But thankfully, 1998’s Mermaid Avenue (named after a Woody song and the street he lived on in Coney Island) is loose-limbed and surprising. The end result could have easily been an overly reverential, gloomy bore. Billy Bragg & Wilco Mermaid Avenue, Elektra Records 1998 Nora, who often called herself a “Shadchan” (Yiddish for ‘matchmaker’), was the executive producer for album and its mostly unheralded hero. Bennett was excited by Bragg’s offer and eventually got the band on board for the unusual project where, as we’ll see, he played a vital role, not only co-writing roughly half the album but also adding in all sorts of unique musical parts (including guitar, saw, B3 organ, Leslie pedals, Farfisa organ, mandolin, piano, electric sitar, banjo, harmonica, drums, upright bass, ‘Delayaphone,’ bells and more). When Bragg approached Wilco about joining him on this Guthrie venture, Tweedy supposedly wasn’t totally on board but thankfully, one of his bandmates was.Ī former math teacher and electronics technician, Jay Bennett could and would play any instrument he could get his hands on and proved vital to Wilco, helping the band make its distinctive mark. Bragg was intrigued by the idea but he had concerns- he didn’t want to have the material to come out as just a copy of Woody’s minimal folkie style, of which he was nevertheless enamored. Nora’s notion was to have Bragg finish the job and present the work as an updated, revitalized take on her dad’s work (supposedly, years earlier, the same idea had been pitched to Dylan but nothing came of it). Though he was racked by Huntington’s Disease towards the end of his life (he died in 1967), Woody would keep writing, accumulating over 1000 lyrics from 1947 on, all of which remained in search of music. No doubt inspired by the shows, Nora had another brainstorm in her quest to keep Woody’s work alive.
#ROGER MCGUINN JOLLY ROGER LYRICS SERIES#
By 1997, she was already responsible for projects around Woody including a songbook, CD, animated video and a glorious 1996 series for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame which included a symposium and concerts with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, the Indigo Girls, Alejandro Escovedo, her sibling Arlo Guthrie and Ani DiFranco, who would produce and put out the concert highlights as ‘Til We Outnumber ‘Em on her Righteous Babe imprint.Īlso participating in the shows was that English folkie. In 1992 alone, she founded the Woody Guthrie Archives and became president of Woody Guthrie Publications (which she still is) and president of the Woody Guthrie Foundation, remaining as such until 2015. After starting out as a dancer, she threw herself into chronicling her dad’s work.
Nora Guthrie was Woody’s youngest of eight children and definitely no slouch. But as it turns out, this was only the beginning. Woody Guthrie had spawned many followers (including a Midwest troubadour named Dylan) and had by the ’90’s seen a revival thanks to a series of reissues on Smithsonian Folkways and a purposeful family member. Wilco emerged from the ashes of the legendary Uncle Tupelo but by their second LP, 1996’s Being There, Jeff Tweedy was already trying to fight off their alt-country yoke, starting the album off with a nod to Pere Ubu co-founder Peter Laughner and blaring horns and starting to gain recognition and respect as a result.
and others, his career faced a slow down as he couldn’t quite manage a more pop sound.
But by the ’90s, despite boosting from R.E.M. progressive folkie who had been dead for 30 years, all drawn together by a determined writer / archivist / producer.īilly Bragg had made a name for himself as a solo act, literally with just him and his guitar in the ’80s, bringing Brit folk back to a political realm. The end of the millennium was a strange time for an English progressive folkie, an alt-country band and a legendary U.S. Woody Guthrie (Image: Encyclopedia Brittanica)
0 kommentar(er)
