DOCUMENTARY #1 STRUGGLE with AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED (ALS)

[New York]: Asch Records, [1945]. First Edition. Record Album. The three discs in Fine condition; slight edgewear with tiny bit of loss to spine head and light foxing to album boards. Letter with light creases at foldlines. Near Fine in a Fine clamshell box. Exceptional. Album of three 78 rpm discs housed in the original half blue cloth with illustrated front board containing the records in three paper sleeves (10-1/4" x 12"). With a superb five-page AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED in dark pencil by Guthrie on three 8" x 10-1/2" sheets of lined notebook paper bound with a single staple at the upper corner. All housed together in a custom blue morocco backed cloth clamshell box with gilt-lettered and decorated spine (11-1/4" x 13"). STRUGGLE is one of the first albums produced after Guthrie began recording for renowned producer Moe Asch and is the first in a series Asch called "American Documentary," inspired by Guthrie's idea for "ballads describing the major events of the week or month." An exceptional Association Copy INSCRIBED on the sleeve of the first record to Guthrie's close friend, longtime correspondent, and likely former lover, Charlotte Strauss: "To Charlotte Christmas and New Year '46/Woody/Marjorie/Cathy/This is me struggling." The three discs contain 5 recordings by Guthrie and one by Sonny Terry: "Buffalo Skinners" (360-1A) and "Pretty Boy Floyd" (360-1B); "Ludlow Massacre" (360-2A) and "1913 Massacre" (360-2B); "Lost John" by Sonny Terry (360-3A) and "Union Burying Ground" (360-3B). Cover illustration of "Burial at Ludlow" by David Stone Martin. The letter by Guthrie, entirely in his neat cursive, SIGNED twice and dated "Dec. 6, 1945," celebrates the release of the album and his recent marriage to Marjorie Mazia. It is the third known letter (the first dated 29 October 1945) in his intimate correspondence with Charlotte Strauss, who he praises here for thinking "down that valley where no grain nor atom is lost and no rock sleeps for too long a spell." Some excerpts from the letter: "They've got me out here in the desert now to keep these mountains company all around. A lonesome stretch of the road for some folks but I walked here a few years ago and the desert never felt blank nor dead to me.... You certainly will never regret the purchase of any or all of the Library of Congress, archives of American Folk Song recordings. I've listened to almost all of them. They are the real mud and water people with the quickest brains and the truest tongues.... The name of it is 'Struggle' and the songs are based mainly on actual scenes out of our struggle to build on trade unions and to be able to fight better to rid our landscapes of slums, filth, disease, idleness, broken bodies and rotten homes, also black markets, low wages, high prices.... You seem to curl and twist as I vision you and I can feel the heat of your sensitivity. You go this way and that way, and several other ways, but not so much out of fear as out of decision.... You think down that valley where no grain nor atom is lost and no rock sleeps for too long a spell, no death. You hear this in those songs and describe it as your empty place and the one that hears feels that same empty and open feeling. You pick the words, 'You got to walk that lonesome valley' --and this song I sang in a hundred saloons, whore houses, jails, roads, union halls, and on that many picket lines.... I left Scott Field on the run for New York, Coney Island, because I had been sort of flirting around (pretty heavy) with a nice pretty young teacher and dancer who's [sic] name is Marjorie Guthrie (now). She is a teacher for Martha Graham. We met back in 1941 or '42 in a show and lived in the worst sin that you ever heard of till on Decembre [sic] the 13th we got the papers and now our sins are all legal and honest. I sang some of my songs and the whole new Dance Group danced." Guthrie would at a later date write to Strauss that he loved her and would always love her. (Inventory #: 021992)