Alive in the archive

Billy Bragg and Wilco resurrect Woody Guthrie by breathing new music into his long-lost lyrics

by Linda Ray

“Well, it’s not like I’ve got the last couple of fragments. It’s not like I’ve got the last half-dozen tunes. There’s so much stuff here, I mean, I could make a record and then if that’s no good then you can make a record and probably all those people over there could make a record each.” British punk folkie Billy Bragg has thus come to terms with his project to score and record lyrics written decades ago by an American icon: Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie’s seventh child, Nora, reinforces Bragg’s assessment. “The old myth that there were a thousand songs turned out to be about three thousands lyrics. And that’s just from our collection, because he freely distributed a lot more lyrics and writings out there.”

In middle age, Nora Guthrie is getting to know her father through his writing, just ahead of the legions of writers, art scholars, curators and other musicians destined to follow Billy Bragg to the Woody Guthrie Archives. The dad of Nora’s childhood had Huntington’s Chorea, his loss of control growing more startling, then frightening, each of the 15 years it progressed before he died in 1967. Nora stresses how much her father taught her family through his illness, but much more is unknown or forgotten about the man whose music provided the soundtrack of working-class life, and whose character often was symbolized by a guitar emblazoned with the slogan: “This machine kills fascists.”

“It’s like looking through your attic when you have to move,” she says. “‘I didn’t know I had this! I didn’t know I had that!’ Two hours later you find you’re reading things instead of doing what you’re supposed to be doing.” She meant only to store them, she says, carefully interleaving the papers with buffered tissue to leach their acid and cataloguing them for future access.

In a modest office building on 57th Street in New York City, tucked in the corner of the twelfth floor — just past the doors of the allergist and the handwriting expert — is a five-room working office where the phones ring constantly on steel desks and cabinets are piled high with files, binders and magazines. The walls are covered with gold records and concert posters: The Weavers, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger. Neatly written on May 6 of the planning calendar is “CBS News film.”

Nora Guthrie’s desk is spread with artwork requiring her approval: album covers, liner notes and j-cards for her father’s latest recording project, Mermaid Avenue, named for her childhood home on Coney Island. She carries on several conversations at once — visitors in town from Germany, reporters on deadline, the archivist relating questions from the Smithsonian Institution about an imminent tour of Woody’s effects, and a meeting waiting in the adjacent office.

The Woody Guthrie Archive shares offices with the Woody Guthrie Foundation and with Foundation Trustee Harold Leventhal, who managed the Weavers and still manages Pete Seeger, and, in between, was manager and promoter of countless artists, concerts and festivals involving legends of American folk music. Until 1996, he also was steely guardian of the boxes and file drawers crammed with thousands of pages of Guthrie’s life as Woody recorded it.

That year, Leventhal spearheaded a marathon fundraiser with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Billed as Hard Travelin’, its purpose was to endow an archive, staffed and equipped to conserve the sketches, cartoons, writings and ephemera saved by Nora’s mother Marjorie and collected by the Foundation. Leventhal and Nora would manage the archive together. Marjorie had been a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company and Nora had thrived as a professional dancer, touring the world with her own dance company. Now, after a dozen years performing the role of mommy, Nora was ready to impose order on her father’s disheveled and deteriorating legacy, much as her mother had endeavored to do with the life it chronicles.

For Nora, the point is to make things easier to find, and to allow greater access with less risk of wear and tear. Nora’s plan for Woody is not just to unlock his life, but to actively send him out again among ordinary people. “Since 1950,” she says, “all we know about him is what someone else wants us to know about him. Whoever was in the room at the time; whoever was interested at the time.”

Biographer Joe Klein was more interested than most. His book Woody Guthrie: A Life, published in 1980, looks unflinchingly beneath the legend to reveal the kaleidoscopic adventures and misadventures that comprised his impulsive life, including their more sordid aspects as well Guthrie’s undeniable contributions to our understanding of life below decks, in the fields and on the street.

Klein’s literate and entertaining biography makes plain the extent to which the Guthrie canonized in the ’60s folk revival had long been superseded by a sophisticated observer and obsessive documenter of the internal life of an eccentric and afflicted man. Out of print for some time, Woody Guthrie: A Life is to be reissued in January 1999. Nora points out, though, that even Klein “goes in there as a human being. He pulls out everything that turns him on and leaves alone everything that doesn’t.”

Seditious in death as in life, Guthrie seems never to have stopped knocking down the walls that constrain people, including those built around him. “Woody wasn’t just loved and appreciated in a small circle of folk musicians,” says Nora. “When someone like Joey Ramone says, ‘Man, I really dig your father’ — try and put that together! Tim Robbins used a cut of Woody’s in the end credits of a film. I went to another film opening, Reality Bites, and Jerry Stiller came up with tears in his eyes and said, ‘Oh, I loved your father’. Then the next minute Ethan Hawke comes up and says, ‘Oh my God, you’re Nora Guthrie, I love your dad.’ And it blew my mind. Here was a young actor in the X generation and then Jerry Stiller, Joey Ramone, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Tim Robbins…and basically I was just getting the message Woody seems to have touched a lot of people that I don’t know about.”

This led to a new priority. “My job is, if you really sincerely love his work, let’s do something. I don’t want to ask what instrument you play, what’s your race or religion or country, or what category in Tower Records your CDs fit into.

“So it was very simple. When I ran into Billy, he sincerely was touched and told me his story of how he had gone down to the Smithsonian Institute and researched Woody and loved to go around reading his stuff. He had just played a concert in Central Park. He had sung also with Michael Franti of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. They did [Woody’s] ‘Vigilante Man’ as a rap song, and Billy sang, and I thought this was about the coolest thing I ever heard because I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate.”

Bragg claims he still had misgivings. “I thought, ‘That’s Dylan’s gig. That’s Arlo’s gig.’…I can remember saying to my manager, ‘I don’t really know if I want to take that one.’ And then Nora did a naughty thing.”

What she did was to complete a circle. “I remember [Bragg] recorded a song called ‘You Woke Up My Neighborhood’,” Nora recalls. “It was a very punky Billie Holiday kind of thing. By coincidence, there was a piece of artwork of my dad’s, and as he often did on his artwork, he titled it or put a lyric on it. And the title on the artwork was ‘You Woke Up My Neighborhood.’ So I made him a copy of it and put it in a little frame.”

Bragg later confided to her he had seen the artwork at the Smithsonian and it had inspired the song. “So they were already collaborating before I came along,” Nora says.

From the beginning, Nora’s vision of Mermaid Avenue was “a Traveling Wilburys kind of thing” rather than a tribute compilation that she and Bragg agreed would likely just sit on a shelf. “I wanted music that people — that kids — would just play. They’re driving in their cars, they pop in the cassette, they just like the music.…If they just heard the music and they like the bands and maybe after three or four listens, they’d start listening to the words as well and somehow they would enjoy Woody’s lyrics without being told, ‘Oh this is Woody Guthrie, a great songwriter.”

With that goal in mind, Bragg tapped Wilco as his collaborators for the project to invoke an American legacy dimension, and also recruited Natalie Merchant for a pop female touch on a couple songs. Bragg freely admits he hoped Merchant’s involvement would ensure the attention he thought the project deserved from Elektra Records, but he stresses he has memories of seeing Merchant perform, “and while the guys are standing around retuning, she’ll do a couple of verses of ‘Wildwood Flower’ just off the top of her head. It’s just a beautifully pure understanding of American folk music. I used to send her cassettes of Carter Family songs and just say, ‘Let’s go out and just do some of [them].…We just never had the time to get together.”

Of Wilco, Bragg says, “They’re a band with a lot of edge that can play ballads instead of being a ballad band.…There’s a very important aspect about Wilco being a Midwestern band in this as well, because Woody was the same kind of guy. And the fact that they kind of come from straight down the Mississippi valley — there’s something very straightforward about them that I really related to, because I can’t bloody stand rock stars.”

“The great thing about [Jeff] Tweedy is he’s an incredible arranger,” Bragg says. “And Jay Bennett is the cat. Jay Bennett is the cat. I have never worked with a musician like Jay Bennett in my life. You can throw anything at him and not only will he play it but he’ll bring something to it that is completely inspirational.…He hardly looks like he’s doing it, which is the annoying thing. It was insane. Jay Bennett is the cat. He is the very definition of how you use that term ‘cat.’”

Bennett was well aware of the uniqueness of this opportunity. “I was just really amazed looking through the lyrics,” he says. “Like no one’s gonna tell me, ‘pick this kind of song or that kind of song’? And there’s pretty much every kind of song, from a straight love song to a stream-of-consciousness kind of song to a totally nasty, vulgar kind of sexual song. I always knew the image you get of him in the media was narrow and constructed,” says Bennett.

Says Tweedy, “Mermaid Avenue gave us a chance to use a vocabulary musically we’ve been comfortable with for a long time. Writing the songs was like, ‘Well, I don’t have to rethink it at all if ‘Hesitating Beauty’ sounds like a kind of poppish punk folkish country song I might have written five years ago.’” He contrasts this with Wilco records, which he says are “all about being able to say, ‘We probably couldn’t have done that a year ago.’”

Tweedy’s approach to collaborating with Guthrie was to imagine the legendary everyman as someone familiar. He tried to picture his own grandfather writing about the events of his life. “Anything like that would be moving — just like if you went to a yard sale and picked up a box of decrepit, dog-eared black-and-white snapshots from the ’30s and ’40s. The thing that emerges is that it’s just a really well-documented life. He managed to put himself in a position to see a lot and do a lot, and he thought about it a lot.

“The essence of Woody I don’t think really comes out in his music or the books. I think his whole thing still seems pretty elusive. He was very much of the moment — very ephemeral.”

Bennett and Tweedy offer Guthrie’s lyric notes as proof the man was just passing through even his own creations. “A lot of times literally the songs would say down at the bottom, ‘If you want to change something, change it!’” says Bennett. “He didn’t know who the hell he was writing that for. It ended up being us.”

“[This project] just reinforced a previously held belief,” Tweedy adds. “It really isn’t about anything that you contribute to a song. It doesn’t necessarily belong to you in any way. The whole idea is that a song in itself is pretty powerless without somebody to listen to it.”

Mermaid Avenue empowers 15 Woody Guthrie songs for the next millennium, one he might have envisioned when he penned “supersonic boogie” in the margin of a lyric, as if to suggest a melody to someone who eventually might put music to it. That song, “My Flying Saucer”, is one of 25 additional tracks recorded for the project but not included on the CD.

Like the privileged handful who preceded them into the uncharted territory of Guthrie’s written legacy, Bragg and Wilco emerged with mirrors. Bragg’s selections reflect his political interests and his wide-open outlook on sexuality, as depicted in his British dance hit “Sexuality”. Wilco chose love songs for the road, a song about writing music, a children’s song, and a ringer, “Christ For President”, which may be the band’s first foray into explicitly religious or political content.

The album’s opening tracks evoke visions of old commercials for Dr. Pepper, a fittingly Texas tradition predating even the dust bowl: The tunes are so infectiously catchy you can imagine the videos of young and old dancing in the streets and fields, everyone eager to be a Pepper, too.

Track one, “Walt Whitman’s Niece”, is an apparently simple but slyly bawdy tale fraught with double entendres bound to make it a hit with precisely the audience Nora intended. It features a woozy sing-along call-and-response structure, involving everyone in the studio at the time, that should be fun on a hayride. “California Stars” is a catchy and moving song of road-weary yearning based on a Tweedy signature that Bragg calls “a brilliant three-chord trick.” It’s grounded in one of John Stirratt’s more memorable bass lines.

“Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key”, a charming tale of youthful seduction, introduces Merchant accompanying Bragg on harmony vocals. The track is noteworthy for the world music flavor Bennett imparts with a B3 and bouzouki. In that respect, it recalls the wide variety of music Nora fondly remembers filling her childhood home courtesy of Moses Asch and Folkways Records, for whom Guthrie had recorded hundreds of traditional folk tunes.

Bragg uses a fragment of an old British folk song to set a wistful, romantic ballad, “Birds And Ships”, to suit Merchant’s voice and the melancholy of lovesick adolescent girls everywhere. He follows up two tracks later with a strikingly prescient and loving proposition of the equality and, perhaps, superiority of women, exemplified by the woman who inspired the song, “She Came Along to Me”.

In between is “Hoodoo Voodoo”, a children’s nonsense song Wilco turns into an irresistibly poppy soul rocker. With “Ingrid Bergman”, Bragg continues to tap Guthrie’s awe-inspiring flair for phallic imagery. If Bragg’s contributions to this project fail to win the 15-24 male demographic, it will not be Guthrie’s fault. Still, as fixated as Bragg may seem on this dimension of Guthrie’s writing, Mermaid Avenue substantially understates the man’s own salaciousness as revealed in graphic letters to his wife and other women, one of whom had him arrested for it.

“Christ For President” reflects a synthesis of Guthrie’s views on religion and socialism that prefigured by more than two decades the Liberation Theology that fostered revolutionary activity in South and Central America throughout the 1980s. Bragg’s choice of “I Guess I Planted”, inspired by a maritime workers strike, is the record’s one nod to Guthrie’s early union involvement, paralleled by Bragg’s own support for the protracted dockworkers strike in England.

The haunting “Eisler On The Go” may seem nonsensical outside the context of 1950s paranoia involving the House Un-American Activities Committee. Guthrie had legitimate reason to fear the HUAC owing to his involvement with the U.S. Communist Party, including writing a regular column for its Daily Worker newspaper. The song refers to persecution of German composer Hans Eisler, who fled the Nazis but was unable to evade HUAC scrutiny and Hollywood blacklisting. No wonder Guthrie wrote the line, “Eisler’s on the come and go, and I don’t know what I’ll do.”

The disc concludes with a classically wordy ballad of the sort that Guthrie’s most famous acolyte, Bob Dylan, must have found particularly inspiring. It’s called “The Unwelcome Guest” and it’s sung from the point of view of one who travels the world on horseback, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. The rider is murdered when found napping, but more brave men are prepared to fill his saddle:

And they’ll take the money and spread it out equal
Just like the Bible and the prophets suggest
But the men that go riding to help these poor workers
The rich will cut down like an unwelcome guest.

As was his habit, Guthrie revisited, possibly several times, the page on which he’d typed “The Unwelcome Guest”. He sketched abstractly over it with pink paint and purple and green crayon. At the foot of the lyric, he typed, “I made this song up in the month of July and it was on the seventh day in the year of nineteen forty. Woody G.”

Beneath it, he wrote, in longhand, “Woody Guthrie wasn’t felt welcome.” His new collaborators may yet help him find a welcome reception among new friends.

No Depression contributing editor Linda Ray also writes for The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Bay Guardian Online and Option and, like Woody Guthrie, is a big fan of God, sex and socialism. For further information write the Woody Guthrie Archives, 250 W. 57th St., Suite 1218, New York, NY 10107.