Post by ZACH Multimedia

#ZACHMultimediaMusicCrescendos  #ZACHMultimediaHistoryMusea #MermaidAvenue Decades after his death, this album of #WoodyGuthrie songs will be played live #BillyBragg and #Wilco got their hands on a trove of unpublished Guthrie works. The result was magic. By Geoff Edgers, The Washington Post, 26 June 2026 On Friday night, in a large field in Western Massachusetts, an album of Woody Guthrie songs will be performed publicly for the first time. Not by Guthrie, of course — the legendary folk singer has been dead almost 60 years. In fact, he never even heard this music. But the songs on “Mermaid Avenue” are still his. The story of this record’s existence and its overdue path to the stage is one of legacy-keeping and artistic liberties, drugs and death, conflict, remorse and reconciliation. It begins, for our purposes, one day in the early 1990s, when Nora Guthrie found her father’s longtime manager in distress. Harold Leventhal received a tape from a relatively unknown roots singer. The artist, Slaid Cleaves, had set a Woody Guthrie poem to music. [Image - Billy Bragg, left, chose Wilco as his collaborators for “Mermaid Avenue.” (Ken Schles) “Can you imagine the audacity?” Nora Guthrie remembers Leventhal saying. “Would they finish a Shakespeare play?” “Well, have you listened to it?” she asked. Nora put the cassette in a tape deck, pushed play and wasn’t a bit offended by what she heard. Guthrie, who oversaw her father’s estate, was moved by the performance and gave Cleaves permission to put out “This Morning I Am Born Again.” The creative approach also gave her an idea about what to do with the boxes of her father’s writings stored at Leventhal’s office on West 57th Street. Why not take some of those pieces — poems and lyrics never set to music — and have somebody turn them into proper songs? She knew exactly who she wanted to recruit: British folk punk rocker Billy Bragg. She just had to convince him that he could do it. And he had to find the right partners to help him pull it off — which is how a now-famous American band entered the scene. [Image - Nora Guthrie, right, thought Billy Bragg, left, would be perfect for the “Mermaid Avenue” project after seeing him perform at a tribute concert for her father. (Pennie Smith)] Woody Guthrie, the “Dust Bowl troubadour,” rambled across the country in the 1930s and ’40s as he sang about the plight of migrant workers and government overreach. He painted the message “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar and served as the inspiration for a slew of politically conscious artists, from Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to Joe Strummer and Steve Earle. But Huntington’s disease ended his recording career in the early ’50s, and he died in 1967 at Brooklyn State Hospital. He was just 55. Nora remembers Dylan coming by the family’s house on Mermaid Avenue in... ... ... https://lnkd.in/emWDr4_G