Tweedy’s Woody
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Guthrie, who died in 1967 of Huntington’s disease, spent most of his last 17 years in hospitals, but he continued to write songs; Tweedy says there may be as many as 3,000 unpublished song lyrics in Guthrie’s New York archives. Over the years plenty of artists have tried unsuccessfully to convince Woody’s youngest daughter, Nora, to let them put the words to music. According to Tweedy, Bragg approached Nora at just the right moment: she’d just uncovered a bunch of new songs and decided to let him have a stab at them. Bragg worked on the project for more than a year, mulling his options, which included making an album using a revolving cast of musicians. About a year ago he began to consider using Wilco, whom he knew only from their records.
Last summer Tweedy and Bennett accompanied Bragg to the Guthrie archives. “They have all the songs arranged by title on computer,” says Tweedy. “I don’t like computers, though, so they’d just bring these big dusty files. You could literally spend two hours and just be getting into the Bs. It’s kind of funny, but a lot of songs on the record have titles between A, B, and C.” Judging by some of Bragg and Wilco’s early demos and a few lyrics Tweedy had lying around, Guthrie’s later writing had a lighthearted, sometimes bawdy aspect–one song celebrates the charms of Ingrid Bergman; in another ditty the narrator wants to kiss a girl’s “pee-pee hole.”
The as-yet-untitled Guthrie project will be released by Elektra early this summer.
