Mermaid Avenue is a 1998 album of previously unheard lyrics written by American folk singer Woody Guthrie, put to music written and performed by British singer Billy Bragg and the American band Wilco. A second volume of recordings, Mermaid Avenue Vol. II, followed in 2000; and both were collected in a box set alongside Volume III in 2012 as Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions. The projects are named after the song “Mermaid’s Avenue”, written by Guthrie. This was also the name of the street in Coney Island, New York on which Guthrie lived. (More from Wikipedia)
I was rather surprised years later to hear my home town come up again as I played one of the songs on the two excellent Mermaid Avenue CD’s, consisting of a set of performances of the lyrics to several of literally hundreds of unrecorded songs by Woody Guthrie that were set to music by the American rock band Wilco and the English singer-songwriter Billy Bragg. One of the songs, “Aginst th’ Law” goes on and on about all of these illegalities – “It’s against the law to talk, and it’s against the law to walk”, etc. – and later in the song, there is the lyric: “Everything in Winston-Salem is against the law!”
(March 2013)
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I have already written about the wonderful Mermaid Avenue Series albums. Leftist English folksinger Billy Bragg and the American rock band Wilco put together music to accompany some of the complete lyric sheets that Woody Guthrie left behind that had no accompanying music – more than a thousand songs in all. In part, Billy Bragg’s liner notes on Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II state: “Woody Guthrie was the first alternative musician. While Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley were busy peddling escapism for the masses, Woody was out there writing songs from a different point of view with a lyrical poetry that captured the awesome majesty of America’s scenery and the dry-as-dust humor of its working folks.”
As terrific as they are, the dozens of songs on these albums only scratch the surface; Billy Bragg said in the liner notes that until these other songs can also be unearthed, “Woody Guthrie has so much more to say to us”.
(March 2015)
