Billy Bragg & Wilco
Mermaid Avenue

'This machine kills fascists'

Up until the late nineties, it was known that Woody Guthrie ("the dust brother") had written about a thousand songs: all on his old typewriter and all inspired by news events, conversations overheard by chance, and thoughts that came to him when he was on the road. Quite an impressive legacy, his, and not just quantitatively... even if, to make his "socialism" more palatable to Americans, he is remembered almost exclusively as the author of "This Land Is Your Land" (a hymn to freedom taught in schools). Then his daughter Nora, after over forty years of near-indifference to her father's heritage, began to explore the recesses of her mother Marjorie's house and discovered hundreds and hundreds of new texts that Guthrie had not had time to turn into songs. Nora then set out in search of a worthy representative of her father's legacy and came across Billy Bragg.
Already in 1983, in the album To Have And To Have Not, Bragg sang:

At 21 you're at the top of the heap,
at 16 you were the best in your class.
At school you only learned
to become a good worker.
Even if the system has failed,
try not to fail yourself.

Harsh words aimed at the neoliberal politics of the Thatcher government, which in a few years would ruin England. Bragg, born in 1957 in Barking (Essex), declared he decided to pursue a career in music precisely because of - or thanks to - Margaret Thatcher. After seeing a Clash concert, he founded his own punk band - Riff Raff - but in 1980 surprised everyone by enlisting voluntarily in the British army ("I wanted to drive a tank!"). After just three months, he threw the uniform to the wind ("The 175 pounds I had to pay to buy back my freedom were the best spent money of my entire life"). Then, armed with a guitar, amplifier, and lyrics full of anger, he began to play wherever he could, soon profiling himself as a bard of anti-Thatcher protest.
"Billy and Woody are saying the same things and have the same sense of humor..." explains Nora Guthrie (sister of Arlo).
And so Bragg: "Woody had the devil in him, just like Robert Johnson. Understanding him is probably easier for an Englishman like me, born in the fifties. Woody posed a lot of questions to the Americans that they couldn’t answer. He made no compromises. He invited them to join the union ('Join the Union!') and said things like: 'As the Bible attests, money must be equally distributed'..."
After Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen (The Ghost of Tom Joad, released in 1995, remains Springsteen's greatest tribute to Woody Guthrie), it has been Bragg who emerged as the exceptional acolyte of the "communist wanderer".
The result? Mermaid Avenue, which brought Bragg and the band Wilco a Grammy Award nomination.

Well I'm walkin' down the track, I got tears in my eyes.
Tryin' to read a letter from my home.
(Woody Guthrie)

The radical philosophy of Woody Guthrie was forged in the disasters that the Great Depression brought with it; afterward, the singer-songwriter suffered - greatly - the harassments of McCarthyism. Woody Guthrie had the suspicion that a curse hung over his family, and perhaps it was just so: five of his eight children died prematurely, his parents' house burned in mysterious circumstances, his sister Clara perished in another fire, even his father almost died in yet another fire, his first wife Nora became demented, and he himself was afflicted by Huntington's chorea (not without first burning his arm, which made it impossible for him to play the guitar...)

Meanwhile, Bruce Springsteen's homage to Pete Seeger has been released. It’s titled We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. Accompanied by a host of excellent collaborators, Springsteen delivers his original interpretation of 15 "traditionals," and it’s not difficult at times to hear Guthrie’s voice resonating between the lines...