Celebrating the Woody Guthrie Centennial with "Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions," - Signed by Billy

Nonesuch - 7559-796-260

When American folk legend Woody Guthrie died in 1967, at the age of 55, among his stored belongings were thousands of complete song lyrics for which he had not written out music or made recordings. Many of them had been written in the 1940s and '50s, in the Guthrie family home on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn. The lyrics remained in boxes for decades, but once his daughter Nora found them in the 1990s, she knew they had to be shared. She approached English singer-songwriter and activist Billy Bragg to select some to set to music.

The Chicago rock band Wilco came aboard soon after, with Jeff Tweedy writing music—along with his late bandmate Jay Bennett on some songs—and the band recording with both Tweedy and Bragg on vocals. Natalie Merchant joined the group to sing a duet with Bragg and two solo songs, and guitarist/singer Corey Harris, who wrote two songs and co-wrote one, performed on many tracks. In 1998, the first batch of songs was released to critical acclaim as Mermaid Avenue, receiving a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Mermaid Avenue Vol. II followed in 2000.

April 21, 2012, finds the release of Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions, which includes: Mermaid Avenue; Mermaid Avenue Vol. II (re-mastered); Mermaid Avenue Vol. III, comprising 17 previously unreleased recordings made during the Mermaid Avenue sessions; director Kim Hopkins' 1999 film Man in the Sand, which documents those sessions; and a 48-page booklet with new liner notes by Nora Guthrie, full lyrics, archival photographs, and facsimiles of lyric sheets and sketches by Woody Guthrie.

Bragg told NPR in 1998, "The words are so powerful, they're so evocative to many people…That's the strength of Woody, it's the simplicity." Tweedy added, "I'd have a really good feeling about things if [the album] did lead a certain number of people back to discover Woody Guthrie."

TRACK LISTING:

MERMAID AVENUE

- Walt Whitman's Niece
- California Stars
- Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key
- Birds and Ships
- Hoodoo Voodoo
- She Came Along to Me
- At My Window Sad and Lonely
- Ingrid Bergman
- Christ for President
- I Guess I Planted
- One by One
- Eisler on the Go
- Hesitating Beauty
- Another Man's Done Gone
- The Unwelcome Guest

MERMAID AVENUE Vol. II

- Airline to Heaven
- My Flying Saucer
- Feed of Man
- Hot Rod Hotel
- I Was Born
- Secret of the Sea
- Stetson Kennedy
- Remember the Mountain Bed
- Blood of the Lamb
- Aginst th' Law
- All You Fascists
- Joe DiMaggio Done It Again
- Meanest Man
- Black Wind Blowing
- Someday Some Morning Sometime

MERMAID AVENUE Vol. III

- Bugeye Jim
- When the Roses Bloom Again
- Gotta Work
- My Thirty Thousand
- Ought to Be Satisfied Now
- Listening to the Wind That Blows
- Go Down to the Water
- Chain of Broken Hearts
- Jailcell Blues
- Don't You Marry
- Give Me a Nail
- The Jolly Banker
- Union Prayer
- Be Kind to the Boy on the Road
- Ain'ta Gonna Grieve
- Tea Bag Blues
- I'm Out to Get

Includes Man in the Sand, a documentary about the making of Mermaid Avenue.