Guthrie’s Kids’ Songs: The Family Sings Along : Music: Arlo and other relatives perform “Woody’s 20 Grow Big Songs” on a new album.

“Marjorie wants this book to be a happy laugher and a goofy dancer, a high flinger, a bumpy jumper, a shy teaser, for all her kids already skipping, and for your kids’ kids when they start hopping.”

--Woody Guthrie, in the dedication of a recently discovered collection of his children’s songs, soon to be released as an album and songbook. (Marjorie was his wife and “organizer.”)

The legend of folk singer Woody Guthrie was born in the protest songs he wrote to give voice to exploited workers and the disenfranchised poor in the Depression-era Dust Bowl days. His celebratory ballad “This Land Is Your Land” is an American standard.

An unpublished book of his children’s songs--found by chance, after 40 years, on a library shelf at Sarah Lawrence College in 1989--reveals a different Woody: a playful, loving father.

The songs can be heard on a new album, “Woody’s 20 Grow Big Songs,” recorded by the singer’s three offspring--Arlo, a memorable ‘60s folkie and activist himself (Woodstock and “Alice’s Restaurant”), Nora and Joady--and their children. It will be released Tuesday on CD and audiocassette by Warner Bros. Records Family Entertainment, along with a reproduction of the songbook filled with Woody’s illustrations and comments, from Harper Collins Children’s Books.

In the vein of Natalie Cole’s “Unforgettable” duet album with her father, Nat King Cole, the Guthrie family members mix their voices in the selections that Woody had recorded.

The album-songbook package is a celebration of childhood, from the sprightly, unpretentious content of such songs as “Cleano,” “Don’t You Push Me Down” and the familiar “Riding in My Car,” to the jaunty cartoon sketches in the songbook and the poignant sound of Woody himself.

That poignancy is underscored in the last cut on the album, “Sleep Eye,” a lullaby first sung by Woody, then by Arlo, who turns it into a tender farewell anthem.

“My dad has always had an image of being a sort of rebel type,” said Arlo Guthrie. “But there was more to him than that. He wrote as many children’s songs as union songs or political songs. He really wrote about a way of life.”

Arlo, 45, considers Woody’s love of words to be his genius. “In his autobiography, ‘Bound for Glory,’ and in a number of his other songs, there’s really a playfulness with his use of the language. He took liberties with rhyme and meter that helped make Bob Dylan Bob Dylan--and influenced lots of other people, including myself.

“He loved local dialects and was fairly well versed in all of them. And in a lot of his writings you’ll see that kind of playing with words, not trying to mean anything, but seeing how they go together, then when something struck, he would write about that.”

Putting the album together presented an unexpected challenge for the Guthrie family, given Woody’s unique, solo performance style and the age of the recordings.

“There were a lot of problems,” Arlo said. “We had to take a lot of time to play along with him. We couldn’t separate his vocals from his guitar, like you could today if you were recording.”

“Woody’s particular style was not to spend hours tuning a guitar,” said Nora. “Once we realized the keys he was singing in weren’t the keys that were notated, we had to try to find ways to make it more accessible.

“We just experimented. We had a whole band trying to tune up to his guitar out of tune. It turned out there was an incredible amount of work on each song to bring it up to date soundwise, then an incredible amount of work to decide what to do with songs he hadn’t recorded.”

The new arrangements “had to fit very intricately with what Woody was playing,” Arlo said. “We had to do that for sound. We discovered that we could mask a lot of his (off-key) guitar playing with an accordion--it happened to be in the same range. Even though his guitar is playing one thing, and we’re playing another, you don’t hear it at all, it seems to fit very well.”

“To sing a close three-part harmony with him,” Nora said, “you have to mimic his dialect--here’s this guy with this incredible Oklahoma drawl--his timing, the way he holds the vowel, then cuts the consonant; we had to say, ‘Everyone keep your fingers crossed and sing like a Guthrie.’

“One of Arlo’s concerns,” she added, “was that it not be too clean, too studio. We wanted to imagine Woody sitting in the room and we’re all singing together, and to capture a memory of our children singing with their grandfather the way we sang with our father.”

“The real test for us,” Arlo said, “was not to lose the simplicity. We didn’t want to change his original recordings, just add to them.

“A fabulous discovery,” he said, was to find “that the records we had been listening to for the last 40 years were not true representations of what Woody really sounded like.” On a few of the songs where Woody plays harmonica, a fixed key instrument, he said, “we couldn’t play along and we realized he couldn’t be in tune to any standard reference point. So, we speeded (the recording) up and all of a sudden my sister said, ‘There’s my dad’s voice!’

“We had always assumed (the way he sounded) was a part of the recording process. . . . For the first time, a lot of people are going to hear what he really sounded like.”

“It was us finding our father again in many, many different ways,” said Nora Guthrie. Woody died of Huntington’s chorea in 1967; his daughter Cathy, the firstborn, died at the age of 4.

“A lot of these songs came out of his early baby-sitting experiences with Cathy during the first four years of her life, and then he continued that with Arlo,” she said. “My mother (Marjorie Mazia Guthrie) was teaching dance with Martha Graham’s company--she was basically the breadwinner--and Woody was left with Cathy and then with all of us.”

Marjorie, who did the notations for the “Grow Big” songs, often had to salvage them from the trash--Woody had a penchant for jotting ideas down on a paper napkin and then using it to blow his nose or eat off of, according to Nora.

Although her mother, who died in 1983, receives co-author credit for the songs, Nora said she worked on only one of the songs, “Race You Down the Mountain.” “Woody wrote all the lyrics and the music. My mother basically compiled it. She was the great organizer of all time. She probably told him where to put the illustrations, and the dedications and notations.”

She believes that perhaps the songbook was meant “as a kind of testament” to Cathy, that “it was part of the healing” for her parents to keep her spirit alive.

The album has emotional resonances for Woody’s son and daughter. For patriarchal Arlo, it was not only a way for “our father to be better understood,” but was a way his own family could be close. Nora, after a few moments’ struggle for composure, described her response.

“Our father was ill most of the years we had grown up. In the last couple of years he wasn’t able to talk at all. I’ve always wondered all my life what he would have said, or done. Suddenly we were singing all these songs, and it occurred to me they were about his feelings about being a father and all the things he would have said to us, had he been able to. To me, to Arlo to Joady.

“There was a lot of meaning we didn’t anticipate in the beginning.”