Thanks to Susan for this link to an old story about Billy Bragg, Wilco and the Mermaid Avenue albums:

There’s long been a story about this project – that Nora Guthrie was going to hand over her father’s lyrics to Bob Dylan (seeing as Dylan was massively influenced by Guthrie) but she changed her mind when Dylan appeared at a concert last year that was staged for the Pope, (this making him, in many people’s eyes, a unworthy recipient of the work of a man who was writing and singing about women’s liberation before it was fashionable or profitable).

“I don’t know that, I’m not so sure,” says Bragg, “and the reason I’m not sure is that eight years ago, I was asked to play at the Woody Guthrie 80th birthday memorial concert in New York’s Central Park where I played two of his songs, one about labour unions and one about international solidarity. Nora was in the audience and apparently really liked what she heard and at the time she was just beginning to unearth all this material of her father’s. When she finally asked me to put music to the words, I think she was looking for maybe someone a bit younger than Dylan and I think she liked the way I got her father’s political messages across without being pompous.”

Did he feel the weight of musical history on him as he completed the songs?

“Well, first there were probably a lot of people thinking that it should have been Bob Dylan’s gig and not mine, and that’s obviously hard to deal with, given Dylan’s massive stature. Also, it was strange because I had come to Woody Guthrie’s work through listening to Bob Dylan, and the more I learnt about Dylan, the more I heard that he was part of this tradition of which Guthrie was the originator . . . the biggest shock, though, of the whole project was when everything was finished and I looked down at the finished work and the songs were credited to Guthrie/Bragg.”

Like Bragg, I don’t know if that story which is alluded to about Bob Dylan, Pope John Paul II and Nora Guthrie’s motivations is true — in my case because I wasn’t paying close attention to this whole subject back in 1998. I would hope it’s not true. In any case, I wonder whether Dylan would have relished taking on a project like that in 1997/98. He had a lot of his own going on then, and has kept pretty busy since as well.

Of-course, this brings to mind what Dylan wrote on the subject of those same old songs of Woody’s in Chronicles. On one of his visits to Guthrie in Greystone Hospital (1961?), Woody had told him about these boxes of songs and directed him to go to his house in Coney Island and retrieve them from his wife, Margie. Dylan quite hilariously describes taking the train out there, and seeing the house where Woody had described it, but failing to perceive a civilized route to getting there, which results in him trudging knee deep through a freezing swamp to get to the front door. A babysitter is there, knows nothing about the songs, and the young Bob discerns that he’d best be on his way. So, he trudges back through the cold swamp to the subway. And that’s it. He doesn’t attempt a repeat visit — his life is moving forward too quickly. I think that there is in this story a cognizance that what occurred that day was the kind of “simple twist of fate” that everything can turn on. What if Woody’s wife had been there and Bob had received these boxes of old Guthrie lyrics? Wouldn’t he have felt duty-bound to devote himself to them — to putting them to music and performing them — and would that have sidetracked him (perhaps terminally) from the path he was meant to follow?

Dylan is very gracious in Chronicles about the ultimate fate of those old manuscripts:

Forty years later, these lyrics would fall into the hands of Billy Bragg and the group Wilco and they would put melodies to them, bring them to full life and record them. It was all done under the direction of Woody’s daughter Nora. These performers probably weren’t even born when I had made that trip out to Brooklyn.

And more recently, on his baseball-themed episode of “Theme Time Radio Hour” Dylan played the Bragg/Wilco rendition of Joe Dimaggio Done It Again, from the second Mermaid Avenue album.

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