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