Another Side of Woody Guthrie: Review of Billy Bragg and WilcoUs  Mermaid
Avenue. Elektra Records. 

Woody Guthrie- the almost frighteningly  prolific American songwriter and
chronicler of the hardships of the dustbowl era and beyond- has suffered the
fate of many TfolkU writers and performers in that his work and memory have been
canonised in a very particular way.  Ever since his adoption by the American
Communist Party as a kind of Okie Tnoble savageU, his songs have been seen as
works which reflect the Tauthentic experienceU of  poor America, and little
else. Mermaid Avenue, Billy BraggUs collection of lyrics unearthed in the
Guthrie archives, to which he and others have added tunes, is in part a
challenge to this image, and makes  a powerful case for Guthrie as one of the
first reflexive singer-songwriters. 

It is as much the styles and forms of language prevalent in academia, as the
dominance of particular ones that makes it so inherently exclusionary and which
cages the ideas the academe produces in so much rhetorical oblivion. An
engagement with different forms of  language and expression might be useful in
breaking the pervasiveness of this morass.  If this is to be at all useful it
needs to deal with two things. Firstly it needs to break with a long held and
deeply entrenched position that denies   popular forms of literature such as
folk songs the kind of analytical scrutiny which is automatically brought out
for TsophisticatedU forms such as the novel. This misses the complex multi
accentuality of ballads like GuthrieUs TPastureUs of PlentyU where the
dispossession and mobility of Okie migrants is at once lamented- Twe come with
the dust and weUre gone in the windU-  but also becomes  forcefully articulated
with  a pride rooted in  work and alternative identities. 

Secondly it needs to deal with the ways in which such forms have been recorded
and reworked. Its not just the explicit violence of song collectors such as
Cecil Sharpe that needs to be countered. Song collectors/ writers, firmly
associated with the left  such as Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl who were
instrumental in simultaneously TinventingU and unearthing a British political
folk song tradition worked within their own imaginative limits. They were rooted
in  an invocation of a heroic male worker, and  a very  industrial imagination -
one wonders where  the anti- enclosure ballads of the English folk song
tradition ended up.  It is within this sense of scrutinising the way these
languages and forms of expression are used that BraggUs project is an
interesting intervention. 

Though not denying the obvious political commitment and content of GuthrieUs
songs,  one of the most affecting songs on the album is a short song about
fellow left songwriter Hans EislerUs trial for un-American activities where
Guthrie despairs at what heUll do if they come for him, BraggUs reconstructions
interestingly tease out some of the ambiguities and edges of Guthries work.
There is a sense of a faltering engagement with sexual politics,  Twomen are
equal and they may be ahead of the menU, in a song which elsewhere touches on
some of the more unpleasant sides of American socialist thought: TI suppose ten
million years from now/ weUll all be just alike/ same colour, same size working
together/ and maybe weUll have all the fascists out the way by thenU. 

A day dream in which Guthrie dreams of shagging TIngrid BermanU on an Italian
volcano is true to  the more ambiguous commitment to sexual politics that
Guthrie managed in his own life. (Bragg  rather spectacularly failing  to convey
the lechiness of the lyric.) Perhaps the finest pieces are the beautifully
reflexive TWay Over Yonder in the Minor KeyU about GuthrieUs childhood, and the
stark lyric TBirds and ShipsU sung here  by Natalie Merchant. These songs are
completely alien to the way Guthrie has been thought and re-sung. The song TAt
My Window Sad and LonelyU has vignettes which could have fallen out of a Suzanne
Vega lyric, and suggest ways in which the  dominantly political narrative which
surrounds him has squeezed a lot of the individuality out of his work. 

As an album it doesnUt hang together particularly well. Bragg seems to have
resolutely bought in to the idea that Guthrie songs have to be sung in a stompy
American country-folk style- his voice though technically improved and mellower
has also lost a bit of its passion...  As an interesting stab at a re-appraisal
of this complex and much simplified figure I reckon it is a thought provoking
project with interesting resources for thinking about how  different forms and
languages can form parts of critical projects which do not search for idealised
images of authentic poverty.  .....Wish heUd played some of his old dodgy
electric guitar thoU. 

Dave Featherstone 

Joe KleinUs biography TWoody Guthrie: A lifeU has just been republished by
Faber... its better than his political thrillers. 




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