“Let the song be the star and just fucking sing!” – Nora Guthrie Interview Part Two

Talking about opening up the songbook, Woody and jazz, Mermaid Avenue Blare and the House of Earth

By Douglas Heselgrave
Part One: “We Brought the Protest Inside”

DH: I wanted to ask you about some of the recording projects you’ve been involved with.  You oversee Woody’s archives and a lot has been written about how many lyrics he left with no music attached to them, and beginning with the Billy Bragg/Wilco albums a dozen or so years ago, there’s been a lot of new songs with Woody’s lyrics in new musical settings recorded. How do you account for the demand and the continued interest in his work – especially in these new forms without Woody’s direct involvement?

Nora: It’s the ideas, right?  It’s all about the words.  I used to get a kick out of how in the early days Woody would often sign his songs with a persona.  It kinda didn’t matter who he was, and he would always take a quiet seat.  It was in the way he performed.  It wasn’t about him as a guy – although Dylan seemed to notice that there was something cool about the guy.  At the time, and it was partly that Midwestern thing that he had – to be a little bit more laid back and not in your face – so it was that whole thing to lay back and let the song be the star.  This just reminded me of when we were doing the Kennedy Center show.  A lot of times I had to remind the artist when they were getting concerned about their hair or their managers, so I had to tell them that none of this was about them, and it wasn’t even about Woody – it’s about the song, so sing, just fucking sing! (Huge laugh)

DH: Ha! So, it’s about the song, but I have to wonder, of all these new interpretations, do you have a favourite?

Nora: I really like all of them.  Did you hear ‘Note of Hope’?

DH: I have heard it.  I’m a huge fan of Rob Wasserman’s bass playing.

Nora: I really like Madeleine Peyroux’s song on that one.

DH: She is a great stylist.  She can really get into the heart of a song, make it her own and respect it at the same time.

Nora: That song (‘Wild Card In The Hole’) was one with a long life where the interpretation and the music really complements the lyrics.  I love Nellie McKay’s track, ‘Old Folks’ a lot.  Woody’s music, you know, it takes you through the day.  There’s the song you want to wake up to, the song you want to work to, the song you want to have wine with, the song you want to go to sleep to… The songs I listen to depend on daily activities, so that sometimes a song just pops up.  I remember one on ‘New Multitudes’ – the title track – was based on the simple lines ‘Give me new multitudes’ that suggested we need more people who think as we do, so everyone should go out and have babies.  For me, it was very symbolic.  Woody could write about love, he could talk about sex….

DH: Yeah, I remember the first time I heard ‘The Mountain Bed’ off of the second Mermaid Avenue record and thinking, wow, that’s pretty graphic and direct for an old song….

Nora: Yeah!  The other thing I like about his writing is his easy, natural going back and forth between sex and politics and family life.  That’s one of the things that’s really changed when you asked me what had changed over the decades, this fracturing of identities.  You know, God forbid that anyone involved in politics should have sex.  There’s the arts!  God forbid that anyone step out of their art shoes and start talking about politics.  We don’t like that either!  Then, there’s family life!  Everyone has to be a really, really good family man, but who decides what ‘family man’ is?  Woody was a really wonderful family man in his own way.  One of the projects I have upcoming is discussing Woody as a family man – father, husband or whatever.  I just need to get some information out there because I’m really tired of the same old kind of blog attitude, ‘he was a terrible husband and father’, and I think ‘how the Hell would you know?’

DH: I wonder when the people who wrote that were married to him or what child of his they were?

Nora: Oh, don’t get me started! (laughs) Pete Seeger might have said once, more than forty years ago that ‘well, he wasn’t such a good father.  He was always on the road.’  But, what the Hell!  Nowadays, many people’s fathers are on the road…so the whole definition, you know.  I have to kind of dig in and say ‘wait a second.’   We really need to take another look at that.  Getting back to the Kennedy Center thing, I really wanted to put out a varied, 360 degree portrait, not just of who Woody was, but as Dylan said, when you listen to Woody’s songs, you learn how to live.  Therefore, everyone in that audience could relate to at least one aspect of the material, whether it was done by someone like Ani Difranco who was very involved politically in the way that kind of was part of the revolution of sexual politics, to Tom Morello who is your Occupy Wall Street troubadour, to Sweet Honey, the traditional, powerful black voice that’ s out there and still asking why?  When will we stop sending those war ships out there is a question that we’re still waiting to be answered.  So, that line and all those lines are questions that we need to keep coming up with.  Woody is just a great reminder again that asking questions is one of the great freedoms we’re supposed to have in a democracy.  That’s something he taught us as kids with the song, ‘Why oh Why?’ That’s one of the most important things to teach your kids.  That’s why again when people say he was a bad parent because he was on the road, that I remember, no, he didn’t play baseball with us, but he wrote ‘Why oh Why?’ instead.  He just had to ask questions and he taught us to as well.  That’s a pretty good dad!

DH: That’s a pretty good dad.

Nora: The definition of the father in the fifties was different than it is now.  I think he actually was a great role model for fathers right now.  Dig into his body of work.  The same guy that wrote ‘This Land Is Your Land’ and ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’ also wrote ‘Baby make a blubble’ about how to burp a baby.  The ease with which he – a lack of ego maybe – could go from writing ‘Riding in My Car’ in the morning and ‘1913 Massacre’ in the evening was amazing.  The first thing that artists freak out about when I show them Woody’s body of work – some of the artists I’ve worked with in the last dozen or so years – is just the diversity of ideas.  It’s like one song has two words in it and the next has ninety verses.  One’s lyrics are only ‘New Multitudes, give me new multitudes’ and that’s ok.  There’s a lot of song writing teaching that you can get just from looking at the lyrics. Whether it’s Jay, Wilco or Billy – anyone I’ve worked with, the main thing they come out with is just how diverse his work was.  You know who I loved working with? Jonatha Brook.

DH: She did a whole album right – ‘The Works’ I think it was called?

Nora: Right.  She was fascinated by Woody’s love songs.  Oh my God.  It’s pretty wild.  Musically, she put together a jazz trio with Christian McBride on bass.  Some other guys – Steve Gadd and Joe Sample are on it, too.  They’re top guys in jazz, and I was so happy because so many people think of Woody’s music as being restricted to ‘three chords and the truth.’  But, a sophisticated composer like Jonatha said ‘it doesn’t’ have to be like that’ and showed us that it could sound great if it was arranged for jazz in a very intricate way.  The ease with which these lyrics lend themselves to so many genres is what I also like.  I liked working with The Klezmatics who play Jewish music.

DH: I like what they did with the songs quite a lot.

Nora: I love that New York Jewish, Mermaid Avenue blare!  I don’t feel like we’ve had any flops in terms of working in different genres.

DH: There’s been a novel come out in the last year.  I think Johnny Depp was involved in getting it published.

Nora: Yes, ‘House of Earth.’  It’s sex in the dust bowl.  It’s what people did when they had to stay in doors a lot.

DH: I have a copy of it, now I really have to start reading it! (laugh) It’d be sex in the rain if he’d written it in BC.

Nora: Oh jeez!  I love it.  It offers a whole other side of the dust bowl thing.  Ken Burns has his way of portraying it – which is terrific – in his new documentary.  It’s terrific, but it’s just one side. Woody just focuses on this one couple in their raggedy shack. The dust is in everything, their bodies, their mouths, their clothes and how they deal with that personally.  It’s very intimate.  It’s very modern in its writing style and that’s another aspect of Woody that was really groundbreaking  – his use of language.

DH: I’ve read ‘Bound for Glory’ and lots of his old columns and you can see that he didn’t feel constrained by regular rules of syntax or grammar or anything like that.  It creates this rhythm, a bouncing rhythm, that makes it hard to stop reading.

Nora: It’s really interesting.  A lot of people have said that when they read ‘House of Earth.’  A lot of his writing, his diary entries are like that.  I was working with Lou Reed for a song on ‘Note of Hope’ and what he always likes to do for his own understanding of words, he likes to frame them, line by line as verses, even if it’s prose.  He really taught me this whole way of looking at Woody’s lyrics.  It’s interesting as if by chance, every other word rhymed in each line of the song he did.  This was just one piece of writing –

DH: – and it had this incredible internal rhyme, creating rhythm…

Nora: Something like that.  I did the same thing with Nellie Mckay when I worked with her.  We took a piece of writing that was actually a ten page story in a notebook and just reformatted the lines.  We found that every other line rhymed, so there was the meter and the whole thing, so you could very easily sing this stuff. 

DH: I know you’ve talked about this before, but I remember from a documentary about the Billy Bragg/Wilco albums a conversation you were having with Billy about how there were literally thousands of lyrics with no music attached to them.  If that’s the case, are you still looking for and open to musicians having a crack at them?

Nora: Oh yeah!  There’s just so much.  It’s way beyond me.  It’ll go way beyond my lifetime.  I’m working with Del McRoury now.  I’m doing a new project with him where he’s writing music to Woody lyrics.  Part of the thing is that if you know what I’ve done over the years is that I go off in weird directions.

DH: Well, here’s a weird – if somewhat obvious – question.  Did you ever ask Bob Dylan if he wanted to take a swing at any of these lyrics?

Nora: Oh yeah, we’ve been in touch over the years.  He’s such a prolific writer on his own – he’s a little like Woody in that sense.  He’s got so much to say on his own and he’s always so busy.  Oh my goodness!  Sometimes, I said I’m very impulsive, but sometimes there’s a window in life that opens for a very brief period of time for a particular idea and a lot of these guys – and this is the way the business runs – say to me, ‘yeah, in three years I’ll be free.’  So, often things have nothing to do with a particular artist – it’s all about timing.  My personal sense of timing is that there are certain times when particular things need to be heard.  I work very intuitively that way.  I felt like after all this wandering from Jewish music to jazz to Jay and his grunge to Jim James moaning over empty beds…

DH: That guy’s voice is incredible.

Nora: Yeah, ‘Empty Bed Blues’ was like ‘arrrarrrarrarrr’

DH: Nice impression!  Yeah, it works!

Nora: Yeah, and I was saying to Del (McRoury) that another thing people don’t know about Woody is that he did so much.  People think that folk music is saccharine like Pete Seeger, but they don’t know that there’s this other side of folk music that is as wicked as The Rolling Stones.  Just listen to ‘New Multitudes.’  So, with each project, I try to show something new about Woody, and another thing is that everyone pictures him as the lone guy with the guitar.  Always walking down the lonely street.  I think that that was actually more of a Dylan persona.  I think that people have forgotten because so many people know Woody through Dylan that they see him through Dylan’s eyes.  But, Woody was always part of a band, whether it was the Almanac Singers of the Corn Cob Trio or –

DH: I love those old films of him playing with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee.

Nora: His favourite thing was playing with other musicians, and he was always trying to put a band together.  At one point, when the Almanac Singers broke up because of the war, he was home alone and he formed a new band called Woody’s Headline Singers and we have the contract here at the museum. Do you know who the contracts were with?

DH: Tell me.

Nora: Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGee and Woody Guthrie.

DH: Yeah, they’d be all right.  I’d go out and hear them.

Nora: Not so bad really. 

DH: Nope

Nora: I have rehearsal tapes of them in the archive.

DH: Wow.  If you could clean those up, I’d love to hear what they sounded like together.

Nora: There’s not enough there for a release, but I have one of them as part of a new project.  I was talking with Del about all of this and Woody’s roots with the Carter Family and all that as well as his early years playing with other musicians.  I told him that the truth is that bluegrass, or hillbilly music, is probably the music that’s closest to Woody’s own background.  I said, ‘Del, you’re probably the closest to Woody. When I hear ‘Do Re Mi’, I want to hear your band do it. ‘ That’s why I had him do ‘So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You’ at the Kennedy Center.  Del just got so excited about the whole idea and said ‘I know exactly what you mean.  Woody’s really one of us.’  And the gentlemanliness and the attitude, and the quiet persona that we were just talking about that that part of the country has…now, I’m doing a whole project with Del and he’s recorded about ten songs so far.  Just beautiful – the fiddle solos and banjo solos!  That’s my nod to the west!  He’s one of you guys, so get over it or get into it! (big laugh)  Woody could be pure Nashville, too!

DH: Well, thank you for talking with me today.  It’s been such a pleasure.

Nora: Delightful talking to you, too.  Thanks for checking in. We’re having fun.  Once we recover from the centennial, we’ll be fine.  We have a few more things to do, but things are winding down a bit after the Kennedy Center.  The Kennedy Center – as I told the musicians – is the kind of thing that we get asked to do only about once every hundred years – so you must say ‘yes.’

DH: Don’t think about it and –

Nora: Just say yes!  Sing the song and say ‘yes’ because they ain’t going to ask us for another hundred years.

DH: – and we’re all going to be really old by then.

Nora: Yes!

Here’s a link to PART ONE of this interview:
Part One: “We Brought the Protest Inside” 

This posting also appears at www.restlessandreal.blogspot.com

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