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Billy Bragg, the founder of Red Wedge, may be disillusioned with the Labour Party, but he has a new project: he has—to his amazement as much as anyone's—been put in charge of preserving and recording the archive of Woody Guthrie, the original American protest singer. Billy Bragg talks to us about music and politics.
[13.43]
[This Land Is Your Land — Woody Guthrie]
Woody Guthrie singing one of the great left-wing protest songs of the depression era, which he wrote as a direct response [to]—indeed a kind of parody of—Irving Berlin's `God Bless America'. Woody Guthrie was one of the great seminal influences of modern music, not just Folk music (though he was the inspiration for many others, not least Bob Dylan). He left behind him a huge backlog of songs, many of which have never been heard, but are still stored in the Guthrie archives in Oklahoma. Now, one singer has been entrusted with restoring and recording them: not Dylan, not Joan Baez, but Britain's own Billy Bragg, the boy from Barking, who with Red Wedge set out to bring music and socialism together in the 1980s. Just as they did in the 60s and Guthrie did in the 30s and 40s. Billy Bragg told me of his admiration for the master of the protest song.
He may be the last of a long line of genuine balladeers that goes all the way back to Elizabethan times in this country; but also the very first singer-songwriter in the way that we know it: I mean he was travelling around America, writing songs himself, at a time when most of the stuff on the radio was Tin Pan Alley—rich songs written for people to sing. Even Hank Williams, who was writing at the same time, was writing with his publisher Fred Rose; he wasn't just writing his own songs. Woody is the original singer-songwriter.
[I Ain't Got No Home In The World Anymore — Woody Guthrie]
The songs that are important that Woody wrote, are actually still important today. If you think of the songs he wrote about the dust-bowl: they're desribing an ecological desaster, and ecology is still very important in poltical consciousness and popular culture consciousness today. And you can see exactly the same things he talked about now in South-East Asia with this terrible smog that's down there, exactly the same sort of thing he's writing about. He's written about homelessness, he's written about the failure of the capitalist system to respond to the needs of ordinary people. If you listen to a song like `I Ain't Got No Home In The World Anymore': he's bringing all that together in a song that ordinary people could hear on the radio and relate to. And I think that's the important thing about so-called `protest music': it's songs that people have a social dimension that's real, rather than purely escapism. And I think if you wanna look at the effect that Woody Guthrie has, and look at Bob Dylan and the effect he had, because without Woody Guthrie, I think, Bob Dylan wouldn't have been able to come through the way he did. He was completely obsessed with Woody Guthrie: he talked like him, he sang like him, he went to visit him in hospital. And when you think of the influence that Dylan had, from the Beatles onwards to today, I think without Woody Guthrie, he wouldn't be able to come through as clearly and, as politically as he did.
[Blowin' In The Wind — Bob Dylan]
You mentioned Dylan, and that leads us on—very neatly I think—into the 60s. You had Baez, you had Peter, Paul & Mary (if you count them as one of them), you had Pete Seeger in this country. What was that involved, was that—I mean at that point we were richer and America was certainly richer than ever been—I suppose there was the Vietnam war, there was the Kennedy assasination, it was a lot of things going on there. Why did that second flowering of protest happen?
Well, my theory is that the second flowering of protest, or that, the first attempt of pop generation to change the world, came about—and I wasn't old enough be part of it at the time, so it is only a theory—but it's because I think these were people, who as teenagers, had witnessed Elvis Presley change the world in a social sense for them, break down the barriers between race, put up barriers between generations, make teenagers have a real identity, and—y'know—there was no reason why, after what happened in 1955 and '56 and '57, those same young people—when they came of age—shouldn't think this could actually change the world through the meduim of pop music. We now know that you can't actually change the world by singing songs.
I suspect I'm a bit older than you, Billy, and I remember all those songs. I remember `Where Have All The Flowers Gone' , `This Land My Land' [sic!]—which of course was a Woody Guthrie song—and all the songs they sang then, and the terrible thing if you listen to them now is, you think: ``Hell, we used to believe all that stuff!''
Well, I'm the same. I am younger than you, but I had exactly the same relationship with The Clash in 1977, when Punk Rock happened here in London, I really did think The Clash were gonna change the world. And I was naive to think that, and they were naive to suggest that. So when it came to be my turn to articulate some of the ideas in my generation, I looked for more practical ways to change things, which lead me to work closer with the Labour Party and to found Red Wedge, which was a sort of a way to create common ground between young people and the Labour Party—with a view to having some influence on the 1987 General Election. Now, we didn't win the election, but now I still could do that if the situation was similar. I would try and bring together the political and the pop, because—although they are two different things—there are areas where they both overlap.
You say you can't change the world by writing music or singing songs, and that is possibly true; but you can kind of focus the world, you can kind of [Yeah] synthesize the problems, can't you, and that's not happening.
Well, it does happen in diffeent ways. For instance there've been a number of benefit concerts for the Liverpool dockers out on strike for over two years now. And at those concerts what you're doing is probably what the best you can do as a musician: which is you're bringing together the community, whether it's in Liverpool or wherever else around the country. You're bringing them together for one evening to focus on the strike, and by the money that's raised allow them to express their solidarity with that cause. I think, y'know, hopefully you stimulate discussion about the situation, why it's happening; but that's probably the most you can do short of following people home, [laughs] and y'know, bugging them in their house—which is not really y'know the way you wanna do it. You've trying to strike a chord with people, you're trying to get across a different idea that's not reflected in the mass media, and you're trying to inspire people. But changing the world, that's the job for the audience, not the performer.
Do you see yourself—and you're a modest chap and I'm sure you wouldn't wanna go too far down this road—but do you see yourself as the heir to the Guthrie / Dylan / Baez tradition, as one of the very few political artists/musicians now; and is that why you've been chosen to pick up on the Guthrie archive?
I see myself as part of a continuing debate that goes on in popular culture that includes The Clash, that includes people like Bob Dylan, more importantly people like Phil Ochs who was writing in America much more political stuff than Bob Dylan was; and this is a thread that's always gone through popular culture, and it does go back to Woody. As I say: Woody was the originator. The reasons [why] I've been chosen are many: it's partly to do with the stuff I write. I think it's also to do with the fact than I'm not an American, because it allows me to be a bit more objective about Woody. It's not so close to me: I came to Wooody through Bob Dylan, and because I'm a generation younger than those people who were first really fired up by him, people like Bob Dylan. Why it's me and not Bob? Perhaps Bob still feels so strongly about Woody that he wouldn't feel confident—I don't know—going in there, but certainly I'm allowed to being an objective. I think there's a movement among young bands now—perhaps it's more prevalent in the United States at the moment, though—to go back and look at a time before music was so exploitative, about a time when it expressed more communal ideas, more positive ideas. But it's a tradition that we're part of, it's part Folk, it's part Punk, it's part Rock, but it is a tradition and I do feel part of that tradition. I don't feel the heir, the sole heir to it, but I do feel very much part of that tradition.
[This Land Is Your Land — Woody Guthrie]
What is the most important political song ever written?
Oy, you put me on the spot now! [laughs]
I meant to.
The most important political song ever written ...
Most influential ...
The most influential political song ever written, that's probably better, isn't it. It's a really tough one, because, y'know, the thing about political ... When we talk about political music, we almost always—by definition—we're talking about left-wing politics, we never talk about the politics of the right at all and the right songs they have. Obviously, a song like `Rule Britannia' is a very political song, or `Land Of Hope And Glory' ...
Or `God Bless America'—to which `This Land Is My Land' [sic!] was a direct response.
Yeah, in some ways those songs are much more subtly political. It's the songs that attempt to reinforce received ideas that are perhaps more political; it's those that challenge, I think, that are more interesting. I can't say they are more important, I can't say they are more influential, but I think they're more challenging. So the songs of our time that really make a stink, are the ones that people dismiss as protest song; but they're not really protest songs, the perhaps better term would be `questioning songs'—and I just personally find those songs to be more resonant, and to cut through the commercial fluff that you get. And this is true in the 60s, and was true in the 1930s when Woody was writing. There were those of us who will always be seeking out what is more real. To be able to tell you exactly what's the best one ... I think that's something left to the pages of `MOJO' when they have their lists of things. I really can't; wouldn't like to put my finger on it—but certainly not one I wrote!
[Between The Wars — Billy Bragg]
Billy Bragg himself, singing his song `Between The Wars', which—saving his modesty—cognoscenti of the genre do describe as the finest political song in decades.
[13.54]
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