Page 1 6 of 7 DOCUMENTS In These Times July 26, 1998 Mermaid's, Song BYLINE: By Thad Williamson; Thad Williamson is author of What Comes Next?: Proposals for a Different Society (National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives). SECTION: Pg. 30 LENGTH: 1893 words In the past 10 years, there has been a proliferation of material dedicated to Woody Guthrie. In 1988, Bob Dylan initiated a tribute album called Folkways: A Vision Shared. A few years later, Bruce Springsteen self-consciously styled an album after one of Woody's most famous songs, "Tom Joad." And, most importantly, the Smithsonian Institution took over the Folkways catalog, leading to the re-release of hundreds of old folk recordings, including several by Guthrie himself. Yet another tribute album, this one produced by indie folk queen Ani DiFranco, is on the way. But as important as tributes from today's artists may be as a device to lure the uninitiated to Guthrie's music, they run the risk of truncating their hero's legacy into a dozen or so well-known, worked-over anthems. Now we have cheerful recordings of "Do Re Mi" from both John Mellencamp and Nanci Griffith -- as well as DiFranco's own dystopian live version of the Dust Bowl lament. Which prompts a question: Is there anything more that Guthrie's would-be heirs can do with that tune? Or, for that matter, is there anything left to do with the "Guthrie canon" as a whole? The great accomplishment of Billy Bragg and Wilco's new album, Mermaid Avenue (Elektra), is that it begins to liberate Guthrie's creative spark from the constraints of that canon. Bragg, a British singer who burst on the scene in the early '80s as a one-man, electric-guitar-and-angry-lyric act, and Wilco, a critically acclaimed band with roots in folk, country, pop and rock, show that Guthrie had a lot on his mind and a lot to say, even after the Dust Bowl ended. They present him not as a nostalgic slice of Americana but as an uncensored radical. Theirs is the Guthrie who wrote in 1946 that "the job to be done is to get this thing called socialism nailed and hammered up just as quick as we can." On Mermaid Avenue, Bragg and Wilco set previously unpublished lyrics to music. The result is not a tribute album, but what Bragg terms a "collaboration": Bragg selected the lyrics from archives that Guthrie's daughter Nora recently established in New York and then collaborated with Wilco to put new music to Guthrie's words. Together, they have created a stunning album, one that revitalizes Guthrie's spirit without simply "updating" his songs for a new generation. Though he successfully recorded dozens of children's songs while living on Coney Island's Mermaid Avenue from 1946 to 1950, Guthrie had difficulty composing and recording high-quality "serious" songs immediately following the war -- in part because the old folk melodies he drew on during the Dust Bowl and his Columbia River days seemed inappropriate to newer material. Bragg and Wilco try to overcome Guthrie's songwriter's block by recasting his words as tastefully crafted folk rock. In his landmark recordings of the '30s and '40s, Guthrie counted on memorable lyrics, rudimentary guitar playing, simple melodies and a well-worn, sincere voice to bring his songs to life. On this record, Bragg and Wilco strive for a pop-folk sound, making most of the numbers upbeat and utilizing strong doses of piano and organ, guitar twang and back-up vocals. Bragg tones down his hard-rocking side, and nowhere is the music allowed to overpower Guthrie's Page 2 Mermaid's, Song In These Times July 26, 1998 words. But Bragg and Wilco's arrangements express a exuberant vitality throughout most of the album, making the few moments of explicit melancholy all the more effective. And unlike a typical Guthrie recording, there is real evidence of songcraft here -- the backup music really does shape the texture and meaning of each song, and Bragg and Wilco even afford themselves the luxury of using more than three chords. The result, in several cases, is nothing short of a revelation. "She Came Along to Me" and "The Unwelcome Guest" stand out as moving political anthems that reflect the complexities of Guthrie's state of mind. "She Came Along to Me," given a typically upbeat arrangement by Bragg and Wilco, can be heard as a commentary on Woody's relationships with women, as a slightly backhanded but nonetheless sincere proclamation of gender equality and, finally, as a utopian vision of a time, 10 million years in the future, when "all creeds, all kinds" will be "alike" and "working together," having placed "all the fascists out of the way." All this in three verses! On the other hand, Bragg crafts "The Unwelcome Guest," a sobering attack on wealth and privilege, as a hymn to solidarity. Here, Guthrie expresses his own political vocation by imagining himself riding on a beautiful black horse as a modern day Robin Hood, taking back the wealth the rich have stolen from the workers. The narrator acknowledges that he will be cut down by the mighty, but hopes that his legacy will live on as "other brave men" take up the task anew. Although the future will not see an easy end to the class war, Guthrie holds out hope for the day when "they'll take the money and spread it out equal just like the Bible and the prophets suggest." Such sentiments fit Bragg's own sensibilities perfectly, and on this track the spirit of Guthrie's deepest convictions pulsate through Bragg's thick, distinctively British voice. Bragg and Wilco slow the tempo down without letting it turn into a dirge, utilizing a pedal-steel line as the backdrop and harmonica fills between verses. In the final verse, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy sings a high harmony part alongside Bragg, creating a compelling, two-textured finale. This track stands on a par with any of Guthrie's greatest songs, even if it took half a century and a fellow traveler's voice for the song to come to fruition. Besides the political anthems, Mermaid Avenue's most moving moments come in a pair of introspective songs, "Another Man's Done Gone" and "One by One," which reflect some of the intense personal pain Guthrie experienced in the immediate postwar years. It was at Mermaid Avenue that Woody and Marjorie Guthrie lost their eldest daughter, Cathy, in a fire. And it was during these years that Huntington's chorea first began to manifest itself in Guthrie, in the form of increasingly erratic behavior that eventually made normal family life impossible. Tweedy brings "Another Man's Done Gone" to life in 90 brief seconds with an aching vocal, accompanied only by piano. "Sometimes I think I'm gonna lose my mind," Guthrie wrote, in what appears to be an apology to his wife, as well as a plea for understanding. Explaining both his wanderlust and undying love for "the people," Guthrie reflected: "Maybe if I hadn't of seen so much hard feelings, I maybe could have not felt other peoples," a couplet given a perfect reading by Tweedy. And it is not possible to hear "One by One," in which a cascading organ line sets an ethereal tone for an even more explicit meditation on the experience of age and the passing of time, without bringing to mind Guthrie's own gradual debilitation. Woody Guthrie is no longer around to turn newspaper headlines into folk-songs and his guitar into a "fascist-killing" machine. Yet, his vivid sense of both the suffering and the earthly joys entailed in being human -- and his insistence on the necessity of human solidarity -- remain deeply relevant. Bragg and Wilco, as well as Nora Guthrie, should be commended for liberating Guthrie's spirit from the printed pages he left behind, and for pouring that spirit out into appealing, infectious, deeply moving music. Still, the question remains: Will Woody Guthrie be regarded at the end of the 20th century as museum piece holding a sentimental place in leftist memory? Or will he live on, as he hoped, as an angry prophet whose words even now speak to the very present? For all of Bragg and Wilco's fine efforts, the answer to that question lies not in the artistic merit of their "collaboration" with Guthrie, but in how those who hear it choose to respond. Page 3 Mermaid's, Song In These Times July 26, 1998 LOAD-DATE: April 16, 1999 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photo 1, Billy Bragg; Photo 2, Woody Guthrie; Photos 1 and 2, PHOTOS COURTESY OF ELEKTRA RECORDS Copyright 1998 Institute for Public Affairs.