In case you missed it, Amy Goodman spent an hour with British singer/activist Billy Bragg on her Labor Day edition of Democracy Now.
Click here to check it out.
Bragg talks music and politics and performs a few tunes including a slowed-down minor-key version of Woody Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home.” A good portion of the interview focuses on the Mermaid Avenue project–the amazing 1998 collaboration with Wilco creating songs from some of Guthrie’s left-over lyrics. He talks about Guthrie’s life and calls him both the “first punk-rocker” and “the last Elizabethan balladeer.” Perhaps most exciting, he alludes to a third volume of the Mermaid Avenue songs coming out next year in honor of the centennial of Woody’s birth.
(Eric Schopmeyer is a musican and teacher in Portland, OR, and plays in a band called The Waxwings)
