Rock musicians from the Beatles to Beck have looked to the past for inspiration, but a new project by Billy Bragg and Wilco will find material there as well. After more than a year of planning to make an album of never-recorded Woody Guthrie songs, Billy Bragg and Nora Guthrie, the late folksinger's youngest child, have agreed to go into a Dublin, Ireland, recording studio with the country-rockers in January. "The idea is to use the real Woody Guthrie stuff, the grittier stuff that doesn't tend to be part of his remembered persona," explained Wilco guitarist Jay Bennett.

\\The project came about after Guthrie spent more than six years archiving the manuscripts, diaries, photographs and original artwork left behind by her father, who died from Huntington's chorea, a degenerative nerve disorder, in 1967.

\\"Some of the lyrics are from 1935 through the 1940s and '50s," Guthrie explained, estimating that Woody Guthrie had only recorded fewer than 200 songs out of approximately 3,000 sets of lyrics. She chose the politically outspoken Bragg to put the lyrics to music after intuiting a kinship between him and her father. "Billy gets right out there on stage and says, 'Let's talk about a union,'" Guthrie said. "Now that's my dad. He'd go out there and say, 'Hi, how many of you are in the union? I'm gonna sing a song about it.'"

\\Bragg, who performed the two Guthrie songs that he has already finished at a Woody Guthrie tribute concert sponsored by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last September, also struck Guthrie as confident enough to avoid falling into the trap of hero worship. "He's the only one irreverent enough to try it," she continued. Bragg concurred: "I have the benefit of being both an ocean and a generation away [from Woody Guthrie]. I didn't grow up with him. He wasn't taught in my school."

\\Wilco, in turn, was suggested by Bragg, who felt that their roots in American music and their appreciation as fans would set the project's focus squarely on Guthrie's songs. "Woody deserves to be in the mainstream of American culture, not out there in the piney woods with those characters you don't believe actually existed, like Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan," Bragg said. "He was the original singer/songwriter."

\\All parties in the nascent collaboration agree that Guthrie's lyrics have contemporary appeal. "This album is not a tribute," Nora Guthrie declared. "I'm making a sign for [Wilco frontman] Jeff [Tweedy] and Billy to put up in the studio: 'Don't bow down to Woody Guthrie.'