Same story with this as with Woody's Bound for Glory: it's an album of Folkways recordings, licensed to the Italian Albatross album, and, at the time I bought it, it was one of the few Guthrie albums available. I got both of them from the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street, I think, but not at the same time; just a case of snapping up whatever was in the racks.
For a decade or two these recordings would have been pretty rare, but now they're common as muck (if not with such a fantastic cover as my copy). As a young anarchist, I liked the fact that the album is a song cycle about the immigrant radicals who were electrocuted for a crime that many believed them to be innocent of.
Guthrie must surely have been commissioned to write these songs. He's held up as a paragon of authentic folk culture, but he was more than happy to write songs to order if the topic was not too objectionable (hydroelectric power was one example) and the price was right.
It has to be said the songs are not among his best. He falls back on two tropes. One is the journalistic reportage set to music — something he must have found as easy as falling off a log since all the sentences in his autobiography have the natural cadences of music. The other is his doggerel nursery-rhyme-style songs, which riff on very simple themes that Messrs Sacco and Vanzetti were good guys done wrong, while the judge and the police and the false witnesses were not so good.
Since the judge is quoted as instructing the jury, "This man, (Vanzetti) although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions," there does appear to be some justification for this characterisation.
But Woody's writing is not at its most elegant. After telling us in I Just Want to Sing Your Name how he wants to sing the names of Sacco and Vanzetti, a later verse continues, "Judge Webster Thayer, I don't want to sing your name." Well, delete that line for a start, then.
Many other songs, books, films and even an opera also cover the Sacco and Vanzetti story.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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