WOODY GUTHRIE, singer, songwriter, poet, seafarer and union activist, penned over 3,000 songs in his lifetime. He influenced generations of musicians with songs about poverty, inequality, immigration, workers rights, fascism — which remain relevant today.

Never afraid to confront capitalism, he answered Irving Berlin’s God Bless America with his enduring The Land Is Your Land, warned All You Fascists Are Bound To Lose and exposed the treatment of immigrants on Deportees (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos), about a plane crash in 1948 in Los Gatos Canyon, California, that killed 32 people, including 28 migrant farm workers.

Born into a middle-class family in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma, his influence on Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen is universally known — but there are many others: Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Steve Earle, The Clash’s Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg, The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Robert Hunter, The Byrds and Wilco who recorded three albums’ worth of Woody’s songs on the Mermaid Avenue series of albums with Bragg.

As with other prolific artists, just when it seems the vaults were empty more unissued demos and tapes surface.

A new set, Woody At Home Volume 1 & 2 1951-1952, came out on August 14, released by Shamus Records, owned by Woody’s publisher TKO Essex. It contains 22 previously unreleased tracks including This Land is Your Land with new verses, previously unheard home recordings of Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done, Pastures Of Plenty, and Jesus Christ, and 13 songs that Woody never recorded elsewhere including Deportees, and three tracks of Woody speaking to Howie Richmond at TKO Essex, who had supplied him with a new two-track tape recorder.

Woody explains to Richmond: “I just want to tell you fellers that I’m awful glad sending this batch of songs to you. This sounds like about the best tape I made so far… I was here at home watching the kids by myself. So the kids’ tapes I’m sending you, the ones with me and the kids on them, I don’t want you sending them back or anything like that. I just want you to keep them and play them, and see the place from whence all good folk songs breed and spring.”

Woody wrote about what he had read in the papers, saw on film, overheard in conversations and observed from ordinary people.

In July 1952, Woody was admitted to Brooklyn State Hospital — he was in and out of hospital for four years. In 1956 he was diagnosed as having Huntington’s chorea, a wasting disease that he had inherited from his mother. He spent the rest of his life in and out of hospital finally passing away in 1968.

Debate has long taken place about Woody’s political affiliation. The House Un-American Activities Committee never formally investigated him. Was he a member of the Communist Party? Woody said he was, but also said: “I’m not a Communist, but I've been in the red all my life.”

His friend the author John Steinbeck said: “Woody is just Woody. Thousands know him by no other name. He is a voice with a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.”

More details and free downloads at woodyathome.com.