A GUTHRIE TREASURE TROVE

In this feature, The Times’ pop-music writers spotlight albums--old or new, obscure or mainstream--to which they’ve formed a special attachment.

Artist: Woody Guthrie.

Album: “The Library of Congress Recordings.”

History: Tuesday would mark the 75th birthday of Woody Guthrie, the folk singer and songwriter whose influence on popular music--and on American culture in general--has been incalculable. This gifted, contrary, contradictory and tragic man was born in Okemah, Okla., and grew up there and in north Texas. He took naturally to music, and became a fairly proficient guitarist and singer before hitting the road in the mid-’20s. His travels--mostly hitchhiking and hopping freights--brought him to California, and it was while living in Glendale that he got his first serious performing job--a daily show on a Los Angeles radio station.

Traveling in California’s Central Valley, he was deeply moved by the plight of the “dust bowl refugees” struggling to survive in migrant workers’ camps, and his sympathies--and the increasing political commentary of his songs--inevitably hooked him up with the Communist Party, in which he’d remain fairly active through most of his career. He played party functions and traveled to camps throughout the state helping entertain and organize the farm workers.

At the beginning of the ‘40s, Guthrie joined his friend Will Geer, the actor, in New York City and fell in with the leftist/folk community that included musicians Leadbelly and Pete Seeger and folklorist Alan Lomax. In 1940, Lomax recorded Guthrie in Washington for the Library of Congress archives he operated. Later that year, Guthrie cut 14 of his “dust bowl ballads” for Victor Records and became involved in increasingly successful radio projects.

Torn between commercial prosperity and his political ideals, Guthrie hit the road again, driving a criss-cross route back to California with his wife, Mary, and their three children. He returned to New York after a hiatus in Oregon, where he wrote his famous songs celebrating the Grand Coulee Dam. In New York he joined the Almanac Singers, an activist group that concentrated on union organizing. His autobiography, “Bound for Glory,” was published in 1943. He served in the Merchant Marine, making two perilous passages to Europe toward the end of World War II. He then served an Army hitch on bases in Texas, Illinois and Nevada.

After his discharge, he settled in Coney Island with his second wife, Marjorie. Some more records had been released, but his attempts to regenerate his career were spotty. His work--and behavior--were erratic, and he suffered a blow when his 4-year-old daughter Cathy was killed in a fire--a haunting echo of his childhood, when, in separate incidents, the family home had burned down and his sister had died from burns. His writing was inconsistent, the Left was in decline and family life was tense (he and Marjorie had three other children, Arlo, Nora and Joady).

Guthrie had become unkempt, and took to wandering the city. In 1952, he attacked Marjorie with a pair of scissors. He was checked in and out of hospitals, and the assumption was that alcohol was the problem. In retrospect, it’s clear that he was displaying symptoms of Huntington’s disease, the hereditary condition that had killed his mother and would strike several other members of his family.

Before his final decline, Guthrie hit the road again, ending up in Topanga Canyon where he stayed at Will Geer’s compound and met Annekke Marshall, who would become his third wife. There were more travels: to Florida (where Guthrie severely burned his arm lighting a fire), back to Topanga, back to New York, back to California, and finally back to New York for the last time in 1954.

His illness was finally diagnosed and he was hospitalized again. Though Guthrie still came out of the hospital occasionally, the disease was inexorable, killing his brain cells and reducing his body to a shaking shell. He weighed less than 100 lbs. when he died Oct. 3, 1967.

Sound: It was only after Guthrie’s active years had ended that his artistic scope became apparent and his impact truly felt. Thanks to torchbearers like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, Guthrie’s style, his political attitudes and his freewheeling life style were transmitted into the ‘60s folk boom and later into rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a straight, clear line from there to Bruce Springsteen’s last concert tour, when the Jersey rocker returned the teeth to Guthrie’s best-known song, “This Land Is Your Land,” turning it from patriotic campfire sing-along to defiant claim.

The “Library of Congress Recordings” were released as a three-record set by Elektra in 1964, but are now available by mail for $16 from Woody Guthrie Publications Inc., Suite 710, 250 W. 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10107. They were cut in March, 1940. That was before many of Guthrie’s greatest songs were written, but the three hours of singing and talking features plenty of strong originals, along with lesser Guthrie compositions and traditional songs. The best are “Talking Dust Bowl Blues,” “Do-Re-Mi,” Pretty Boy Floyd” and Guthrie’s other popular song, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.”

Lomax recognized Guthrie’s importance and knew how to bring out his essence, drawing Guthrie into warm, detailed anecdotes spun in a dry drawl that’s almost as musical as his singing.

The conversation centers on Guthrie’s childhood, the dust storms that destroyed the farms, the experiences of the Okies fleeing to California. They talk about outlaws and hobos, riding the rails and walking the ties, and Guthrie’s descriptions of the homeless seem especially timely today. There’s also a palpably emotional moment--a sudden slowing and hesitation in his speech, a heavy throat-clearing--as Guthrie recounts the deaths of his sister and mother. And there are loose moments when Lomax drops his interviewer’s role and begins baying along with Guthrie.

Listening to Guthrie’s sly digs at preachers and politicians and bankers, you can just imagine what fun he’d have with today’s cast of Ollie, Oral, Jim and Tammy. And when you hear him talk and sing about people with their backs to the wall, you wish you could hear what art he’d make of the deaths of 18 men in a boxcar in Texas. But you can bet that somewhere there are people writing songs about those very things. And whether they know it or not, Woody Guthrie is a big part of the reason they’re doing it.