Singing Once Again on Mermaid Avenue

Billy Bragg and Wilco, Mermaid Avenue. Elektra Entertainment Group, Inc., 1998.

Billy Bragg and Wilco, Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II. Elektra Entertainment Group, Inc., 2000.

The years immediately following World War II were difficult ones for Woody Guthrie. The once rich folk music scene in New York City all but disappeared. His recording career ended. His second and third marriages failed. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) caused much fear and consternation among radicals across the country, including artists, actors, and musicians of the Popular Front. All the while the debilitating effect of the disease that would eventually take Guthrie's life--Huntington's disease--began to take hold, engendering erratic behavior that would define much of his life throughout the 1950s. It is within this context that most of the songs from Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II emerged, illuminating a Woody Guthrie rarely seen and seldom heard.

Taken from a previously unpublished and largely unseen collection of lyrics housed at the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York, the songs on Mermaid Avenue (MA) and Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II (MAII) reflect the work of a man who struggled to make sense of his changing world. Increased social and political conservatism as well as fundamental shifts in race and gender relations, union organizing, and cultural production, created an American landscape Woody Guthrie found unsettling. In many ways, the songs compiled for this collection are the work of a radical at a time when radicalism was taboo. Some songs are explicitly political, most are not. Others are remarkable for their lyrical quality, while still others convey growing anger, frustration, and bitterness. Yet all suggest the work of a man trying to negotiate boundaries recently constructed by postwar political, social, and cultural changes.

What is also remarkable about this collection of material is its strident attempt to reconstruct the image of Woody Guthrie, from rural folk icon to multidimensional songwriter and citizen. As one reporter wrote about Guthrie's youngest daughter Nora, who brought this project to fruition, "Nora Guthrie's agenda has always been on the table: The thought of Woody, imprisoned in fogie-folk legend like an artifact locked in amber, is anathema to her." ¹

In this regard, the album's title immediately refocuses attention from Guthrie's rural roamings to New York City, where he lived from 1940 until his death in 1967--many of these years in a small apartment on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island with his wife, Marjorie, and children Arlo Davy, Joady Ben, and Nora Lee. According to Billy Bragg, one of the principal collaborators on Mermaid Avenue, "Woody as a New Yorker is more significant than as a Dust Bowl refugee." ² While some might dispute this claim, it does suggest that the period of Guthrie's life in New York is less clearly understood and more complex than those of his previous hard-traveling days. The songs on Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II speak to this neglected period in Woody Guthrie's writing, which, as Guthrie's biographer Joe Klein once wrote, was not "of any consequence." ³

In 1995, Nora Guthrie enlisted British singer/songwriter Billy Bragg--who himself is a social activist, labor organizer, and working-class troubadour--and the American band Wilco to bring Guthrie's lyrics and worldview to a new generation of listeners. In the liner notes to Mermaid Avenue, Billy Bragg wrote, "Nora talked of breaking the mould, of working with her father to give his words a new sound and a new context. The result is not a tribute album but a collaboration between Woody Guthrie and a new generation of songwriters who until now had only glimpsed him fleetingly." Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II represent a collaborative effort worthy of praise.

Mermaid Avenue, released in 1998, showcases the breadth of Woody Guthrie's songwriting palette, from children's songs to political songs to work songs. Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II, released in 2000, is a...