Woody and me

LARRY SCHWARTZ

‘Oh God,” he read. Billy Bragg was taken aback by words on a yellowed page. He thought this song, among thousands perused while sorting through papers in a New York City archive, was a cry of despair. “The lyrics were just, ‘Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God for four lines,’ Bragg recalls. “Then a break. And then, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God.’ Another four lines,” Bragg says. Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, was with him. “We looked at it in silence, the two of us, for about 30 seconds. Just took it in and tried to imagine this man drowning in this disease. But we didn’t have the courage to take it and record it.” Bragg had enlisted Tweedy to help with a special project. He’d been invited to write music for lyrics penned between the late-1930s and 1950s by the legendary Woody Guthrie, who died of Huntington’s chorea in 1967. The Oklahoma-born singer-songwriter’s best-known songs, from Pastures of Plenty to This Land is Your Land, are now standards that seem to have sprung from the public domain. Guthrie’s daughter, Nora, was intrigued by the boxes of manuscripts she’d found when she took charge of his archive after her mother’s death a few years ago. She chose Bragg to record them because she was so impressed by his performance at a tribute to her father. Last year’s 15-song Mermaid Avenue won critical acclaim and is understood to have sold more than any record her father ever released. Nora Guthrie described it as, “Kind of like sci-fi vaccination, awakening 50-year-old sleeping lyrics”. A new generation has come to Guthrie, via Bragg. When the English singer-songwriter, nicknamed the Bard of Barking, spoke of his disquiet at Oh God, she suggested he look again at the yellowed page. “Nora said, ‘Don’t be like that about it. Woody was never like that. Read it again and read it as revelation. He may have had something revealed to him. Something may have struck him. It might just have been his mantra’. She wanted to challenge preconceptions of her father, not reinforce them,” says Bragg. He would come to regard Guthrie as defiantly upbeat. “My feeling is, that he never wrote in a self-pitying, I’ll-never-get-out-of-this-world-kind-of-deal.” Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was just 55 when he died. He’d spent the last 15 years of his life in hospital with Huntington’s chorea, a hereditary condition that causes progressive deterioration of the central nervous system. He’d written almost to the last, until he could no longer hold a pen. About 2500 songs remained in storage through the decades. Mostly words on paper with few clues to how he might have wanted them to sound. Nora Guthrie made an inspired choice for what is likely to be the first of a series of recordings of her father’s unknown works. She might, as Bragg suspects, have seen parallels between her father’s political activism in 1930s America and Bragg’s in 1980s Britain. “Both were very radical times,” Bragg has said, “and we both came to similar conclusions about what to do about it.” The similarities were obvious to one of Guthrie’s most fervent followers, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, when he first encountered Bragg at a a folk festival in Canada about six years ago. “I immediately was reminded of Woody,” he told me. “At that time, I don’t think Billy Bragg even knew about Woody Guthrie. But he made me think about Woody because of his spirit and his way of being. Just very plain and like a working man.” Bragg was almost 10 when Guthrie died. “I kind of took my influences primarily from Bob Dylan and the Clash,” says Bragg, who started out in a punk band, Riff Raff, and released his first solo album, Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs Spy, in 1984. “When I first started out, when anyone reviewed me they said, ‘One-man Clash’. But when I went to America, people began to compare me to Woody. The reality would be that I didn’t think of Woody as someone whose tradition I was part of.” With the help of Wilco and others including Natalie Merchant and Corey Harris, Bragg recorded 40 versions from the Guthrie vaults. “When we went into the studio, I said to Jeff Tweedy, ‘It’s not our job to try and out-think Woody. Our job is to collaborate with Woody. So we’ve got to sit Woody down and explain to him who the Clash are and why we love (The Rolling Stones’) Exile on Main Street.” In a notebook, he found a loose description of the tempo Guthrie favored for a song he called Flying Saucer, one of 25 recorded by Bragg and co yet to be released. “The words he used to describe it are ‘supersonic boogie’. When I read those words, I had from Woody carte blanche to play any music in any style that was available in his lifetime and nobody, no Woody Guthrie expert, could come to me and say, ‘Do you really think Woody would have done it this way, son?’ I could say, ‘Supersonic boogie!’ “Where do you think he got those words from? He didn’t get them from Oklahoma. He was in New York City listening to the radio and grooving to black music.” “Sometimes, I think I’m gonna lose my mind,” Guthrie wrote in the undated Another Man’s Done Gone, one of 15 songs on the album. It is here, says Bragg, that Guthrie clearly articulated fear of his disease. “There’s a man who, at the time he wrote that song, his family had fallen apart, he wasn’t working as a musician and he probably knew he was going to die in the same way that his mother had. “And yet, he still was able, in the depth of that, to write a song as powerful and as simple… I think, in those moments when we recorded that album, if there ever was a time when Woody was present in the room with us, it was during the recording of that song.” It was Nora Guthrie, the youngest of four children of Guthrie’s second wife, Marjorie, who suggested the album take its title from the avenue in Coney Island where the family lived after her father returned from service in World War II. It takes him out of the landscape with which he remains identified through songs and a 1943 autobiography, Bound For Glory. In his latter years, he was marginalised not just by illness, but by the paranoia of McCarthy-era America when anyone connected with the Communist Party was suspect. “In such a cultural climate, it is perhaps no surprise that the real Woody Guthrie has all but dissappeared from sight,” Bragg writes in a foreword to a new edition of Joe Klein’s 1980 biography, Woody Guthrie: A Life. “Most Americans, if they know him at all, recall a one-dimensional figure from the Depression years: some kind of Dustbowl icon, universal hobo, boxcar rider and wiseacre philosopher. Perhaps they wonder if he ever actually existed at all.” For Nora, there must be an element of discovery in the music project. Her relationship with her father is described poignantly in Klein’s book. After her birth, he was institutionalised, remarried, divorced and was back in hospital, where she dreaded visiting him. She was 14, Klein writes, when she “happened upon Woody, who was quietly trembling on the living-room couch and she realised that this odd little man was her father. So she sat down near him – and he noticed her, and looked at her, and it was the one quiet moment they ever shared together”. Bragg will be playing his own songs as well as the Guthrie material on his Australian tour. “Bring your dancing shoes,” he says. Soon, it’ll be time to step back from the little man from Okemah, Ofuskee County, Oklahoma. “I’ve got this band together, and we’ve been working on some songs together live. If the Woody album would just lay down and if I could only stop rambling around. Then I would like to record it in this coming autumn. But at the moment the little bugger has got too much life in him.” Bragg has his own life, is a devoted dad. His previous album, William Bloke, featured vigorous strumming to distract the infant Jack, now five. “If having a child doesn’t change your perspective on everything, you aren’t doing it right. For me, it’s been the greatest experience of my life.” Billy Bragg plays at the Forum on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Billy speaks “Politically, the fault lines were clear in the ’80s. But since the 1992 election and Tony Blair becoming leader of the Labour Party, things have blurred a lot and I’ve found myself returning to my own core values. In this climate, and as you get older, it becomes difficult to shout, ‘To the barricades!”‘ “When we went into the studio, I said to Jeff Tweedy ‘It’s not our job to try and out-think Woody. Our job is to collaborate with Woody. So we’ve got to sit Woody down and explain to him who the Clash are, and why we love (The Rolling Stones’) Exile on Main Street.” “Nobody, no Woody Guthrie expert, could come to me and say, ‘Do you really think Woody would have done it this way, son?’ I could say, ‘Supersonic boogie!’ “Where do you think he got those words from? He didn’t get them from Oklahoma. He was in New York City listening to the radio and grooving to black music.” “If having a child doesn’t change your perspective on everything, you aren’t doing it right. For me, it’s been the greatest experience of my life.” The Age, 16-Apr-1999