Billy Bragg and Wilco
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For all Woody Guthrie’s standing as a poet laureate of the American spirit, I doubt that the words to “This Land Is Your Land” would have found their way into any English class without the music. And without those words that simple, six-note melody would have faded from our cultural memory years ago, along with thousands of other folk tunes. But the sense of breadth and possibility the two generate together has gotten the song taught to generations of schoolkids, even if they’re never taught the verses about the No Trespassing sign (“But on the back side, it didn’t say nothing / That side was made for you and me”) or the relief office (“As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, / Is this land made for you and me?”). Listen to Guthrie’s records and you’ll hear lots of stories about Depression-era poverty, fascist creeps, unions, and rebels. You’ll also hear him whooping, laughing, yodeling, and joking. You’ll hear the clickety-clack of the freight trains he rode beneath nearly every song, and you’ll hear plain melodies that drive home his words with unerring directness.
Guthrie left no musical notation to accompany his thousands of unrecorded lyrics when he died in 1967 from Huntington’s chorea, a degenerative nerve disease that had been sapping his strength since the early 1950s. In 1995 his daughter Nora, manager of the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York (which opened this year), asked English folk rocker Billy Bragg to set some of those orphaned lyrics to music. Bragg in turn enlisted Wilco, and their collaboration, Mermaid Avenue, was released this week on Elektra. In interviews Bragg has portrayed Mermaid Avenue (the title refers to the Coney Island street on which the Guthries lived after World War II) as a revisionist effort that reveals Guthrie as a multifaceted person rather than a proletarian folk icon, and the lust, longing, and introspection of the lyrics certainly are a departure from much of his recorded work.
