European law limits copyrights on recordings to 50 years, whether the recordings were made in Europe or not, which means that, for example,
Woody Guthrie's recordings, made in the U.S. in the 1940s, are all in the public domain (although they continue to be claimed by American record companies). A whole host of European reissue labels exist solely for the purpose of exploiting this anomaly by assembling unlicensed albums by vintage artists mastered from old vinyl records or even current CDs. These albums range from poorly compiled and annotated ripoffs to more scholarly and thorough efforts. Britain's Proper Records leans toward the high end, putting together box sets with extensive booklets, and that's the approach the label has taken with its
Guthrie collection
Some Folk. In terms of length, only the legitimate album
The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1-4 (Smithsonian Folkways) is in the class of this four-CD set, which contains 99 tracks and runs four hours and 42 minutes. Compiler/annotator
Adam Komorowski has taken a simple chronological approach. The first disc is an abridged version of the three-disc set
The Library of Congress Recordings that cuts out most of the spoken material in favor of the music. The second disc begins with the tracks from the Dust Bowl Ballads album and continues by copying the contents of
The Columbia River Collection. That concludes at the start of the third disc, followed by four tracks with
the Almanac Singers (one of which, "The Dodger Song," features
Lee Hays on lead vocals, with
Guthrie buried in the chorus), and then the rest of the third disc and all of the fourth contain excerpts from
Guthrie's large catalog of casually recorded folk songs done for record company owner
Moses Asch in the mid-'40s. (Among these, "Sowing on the Mountain" features
Cisco Houston on lead vocals, with
Guthrie singing harmony, and the version of "Sinking of the Reuben James" is actually the
Almanac Singers version, with
Pete Seeger on lead vocals; although
Guthrie co-wrote the song, he isn't present on the track.)