Billy Bragg

Just because I dress like this, doesn’t mean Im a Communist. -Billy Bragg (To Have And Have Not)

They’ve got a lot in common, Billy Bragg and Woody Guthrie. Bragg, an English protest singer, Guthrie an American one, separated by 50 years and an ocean, but linked by a musical tradition and the power of one voice.

Billy Bragg is joined by the American rock band Wilco on Mermaid Avenue, a unique project featuring never before recorded lyrics by Guthrie. It is fitting that Bragg and Wilco have been chosen to carry Woody Guthrie’s torch into the next century. Bragg and Guthrie belong to the same singer-songwriter heritage, and Wilco is a quintessentially American rock band, well-versed in the traditions of American music. In the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s Guthrie wrote from a left-wing standpoint and succeeded in injecting powerful rhetoric into the music industry without forgetting to entertain; Billy Bragg pulled off the same trick in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Purists may argue that a man born in the East End of London in 1957 cannot properly understand a man born in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1912, but this pan-generational, transatlantic handover illustrates just how timeless and universal Woody Guthrie’s sentiments and beliefs are.

Billy Bragg only dabbled with folk music in his youth, borrowing arcane compilation albums from his local record library, but this was the time of the punk rock explosion in Britain (Billy turned 19 in 1977) and he and his first band Riff Raff, formed with friends from school, were fired up by The Clash and The Jam. The unifying strength of punk lay in anger and loud noise, and the political and emotional punch of folk was too subtle for the young Bragg to dream of trying to play. Plus, it wasn’t exactly cool.

Riff Raff disintegrated after one single, but the experience taught Billy the visceral thrill of live performance, and honed his songwriting skills. After a desperate stint in the British Army in 1981. Trooper Bragg bought himself out for 175 pounds after the minimum 90 days and re-entered the civilian world. Bragg decided to go solo, but chose to play electric guitar instead of acoustic, on which he wrote hard-hitting, punk-inspired love-and-hate songs that tapped into the rich legacy of folk.

His 1983 debut album, “Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs Spy,” was raw and economical, full of righteous indignation and romantic bitterness. It caught the national imagination, topped the independent charts and made Billy and unlikely star, going on to sell over 150,000 copies in the UK and a further 250,000 worldwide. Throughout the 80’s he championed political causes like the 1984/5 British coal miners strike and Artists Against Apartheid and performed countless benefits. He was also a founder of Red Wedge, the musicians’ pressure group dedicated to ousting the Conservative government (they disbanded after the 1987 General Election when the Conservatives got back in) It was while playing benefits for the striking miners, Billy first came into personal contact with political folk singers. In 1992 he was invited to play at Woody Guthries’s 80th birthday memorial concert in New York’s Central Park, and his interpretation of two Guthrie numbers, along with his own songs concerning labor unions and international solidarity, impressed Woody’s daughter, Nora. She was in the process of setting up an archive of her fathers work in New York City and was looking to extend his musical legend by way of some “new” material. ‘Billy has a way of getting a message across without being pompous, the same way Woody did,’ Nora says.

Wilco established themselves as a band to be reckoned with in the mid ’90’s, and had crossed Billy’s path on several live shows. Their 1996 album, ‘Being There,’ garnered raves from Rolling Stone (****) and NME (9/10), drawing comparisons to the Stones classic ‘Exile On Main Street.’ In its wake, ex-Uncle Tupelo co-leader Jeff Tweedy has emerged as one of the more important songwriters of the post-grunge era and his Wilco co-conspirators Jay Bennett, John Stirratt and Ken Coomer have developed into some of the most exciting live and studio musicians on the scene today.

Woody Guthrie forged his craft in the thirties when drought and dust storms swept through the South and caused a great exodus to ‘the promised land’ of California. ‘You can only write about what you see,’ he said later. What he saw was poverty, devastation and unbreakable human spirit, as conveyed in his Dust Bowl Ballads. In Los Angeles he wrote prolifically, and, milking his hillbilly image, earned his own radio slot. It was at this time that, moved by what he had encountered in the migrant work camps in California, that he became highly politicised. Ever restless, he moved to New York and became a minor celebrity, a published author (the semi-autobiographical Bound For Glory) and a hit on the folk circuit, often playing at union meetings. Tragically, an incurable hereditary disease of the nervous system, Huntington’s chorea, hospitalized him in 1954 and it became impossible for him to perform in public. The sixties folk revival, spearheaded by a self confessed Guthrie imitator who called himself Bob Dylan, happened without Woody’s direct involvement, and he died in 1967. He left behind him a legacy of written and recorded work that make him one of the greatest lyrical poets of the 20th century. However, unknown to the public, he also left manuscripts of hundreds and hundreds of songs he had written. Unfortunately, these manuscripts contained no musical notation – he had kept the tunes in his head. It was this previously unheard material that Nora Guthrie offered to Billy Bragg in the spring of 1995. These lyrics, the majority of which were written in Coney Island in the late forties and early fifties, can now be heard for the first time on ‘Mermaid Avenue’ with tunes specially composed by Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett.

It’s a collaboration, not a Woody Guthrie tribute album, states Billy Bragg firmly – a collaboration between himself and Chicago rockers Wilco, and the forever restless spirit of Woody Guthrie. Billy originally put the project to Wilco in London, 1996. In the summer of ’97 both acts were performing at the New York Fleadh Festival where they all met with Nora – “and from there on it was a done deal,” says Billy. “Wilco are ideal for this project, they are a young band but are steeped in the tradition of this kind of music.” Billy joined Wilco in Chicago to demo the material and then the ensemble decamped to Dublin for five weeks where, at sessions attended by Nora Guthrie, the songs evolved as they were performed-as live as is possible in a studio set-up. To a devoutly solo performer like Bragg, it was an inspiration to watch Wilco perform and to join the creative process at work in the room. Such was the momentum of these sessions that, in all, 40 songs were recorded, with contributions from Natalie Merchant and slide guitarist, Corey Harris. “With Nora on hand to offer insight and encouragement to the assembled musicians, you got the feeling that it’s what Woody would have wanted,” said Billy. The whole process was filmed for a documentary commissioned by BBC2 Television about the making of the album and the legacy of Woody Guthrie. “I have a strange inkling that this might be Woody’s time” remarks Billy, “People may at last be ready to reassess his contribution to popular music and recognize him as the first true singer-songwriter. Too many bands these days are obsessed with making music that sounds retro, whereas Woody’s lyrics on ‘Mermaid Avenue,’ some dating from as far back as the thirties, sound like they could have been written just the other day.” Woody Guthrie legendarily had this message scrawled on the front of his guitar: “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” And, way back in the days of punk, Billy Bragg adapted it for the front of his: “THIS GUITAR SAYS SORRY.” The great Anglo-American folk tradition which gave birth to the singer-songwriter movement is alive and well, as revealed by the work of a bloke from London and a group of guys from the midwest and southern U.S.