Writer Mike Farren once said that Bob Dylan wanted to be Elvis but there was a vacancy for Woody Guthrie, so he took the gig. Billy Bragg started out as Bob Dylan with a dash of The Clash, but now there's another vacancy for Woody Guthrie, and he's got the job.

    Bragg has just embarked on arguably the most important project of his 15-year career. The man the Sunday Times recently described as a ``1980s protest singer'' (so kind!) is breathing new life into the legend of Woody Guthrie, who fled the dust bowls of Oklahoma and Texas for California in the 1940s, writing and singing his way to a unique status in modern American music. Guthrie died in 1967, the victim of Huntington's chorea, a disease which afflicted him just as he was becoming fashionable in folk-revival New York. He left little recorded work.

    There are many ties that bind Guthrie and Bragg: both are solo performers, both are singer-songwriters, both are political (and for roughly the same theme). Bragg got into Guthrie, like many others, via his heir Dylan (the cap-doffing ``Song to Woody'' appears on Dylan's eponymous 1962 debut album). For Bragg, it wasn't exactly love at first listen—Guthrie recordings are scratchy, uncosmetic creations—but certainly respect.

    In 1991 he pinched the title of a Woody drawing he's seen in Washington's Smithsonian Institution, ``You Woke Up My Neighbourhood'', and used it for a song on his album Don't Try This at Home. In 1992 he played the song at a free concert in New York in honour of the 80th anniversary of Guthrie's birth, and things started to fall into place. Nora, Guthrie's daughter, was side-staged and as curator of her father's private archive, she was lookig for someone to interpret a treasure chest-full of unseen lyrics and poems into songs. (Though unable to hold a guitar or sing during his last then years, Woody continued to write, latterly dictating to his devoted wife Marjorie.)

    Bragg and Nora shook hands, and the project was set in motion. It ebventually came to fruition last year, when Bragg recruited the Chicago country rock band Wilco—in particular their gifted songwriter Jeff Tweedy—to collaborate on thrashing out some brand new Guthrie tunes. The reuslts have been honed and recorded in Dublin, where Bragg talked about the project. ``It's a collaboration, not a Woody Guthrie record or a tribute album,'' he says.

    Bragg is quick to point up Tweedy's vital role (they share the composer credits) and is mindful of the ``tribute album'' trap, where assorted artists each interpret a number from Whichever Great Artist's canon, and an inconsistent if heartfelt mishmash results.

    The Guthrie album, title Songs of Experience and due out this summer (followed by a BBC2 documentary) has been a liberating experience for the previously solo Bragg. ``Making records is usually a solitary experience for me—I'm leading from the front, and also pushing from the back. This record has been more fun: watching Jeff work, seeing where he's going, then I've got the guys from Wilco and I can bring them my way.''

    The creative process has been non-stop (there is already talk of as second album). One night in January the 48-year-old Nora Guthrie arrived at Dublin's Totally Wired studio with a fistful of new lyrics (``Nora really vibed us up,'' remarks the producer and longtime Bragg confidante Grant Showbiz). At 3am, during a guitar overdub, Bragg pulled ``a couple of little chords'' out of the air, ``fucked around for half an hour'' and played it to Nora. Wilco's Jay Bennett, at the piano found the missing chord between E monor and A seventh. Tweedy, dozing behind a curtain, woke up and sang ``Another Man Done Gone'', with Nora sitting in. In 15 minutes, they'd recorded five versions, and it was done. Bragg is still amazed by the buzz. ``Something happens.''

    The notion of a 40-year-old Englishman, born in Barking, interpreting the thoughts of the doomed Oklahoman is rich with cross-cultural, transatlantic, pan-generational possibility. To chance a comparison, when the comedian Paul Merton does Tony Hancock on the TV, it is not from unperformed scripts, and the outcome is an inoffensive but pointless copy. Here, as Bragg notes, the subject and his interpreter are not just a generation apart, but ``an ocean apart''. The age-old cross-pollination of English and American folk songs and ballads is a historical bridge that links the two men. That, and the political rhetoric. ``We've had similar influences. But the political angle really binds me to Woody. I'm writing songs about unions too, and there's not many of us about.

    Guthrie was never a card-carrying communist, but wrote for the feft-wing papers People's Worldand the Sunday Worker. He was demonised for his views, especially in his native Okemah, and even in California, where the communists were instrumental in organising the unions during Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal welfare-to-work programme. Guthrie later refused to tone down his opinions for a weekly CBS radio show in New York and subsequently blew a $200-a-week cheque. As Colin Irwin wrote in Mojo recently: ``Every time good money and tangible celebrity was put a polite handshake away, he'd press the self-destruct button.''

    Bragg's journey has been less tumultuous, though he quit his independent record company Go!Discs after eight years when a 49 per cent share was sold off to PolyGram, and has always insisted his records retail for a fixed low price (his most recent, William Bloke, was £9.99). From working-class stock, Bragg clearly admires Guthrie's authenticity, contrasting him to a ``middle-class, catholic guilt-tripping twat'' such as Jack Kerouac, or even agit-folk Guthrie contemporary Pete Seeger, a Harvard graduate.

    ``If you want to find an American lyrical poet as powerful as Woody Guthrie, you've got to start at Walt Whitman or Mark Twain. Allen Ginsberg doesn't come near it. Bob Dylan? Forget it, he didn't write Bound for Glory (Guthrie's fictionalised autobiography, turned into a ropey 1977 movie with Keith Carradine). You can't compare him to Hemingway goofing off in Spain with his rolled-up money.''

    Guthrie's most famous song is ``This Land Is Your Land'', written in impassioned response to Irving Berlin's ``God Blessed America'', a kind of parody from the point of view of the worker. It was soon taken up as a quasi-hymn by the schoolchildren of America. (This was fitting as Guthrie wrote countless kids' songs—he was father to a total of eight.) Many of his songs have become folk standards, themselves often ``adapted'', as is the tradition, from things he heard along the way. Annotation is frequently found alongside Guthrie's original lyrics: beneath one of the new ones in Bragg's posession, ``Bugeyed Jim'', runs the explanation: ``I fished this up out of some place or other, April 30, 1946.''

    Just as Bragg is falsely characterised as a ``1980s'' artist or only as a writer of protest songs, so knowledge of Woody Guthrie's work is often confined to his Dust Bowl set, recorded in 1940 (first-hand ballads as his people evacuated a devastated Pampa, Texas: ``Dust Storm Disaster'', ``Dust Can't Kill Me''. ``Dust Pnemonia Blues''). The newly uncovered lyrics confirm a broader palette.

    ``She Came Along to Me'' is a love song to his wife written in 1942, with the opening line: ``Ten hundred books could I write you about her now.'' Equally the silver-tongued Guthrie was capable of being a cheating, womanising cad, taking full advantage of groupies on the road and allowing the frequent tragedies in his life (he believed his family were cursed) to excuse booze and hanky-panky. Among the new material, Bragg calls ``Tea Bag Blues'' a classic ``trouser snake song''.

    ``When I found it, I thought of you,'' Nora told Bragg, referring to the Englishman's ribald humour rather than suggesting Guthrie-like tendencies. Bragg is an honourable sort of guy; square, even. A moonstruck movie-star paean entitled, simply, ``Ingrid Bergman'' [sic!], adds to Guthrie's red-blooded reputation, and delights Bragg (``I didn't want to make an album of PC songs'').

    Within the new collection, more mainline titles such as ``Low Pay Daddy High Price Blues'' and ``Black Wind Blowing'' are countered by whimsy such as ``Mr. Flying Saucer'' and, more bawdily, ``Walt Whitman's Niece'' (``And as she read, I lay my head, and I can't tell which head, down in her lap''); not, we may deduce, written about his wife. ``Union Prayer'', written in 1949, conjures up Bragg's own 1987 tub-thumper ``There is Power in a Union'', but also contains a religious vein absent [from] the Englishman's work: ``I hear that prayer and praying will change this world around / Will prayer change shacks to decent homes? / Will prayer change sick men into healthy? / Will prayer change hate to words of love? / Will prayer give me my right to vote?''

    Sometimes the politics is hard, in your face, as in ``All U Fascists Bound to Lose,'' but the closing line of the love song ``She Came Along to Me''—``And maybe we'll ahvwe all the fascists out the way by then''—reveals more. As does the fact that his famous Grapes of Wrath number ``The Ballad of Tom Joad'' (which inspired Bruce Springsteen) was written not after reading Steinbeck's book, but after seeing the 1940 Henry Fonda film—a record executive had tipped him off that there might be a market for a song after the film's success. Whatever the motive, it turned out to be among Guthrie's best work.

    ``He wasn't some wandering minstrel idiot savant,'' says Bragg. ``He wanted to be a pop star. But he also had something else which sent him spinning off into another place.''

    Despite his apparent vanity, Guthrie never did become a star (in the 1940s, radio stations would use Burl Ives as a cleaned-up apolitical Guthrie, and there was no love lost between the two singers). By the time of Sputnik, he was writing about it, but was unfit to appear before the public. And negative feelings about him linger in Oklahoma. Two years ago a shopkeeper in his hometown erected a sign saying ``Okemah: Home of Woody Guthrie'', which was quickly vadalised with the footnote ``Commist (sic) draft dodger and red''. They took it down.

    Still, a Woody Guthrie day was declared in Okemah last year, and an official Guthrie US postage stamp is on the cards for 1998. Bragg's aim is more ambitious: to re-instate Guthrie as ``a true giant of American literature''.

    This is not a status anyone is likely to claim for Bragg and it illustrates that for all the marketing convenience of being able to promote Bragg as a modern-day Guthrie, the claim misleads and lessens the importance of both. Bragg, like Guthrie, has taken his music on the road, albeit propelled by boredom rather than dust storms, and persisted with causes and themes of which others have grown tired. But when Bragg sings of political vision, there is irony and pragmatism as well as committment (``In a perfect world we'd all sing in tune / But this is reality so give me some room''—``Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards'').

    Guthrie was a radical before and after the war, but an active patriot during it. Equally he was as happy to drop out and drink with the hobos as get up and make a public stand against oppression. Maybe Guthrie's unpredictability, some of it mythologised, but in reality the source of his magic, is what takes him beyond Bragg's work, which is easier to read, and so to compartmentalise.

    Unlike Guthrie, Bragg has not faced a McCarthyte blacklist; rather he has the ear of national media. But the fact that his barricade-charging are behind him does not alter his loyalty to the struggles he sings about: for the unrepresented and the disposessed. It is hardly surprising that he has responded with such passion to a spiritual alliance with an authentic revolutionary.

    The collaboration has yielded some great songs which will increase Bragg's approval rating in the US. Uncomfortable with such boardroom speculation, Bragg shifts tack. ``It's Woody time. People are looking for something real and solid that hasn't been done to death in the media. Some people in America aren't even sure if he ever existed.''

    No such doubts surround Billy Bragg. He's still very much the available rebel, happy to tell the Guardian which way he's going to vote or The Midnight Hour what he thinks of the Dome. Perhaps his new deal with Woody will establish him as the first ``1990s protest singer''.

Songs of Experince will be released by East West Records in June. A BBC2 documentary will follow. Andrew Collins is working on a biography of Billy Bragg.

New Statesman. — London : New Statesman.
ISSN 1364-7431
127. 1998, 4375 (6.03.1998), pp28-30