<<< Back to News

Mermaid Avenue

"Mermaid Avenue is the name of the street in Coney Island, Brooklyn, that was home to Woody Guthrie and his wife, Marjorie and their kids in the years that followed World War II.

Here he daydreamed about making love to Ingrid Bergman on the slopes of an Italian volcano and wondered to himself what he would do if, like left-wing songwriter Hanns Eisler, he was called before the house committee on un-American activities. And here he wrote songs.

Hundreds of them. Nonsense songs for his kids like Hoodoo Voodoo, visions of his own Oklahoma childhood like Way over yonder in the minor key, mid-century love songs like Hesitating Beauty and work of personal self-exploration like Another Man's Done Gone that make him prime candidate as the first in a long line of singer songwriters.

Despite the fact that his recording career was more or less over by 1947, he carried on writing songs until he became too ill to hold a pencil. The last years of his life were spent in the Brooklyn State Hospital and when he died in 1967, the tunes that he had dreamt up for these hundreds of unrecorded songs, tunes he had carried in his head all his life were lost forever.

Woody's daughter Nora Guthrie approached me in the spring of 1995 with the idea of writing some new music to accompany these lost songs.

She runs the Woody Guthrie archive in New York city and offered me access to over a thousand complete lyrics of her father's that are in her care. Hand-written or typed, often bearing the date and place where they were written and sometimes accompanied by an insight into the process at work, they offer us a broader picture of a man who over the past sixty years has been vilified by the American Right whilst simultaneously being canonised by the American left In her original letter to me, Nora talked of breaking the mould, of working with her farther to give words a new sound and a new context.

The result is not a tribute album but a collaboration between Woody Guthrie and a new generation of songwriters who until now had only glimpsed him fleetingly, over the shoulder of Bob Dylan or somewhere in the distance of a Bruce Springsteen song." Billy Bragg London 1998.

Mermaid Avenue is released by Elektra Entertainment in the US and the Warner Music Group internationally.

Check out: http://webobjects.elektra.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/elektra/Home.woa/wa/load?ID=521&Page=Artist

<<< Back to News