Bragg, Wilco Talk About Working With Guthrie

Back in 1992, when Nora Guthrie first asked Billy Bragg to write music to lyrics left behind by her father, folk icon Woody Guthrie, the English singer-songwriter was understandably hesitant. "I said, 'Well, that sounds like a job for Bob Dylan, not me,'" says Bragg.

But being almost as strong-willed as her famously strong-willed father, Nora Guthrie kept at the Englishman, until he agreed to visit the Woody Guthrie Archive in New York and look over thousands of Guthrie's manuscripts. It didn't take long for the greatness of those lyrics -- not to mention their inestimable historical significance -- to change Bragg'smind. "Woody lives up there, man. This is just the tip of the iceberg," he says. "There's American history in there: proto-feminism, union songs, self-expressive songs where you see the first stirrings of the confessional singer-songwriter."

Does it sound like too incredible an opportunity for any self-respecting, ambitious songwriter to pass up? Bragg certainly thought so. "We had a chance to add something to the idea of Woody Guthrie," he says. "Not to make a Woody Guthrie record, but to collaborate with him. What a unique project! Who else has a backlog of songs which need tunes?"

Bragg was convinced, but still uncomfortable. "I was very conscious of the fact that I'm not American," he says. "And here I am, dealin' with a big part of the American psyche." So he turned to the American band he admired most. "Wilco are people with a deep knowledge of American music," says Bragg. "I just mention a style or a record, and they've got it."

Bolstered by their Midwestern brand of optimistic fatalism, Wilco singer Jeff Tweedy and guitarist Jay Bennett jumped into the tasks of choosing lyrics and writing songs. "I didn't feel intimidated at all," Tweedy contends. "What's the worst thing that could happen? Some Woody Guthrie purists are gonna hate your guts. That's gonna happen no matter what."

Mermaid Avenue is the album of songs that Bragg, Tweedy and Bennett wrote to Guthrie's lyrics. Woody Guthrie's plain-spoken anthems ("This Land Is Your Land") cast a defining influence on folkies like Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary, but they also had a tremendous effect on such rockers as Bob Dylan and the Band. Guthrie succumbed to a nervous system disorder in 1967, but not before meticulously typing up and copying more than thousands of lyric manuscripts for which he'd never written melodies. Nora Guthrie, director of the Woody Guthrie Archive, has been trying to bring her father's unknown works to life for most of the '90s. "I've been looking at these lonely lyrics for so long," she says. "A guy spends his whole life writing lyrics, you assume he wants those lyrics sung. It's been six years that they were tacked up on my wall."

The musicians convened in a Chicago recording studio last November to bang out some demos before booking three weeks in a Dublin, Ireland, studio complex. The music they committed to tape there comprises everything fromrock 'n' roll laments and country road songs to two-steps, folk ballads, children's nonsense rhymes, pub stomps and shaggy dog tales. One tune, "She Came Along to Me," sounds like the Byrds singing a meditation on feminism. But most of the songs refer to Guthrie's fiercely held leftist politics only subtly, concentrating instead on love songs and sly sexual metaphors. Lyrics from the lovely "California Stars" mention laying one's head on a bed of California stars, never making it quite clear whether those stars are the kind that live up in the sky or in Hollywood bungalows.

"There's beautiful imagery in 'California Stars,'" Tweedy says. "That was probably the biggest success, because it's just three chords, it couldn't be simplified anymore. The phrasing seemed to jump off the page." The musicians were joined by Natalie Merchant on backing vocals, and blues singer Corey Harris contributed keening harmonica and majestic slide guitar.

In Dublin, they lived and ate together in two rented houses and the recording studio. "It was very family-like," says Nora, who acted as the group's spiritual adviser. "It reminded me of my childhood, with everybody in the house playing and eating and fighting and talking and arguing and telling jokes together," she says. "There was one moment whenBilly walked into a closet with a guitar and came out 15 minutes later with a beautiful tune. He went over to the piano and Jay was there, and then Jeff moseyed in and started singing. I ran over to put a mic in front of them all." The song was "Another Man Done Gone," the record's heartfelt signature track.

"I was layin' on the couch tryin to take a nap," Tweedy remembers of that moment, "and they were makin' so much noise I woke up. I was still kinda' half asleep when they rolled tape. Nora was sittin' right behind me, and I'm singin' her dad's words sayin', 'just think of me as another man done gone.' Just like anybody else who's built up into alegend, he's got a daughter who just thinks of him as Dad."

Besides helping to humanize the songs themselves, Nora's presence in the studio helped the band overcome any doubts about their ideas. "It was the closest we'd get to having Woody standing there going, 'you're not pissing me offtoo bad,'" Tweedy says.

The freewheeling atmosphere of the recording sessions was no accident. "We wanted it to feel like a bunch of people in a room jammin' like the Basement Tapes," says Bennett, referring to Bob Dylan and the Band's home recordings. "We even listened to the Great Divide, going, 'this one should feel something like that.'"

For Bragg, who's taken to carrying around a thick binder of photocopiedGuthrie manuscripts like a revival preacher with his bible, recordingMermaid Avenue was his way of demythologizing one of America's most legendary songwriters. "Woody Guthrie never played 'Madison Square Garden,'" he says. "He played union halls, but he never did a tour. There were never Woody Guthrie T-shirts. Here we've stumbled on this global treasure of American culture. So we're trying to reposition him to get Woody over there near Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, where he belongs."(Rodd McLeod)