$3M for Woody Guthrie Archive; $4.5 M for 137 Photos

[David Kay, MLS]

". . . .as places from California to the New York island get ready to
celebrate the centennial of [Woody] Guthrie’s birth, in 2012, Oklahoma
is finally ready to welcome him home. The George Kaiser Family
Foundation in Tulsa plans to announce this week that it is buying the
Guthrie archives from his children and building an exhibition and
study center to honor his legacy. . . .

The archive includes the astonishing creative output of Guthrie during
his 55 years. There are scores of notebooks and diaries written in his
precise handwriting and illustrated with cartoons, watercolors,
stickers and clippings; hundreds of letters; 581 artworks; a half-
dozen scrapbooks; unpublished short stories, novels and essays; as
well as the lyrics to the 3,000 or more songs he scribbled on scraps
of paper, gift wrap, napkins, paper bags and place mats. Much of the
material has rarely or never been seen in public, including the lyrics
to most of the songs. Guthrie could not write musical notation, so the
melodies have been lost.

The foundation, which paid $3 million for the archives, is planning a
kickoff celebration on March 10, with a conference in conjunction with
the University of Tulsa and a concert sponsored by the Grammy Museum
featuring his son Arlo Guthrie and other musicians.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/arts/music/woody-guthrie-gets-a-belated-honor-in-oklahoma.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&hpw

Offhand I don't know the specifics and extent of their collection, but
I do know they are located upstate in Mt Kisco, NY! I wonder if they
ever had it appraised before the billionaire made his offer. . . .
Meanwhile, in a St. Paul vault lies a a photo album with 137 photos
recently appraised at $4.5M.

"In the bowels of U.S. Bank's basement in downtown St. Paul, Kenton
Spading follows guard Linda Traen into the carpeted vault lined with
rows of safe deposit boxes. She reaches up to the second row from the
top and unlocks a steel door. Spading delicately withdraws a large
photo album containing 137 historic photos of the Mississippi River
taken in the 1880s. "They're in pretty remarkable shape, considering
they bounced around on a dredge for more than 50 years," said Spading,
a hydrologic engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Remarkable - and valuable.

A photography expert from Sotheby's, the international auction house,
flew in from New York recently and spent a day with the old photo
album before appraising it at $4.5 million.

http://www.startribune.com/local/136240423.html

"The Archives holds 2998 individual lyrics, penned by Guthrie on a
variety of mediums, including tissue paper, onionskin, gift-wrap,
napkins, concert programs, and even placemats! Some of these lyrics
are in the form of loose-leaf sheets, others are written directly in
notebooks or journals, others are pasted into oversized notebooks, and
still more are loose sheets collected by Guthrie, which he bound
himself.

check out the archive: http://www.woodyguthrie.org/archives/index.htm

dk
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