Band records Jewish songs written by Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie was a dust bowl drifter who wrote enduring songs about America’s workers and underdogs. He also was a longtime New York City resident who relished Jewish culture and wrote pages of unpublished lyrics about Hanukkah, Jewish history and spirituality.

That “other” Guthrie is now in the spotlight, decades after his death.

A batch of his Jewish lyrics has been dusted off, set to music and recorded by the Klezmatics, a New York City band that puts its unique spin on traditional Jewish klezmer music. The recently released “Happy Joyous Hanuka” CD includes loopy lines about dancing around the Hanukkah tree and a serious treatment of the Jews’ bloody history.

“The more time that goes by, the bigger a picture we get of the guy,” said Guthrie’s son, Arlo Guthrie, who’s joining the Klezmatics to perform the songs in concert. “This is just another element to a picture that’s still developing.”

Grafting new melodies on Woody Guthrie’s old lyrics has been done before, most notably by Billy Bragg and Wilco for two commercially and critically successful albums, “Mermaid Avenue” and “Mermaid Avenue Vol. II.”

Guthrie had moved from the West to New York City by 1940. He met and married a Jewish girl, dancer Marjorie Mazia, and settled in Coney Island.

Known for his empathetic tales of Okies, Guthrie also found common ground with his Jewish neighbors. In particular, he found a kindred spirit in his mother-in-law, Aliza Greenblatt, a Yiddish poet with a matching streak of social consciousness.

He dove into Judaism and churned out lyrics reflecting his passion. He wrote one song about Ilsa Koch, the infamous “Witch of Buchenwald” concentration camp, from the point of view of a prisoner seeing chimney smoke, “bones in piles” and “lamp shades made from skins.”

“He put himself in the camp,” said daughter Nora Guthrie, keeper of the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, who brought the songs to the Klezmatics.

“This is really fascinating to me – that he suddenly became a Jew, in his own way.”

The Klezmatics’ Hanukkah CD is scheduled to be followed by another of Guthrie tunes touching on broader Jewish spiritual and historic themes.