Album Essentials: Billy Bragg & Wilco - "Mermaid Avenue"
By Dave Swanson - Summit FM Contributor
What does one get when you take one of England's finest singer/songwriters, pair him up with one of America's most respected and heralded combos, and unleash them on a songbook of unknown lyrics from one of the most important figures in the history of American music? You get 'Mermaid Avenue,' an album of historical and modern significance.
The characters at play here are, of course, Billy Bragg and Wilco, who teamed up to set a cache of unknown Woody Guthrie lyrics to music, with highly glowing results. Issued in 1998, it seemed like a match made in heaven on paper, the 'alt-country'/ 'Americana'/whatever you wanna call 'em sounds of Wilco, merged with Bragg's own unique take on folk, rock, and pop music, was a good enough concept, but then toss in the lyrics of, arguably, the father of American folk music, and it was a great blending of all these parts.
Kindred spirit Bragg was always cut, in part, from the cloth of Guthrie, via Bob Dylan, and his involvement proved a perfect fit. The entire project was the brainchild of Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, who was, at the time, the director of the Woody Guthrie Foundation. The lyrics all date from the late 1930s through the late 1940s, with the latest date in the batch from 1950. The seeds for the project sort of sprang up from the ground, without much prodding, when Nora discovered a cache of her father's unused lyrics.
"It started with first finding the stuff. Finding the stuff, that’s where it starts. And after we discovered that there were so many hundreds of lyrics that no one had ever seen, and I include most people on the Earth in that sentence. There's maybe like three people that had ever looked through these files and boxes of my dad's stuff that had been sitting around for forty years," Nora Guthrie said in an interview surrounding the project. "There were just so many lyrics that I had never heard of, and my family hadn't heard of. And don't ask me why they were never recorded, because I can only suppose why. I wasn't there so I don't know the real answer to that one. I just started finding these great lyrics, and they sounded, I mean just as a piece of written word poetry, I just loved them. I thought hmm, someday I want to do something with this stuff. And then cut to the chase, I found Billy Bragg and asked him if he wanted to work on it. He kindly said yes."
From there it kind of snowballed with Bragg suggesting Wilco get involved and one lyric led to a song, then to another, and soon enough 'Mermaid Avenue' was born. "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key," "California Stars," "Eisler On The Go," and "The Unwelcome Guest," are only a few of the gems to be found here, as Bragg and Wilco create just the right mood musically, to fit the lost words of Guthrie.
There were so many lyrics, in fact, that ultimately there would end up being three volumes of material from Bragg and Wilco channeling Guthrie, all to great effect. 'Mermaid Avenue' is where it started, and truly is a 'modern day' essential as much as it is a historical nugget, connecting past to present to future along the way.