Billy Bragg – Billy Bragg and Wilco resurrect Woody Guthrie by breathing new music into his long-lost lyrics

“So it was very simple. When I ran into Billy, he sincerely was touched and told me his story of how he had gone down to the Smithsonian Institute and researched Woody and loved to go around reading his stuff. He had just played a concert in Central Park. He had sung also with Michael Franti of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. They did [Woody’s] ‘Vigilante Man’ as a rap song, and Billy sang, and I thought this was about the coolest thing I ever heard because I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate.”

Bragg claims he still had misgivings. “I thought, ‘That’s Dylan’s gig. That’s Arlo’s gig.’…I can remember saying to my manager, ‘I don’t really know if I want to take that one.’ And then Nora did a naughty thing.”

What she did was to complete a circle. “I remember [Bragg] recorded a song called ‘You Woke Up My Neighborhood’,” Nora recalls. “It was a very punky Billie Holiday kind of thing. By coincidence, there was a piece of artwork of my dad’s, and as he often did on his artwork, he titled it or put a lyric on it. And the title on the artwork was ‘You Woke Up My Neighborhood.’ So I made him a copy of it and put it in a little frame.”

Bragg later confided to her he had seen the artwork at the Smithsonian and it had inspired the song. “So they were already collaborating before I came along,” Nora says.

From the beginning, Nora’s vision of Mermaid Avenue was “a Traveling Wilburys kind of thing” rather than a tribute compilation that she and Bragg agreed would likely just sit on a shelf. “I wanted music that people — that kids — would just play. They’re driving in their cars, they pop in the cassette, they just like the music….If they just heard the music and they like the bands and maybe after three or four listens, they’d start listening to the words as well and somehow they would enjoy Woody’s lyrics without being told, ‘Oh this is Woody Guthrie, a great songwriter.”

With that goal in mind, Bragg tapped Wilco as his collaborators for the project to invoke an American legacy dimension, and also recruited Natalie Merchant for a pop female touch on a couple songs. Bragg freely admits he hoped Merchant’s involvement would ensure the attention he thought the project deserved from Elektra Records, but he stresses he has memories of seeing Merchant perform, “and while the guys are standing around retuning, she’ll do a couple of verses of ‘Wildwood Flower’ just off the top of her head. It’s just a beautifully pure understanding of American folk music. I used to send her cassettes of Carter Family songs and just say, ‘Let’s go out and just do some of [them]….We just never had the time to get together.”

Of Wilco, Bragg says, “They’re a band with a lot of edge that can play ballads instead of being a ballad band….There’s a very important aspect about Wilco being a Midwestern band in this as well, because Woody was the same kind of guy. And the fact that they kind of come from straight down the Mississippi valley — there’s something very straightforward about them that I really related to, because I can’t bloody stand rock stars.”

“The great thing about [Jeff] Tweedy is he’s an incredible arranger,” Bragg says. “And Jay Bennett is the cat. Jay Bennett is the cat. I have never worked with a musician like Jay Bennett in my life. You can throw anything at him and not only will he play it but he’ll bring something to it that is completely inspirational….He hardly looks like he’s doing it, which is the annoying thing. It was insane. Jay Bennett is the cat. He is the very definition of how you use that term ‘cat.'”

Bennett was well aware of the uniqueness of this opportunity. “I was just really amazed looking through the lyrics,” he says. “Like no one’s gonna tell me, ‘pick this kind of song or that kind of song’? And there’s pretty much every kind of song, from a straight love song to a stream-of-consciousness kind of song to a totally nasty, vulgar kind of sexual song. I always knew the image you get of him in the media was narrow and constructed,” says Bennett.

Says Tweedy, “Mermaid Avenue gave us a chance to use a vocabulary musically we’ve been comfortable with for a long time. Writing the songs was like, ‘Well, I don’t have to rethink it at all if ‘Hesitating Beauty’ sounds like a kind of poppish punk folkish country song I might have written five years ago.'” He contrasts this with Wilco records, which he says are “all about being able to say, ‘We probably couldn’t have done that a year ago.'”

Tweedy’s approach to collaborating with Guthrie was to imagine the legendary everyman as someone familiar. He tried to picture his own grandfather writing about the events of his life. “Anything like that would be moving — just like if you went to a yard sale and picked up a box of decrepit, dog-eared black-and-white snapshots from the ’30s and ’40s. The thing that emerges is that it’s just a really well-documented life. He managed to put himself in a position to see a lot and do a lot, and he thought about it a lot.

“The essence of Woody I don’t think really comes out in his music or the books. I think his whole thing still seems pretty elusive. He was very much of the moment — very ephemeral.”

Bennett and Tweedy offer Guthrie’s lyric notes as proof the man was just passing through even his own creations. “A lot of times literally the songs would say down at the bottom, ‘If you want to change something, change it!'” says Bennett. “He didn’t know who the hell he was writing that for. It ended up being us.”

“[This project] just reinforced a previously held belief,” Tweedy adds. “It really isn’t about anything that you contribute to a song. It doesn’t necessarily belong to you in any way. The whole idea is that a song in itself is pretty powerless without somebody to listen to it.”

Mermaid Avenue empowers 15 Woody Guthrie songs for the next millennium, one he might have envisioned when he penned “supersonic boogie” in the margin of a lyric, as if to suggest a melody to someone who eventually might put music to it. The song “My Flying Saucer” is one of 25 additional tracks recorded for the project but not on the CD.