter the show to the music of Berlioz, which he called art for disturbed hearts. Then we meet monsieur Roulin, resplendent in his postal uniform and exuding pride over the birth of his third child, his first daughter, earlier in the day he sat for the portrait.
The next room shows us the three children, each alone. Looking straight ahead we can savor a strategically placed portrait of madame Augustine Roulin. The unseen end of a cord in one rendition of her upper body and face was in reality tied to a cradle for rocking baby Marcelle. Multiple paintings of a single working class family were unusual for the period. Such portraiture was usuallyfor nobles and the wealthy.
The context of the show is enhanced by photos of various Moulins in later years. Father Joseph’s distinctive appearance remains the same over time. Marcelle became one of the last people alive who had been around Van Gogh. An informal photo from her senior years shows her standing with her portrait.
He took artistic liberties with settings in the portraits: sometimes bold-hued solid blocks, sometimes floral patterns in the background, sometimes both. Do the colors and style reflect the mood and vibe of southern France? Certainly more than they would the Paris he left behind. A self-portrait done in Arles suggests a more peaceful state of mind than one done during his Paris days. But that was not the case. We see 10 letters with accompanying translations from Joseph Roulin to Van Gogh and his brother Theo concerning his mental state and institutionalization. It was in Arles that he cut off an ear.
Along with the Roulin pictures, there are natural scenes (one quite arresting) and religious works. Remember, Vincent had previously attempted a career as a minister. As with the recent Salvador Dali show at the MFA, we get added context with the inclusion of a few pieces by earlier artists such as a religious Rembrandt that could well have influenced Van Gogh. The Dali exhibit did this more effectively, perhaps because it was easier to do with Dali.
With 14 of the original 26 Roulin portraits, the show at its core is about a friendship that Van Gogh surely needed given his mental and financial states.
Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits is at the Museum of Fine Arts through September 7. Admission tickets are for timed entry.
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