Giving Voice to Woody Guthrie's Unheard Lyrics

BILLY BRAGG, JEFF TWEEDY AND WILCO PERFORM THE SONGS OF MERMAID AVENUE LIVE FOR THE FIRST TIME

By Benjamin Lerner

May/June 2026

Read Berkshire Magazine's May/June 2026 Issue.

From June 26 to 28, the Solid Sound Festival will once again transform the campus of MASS MoCA into one of the most distinctive musical environments in the country. This year’s opening night carries remarkable weight. For the first time, Wilco, the festival’s founders, will be joined by British rocker Billy Bragg for a full concert devoted to the songs of Mermaid Avenue, a landmark collaboration that brought previously unheard Woody Guthrie lyrics to life through the original album released in 1998; Mermaid Avenue Vol. II, released in 2000; and the box set, Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions, released in 2012. Conceived in the 1990s by Woody’s daughter Nora Guthrie, the project transformed Woody’s unpublished lyric manuscripts into a living repertoire that bridged generations, genres, and artistic traditions. Nearly three decades later, the performance in North Adams will bring the collaborators together in a way that never fully happened when the records were originally made.

At the center of that story is not merely a reunion, but an act of rediscovery. Mermaid Avenue was never just a tribute album, nor simply an archival exercise. It was a reintroduction: a way of bringing Woody back into the present not as a static folk icon, but as a living and expansive writer whose words could still provoke, console, amuse, and resonate. In the years since, the songs from the Mermaid Avenue sessions have taken on a life of their own, becoming a treasured part of Wilco’s canon, a vital chapter in Bragg’s career, and one of the most enduring collaborations in contemporary music.

THE ARCHIVES COME TO LIFE

Long before the songs of Mermaid Avenue found their way onto records and stages, they existed only as paper— thousands of lyric sheets scattered across notebooks, folders, and boxes accumulated over the course of Woody’s restless life asa songwriter. Mermaid Avenue was inspired by the street name where Woody lived with his family during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the location of many of the unpublished lyrics’ origins.

For decades after his death in 1967, much of that material remained largely unexplored. When Nora began systematically working through the archive in the early 1990s, she found far more than a cache of unfinished ideas; she discovered a vast body of work that would radically change the public perception of her father.

“I had just discovered them myself,” Nora recalls, “and I was so excited because I felt like the only person in the world that knew Woody Guthrie had written a song about flying saucers, or about Ingrid Bergman, or about Walt Whitman’s niece.” Alongside the political songs and Dust Bowl ballads that had defined his public legacy, Nora found love songs as well as songs that served as comic sketches, surreal digressions, and cultural observations that revealed a far more expansive imagination. The familiar image of Woody as a singularly serious chronicler of workers and migrants suddenly seemed incomplete.

That realization gave Nora both a creative spark and a sense of responsibility. “I felt like the only person in the world that knew these songs existed,” she says, “and I couldn’t keep it to myself.” What she envisioned was not a museum display or scholarly edition, but something more alive: a musical revival that would allow contemporary artists to bring the words into circulation by setting them to new music.

Finding the right artist to begin that process was not easy. By the early 1990s, much of American acoustic songwriting had drifted toward confessional and inward-focused lyrics. Nora was looking for someone who still approached song as a public act. “Most of the songwriters in the United States had become singer- songwriter types,” she says. “They were singing about their apartments and their boyfriends. But my father wrote union songs, anti-fascist songs, and songs about the world.”

Across the Atlantic, she found that sensibility in Bragg. Emerging from Britain’s punk scene and grounded in folk traditions of his own, Bragg had built a career on songs that fused political clarity with palpable human emotion. “I felt like he was kind of an equal to my father at that age,” Nora says. “Politically in the same box with my dad and musically using music as a tool—a political tool.”

For Bragg, the invitation felt both thrilling and improbable. When Nora first mentioned the project at a celebration for Woody’s 80th birthday, he remembers thinking, “Surely that is Bob Dylan’s job.” But once she began sending him copies of the lyrics, the project started to feel not mythic but strangely intimate. “They weren’t fragments,” Bragg says. “These were complete songs. They just had no musical notation.” In that respect, the material felt oddly familiar. “When I write a song, you just get a bit of paper with a load of words on it,” he says. “Woody wrote in a similar way.”

The deeper Bragg ventured into the archive, the more staggering the scale became. Early estimates suggested Woody had written around 2,000 songs, though later research pushed the number beyond 3,000. The vast majority had never been recorded in his lifetime.

“About 90 percent of the songs Woody wrote he never recorded,” Bragg says. Yet that abundance also produced an artistic problem. When Bragg began trying some of the songs out live in England, mixing them with his own compositions, audiences often could not tell where Woody ended and Billy began. “It became apparent to me they couldn’t tell which was a Woody song and which was a Billy Bragg song,” he recalls.

That realization led him toward bringing in additional musicians. He realized that the project needed another perspective, which would widen its range and keep it from becoming simply an extension of Bragg’s own voice. That search led him to Jeff Tweedy and Wilco, whose 1996 album Being There had established them as one of the most culturally resonant American bands. Bragg sensed that Wilco could offer the right balance: an American musical vocabulary rooted in tradition, yet expansive enough to carry the archive somewhere new. “I felt Jeff would understand the privilege of working with one of the great songwriters of the tradition,” he says.

For Tweedy, the invitation quickly became something larger than a side project. “When it was brought up that we could go to the archives and write songs too, I saw it as an opportunity of a lifetime,” he says. What began as Nora’s instinct, then Bragg’s commitment, soon became a transatlantic creative convergence—Bragg’s bold directness, Wilco’s adventurous artistry, and Nora’s stewardship of the archive meeting in the same body of songs.

PASTURES OF PLENTY

Once the collaborators were assembled, the project moved quickly from concept to practice. Early sessions began in Chicago before the musicians regrouped in Dublin, which Bragg proposed as neutral ground. “Rather than me come to Chicago or you come to London,” he recalls suggesting, “why don’t we do it in Dublin?” It was a practical solution, but also a way of entering the music without anyone’s home terrain dominating the atmosphere.

From the start, the sessions carried unusual momentum. A handful of songs— including “California Stars”—were recorded early on, and Bragg immediately sensed the project had found its footing. “It already sounded like a record,” he says. Rather than a limited side project, the undertaking began expanding almost immediately. “We were sent there to record maybe a dozen songs,” Bragg explains. “We ended up recording over 50.” The archive seemed inexhaustible, and each lyric suggested another doorway.Inside the studio, the process was both disciplined and intuitive. New lyrics would appear each day, sometimes five or six at a time, and the musicians would begin working almost immediately. For Tweedy, the experience carried a rare kind of freedom. “There was a liberation in knowing that the words were the words,” he says. “You weren’t going to change them.” Because the lyrics were fixed, the creative energy could be devoted entirely to discovering what music belonged underneath them.

Woody’s language made that process feel surprisingly natural. “He’s such a rhythmic writer,” Tweedy says. “There would be a cadence right off the bat.”

Some songs arrived through experimentation; others seemed to announce themselves almost instantly. “Just the name alone made me think you’ve got to make this beautiful,” Tweedy says of “California Stars,” a song whose arrangement would become one of the most beloved pieces in Wilco’s orbit. Elsewhere, the sessions opened up stranger, more unexpected sides of Woody’s imagination. Bragg recalls finding the lyrics about flying saucers or making love to Ingrid Bergman particularly captivating, which were precisely the kind of lyrics Nora hoped that the musicians would embrace.

Nora’s own presence in Dublin helped keep the archive alive as a living source rather than a static repository. She brought new lyric sheets with her, stayed close to the process, and occasionally introduced songs that had only just surfaced. One such moment produced “Another Man’s Done Gone,” when she watched Bragg and Wilco begin shaping the song almost immediately. “Jeff didn’t even know we were recording it, but it was so beautiful because it was so raw,” she remembers. That rawness—half discovery, half performance—became central to the album’s identity.

As depicted in the accompanying 1999 documentary, Man in the Sand, the Mermaid Avenue sessions were not without friction. Looking back, both Tweedy and Bragg agree that the conflict was not as confrontational as it might have appeared on film. Rather, it was natural tension that all but inevitably arose as the result of passionate artists working at full concentration. The musicians had different instincts and different preferences, yet those contrasts often enriched the songs rather than undermined them. Nora would later describe the partnership in beautifully simple terms: “There’s the pulse of the punk that is Billy and the more melodic, poetic side that is Wilco.” Their styles, she says, were “really oil and vinegar in so many ways. And somehow it made a great dressing together.”

When the initial album appeared in 1998, followed by Mermaid Avenue Vol. II in 2000 and later The Complete Sessions in 2012, it became clear that the project had done more than revive lost texts. It had revealed a fuller Woody Guthrie—romantic, funny, strange, political, tender, and unpredictable—without embalming him in reverence. The songs sounded not like museum pieces, but like fresh compositions carrying older words into a new era.

WILCO AT THE CROSSROADS

For Wilco, Mermaid Avenue arrived during a moment of artistic expansion. The band was already moving beyond the alt-country framework that had shaped its early identity, working toward the more ambitious terrain that would soon become Summerteeth. In that sense, the Guthrie project might have looked like a detour back toward roots music. Instead, it became a bridge between tradition and experimentation.

At first, Tweedy misunderstood the invitation, assuming Wilco had simply been asked to back Bragg, “which probably would have been appealing enough,” he says. Once it became clear that the band would also write music from the archive, the collaboration took on deeper meaning. The paradox was that Wilco, at the very moment it was trying to escape a narrow Americana label, found the endeavor not a limitation but a liberation. “Woody Guthrie is like a genre in himself,” Tweedy says. “Even though you can associate him with a certain period in American music, he looms much larger than that.”

The project also became a lesson in process. Seeing Woody’s notebooks and lyric drafts offered Tweedy a reminder of how much labor lies behind the illusion of natural genius. “It was a master class lesson,” he says. “You realize the tiny little bit people see is the result of all that work.” Woody’s pages contained not only finished lyrics, but fragments, failed starts, and repeated attempts. “To write good songs, you have to write a lot of bad ones,” Tweedy reflects. “You have to give yourself permission to write about anything and keep going.”

Over time, the songs entered Wilco’s life in ways few side projects do. “California Stars” became a staple. Other pieces settled naturally into the band’s repertoire. What had begun as a collaboration on Woody’s words increasingly became part of Wilco’s own story as well. By the time the 2012 box set appeared, Mermaid Avenue had become not an outlier but a distinct and meaningful chapter in the band’s broader discography.

That long afterlife is one reason the 2026 Solid Sound performance feels so resonant. The concert, for Tweedy, is less an exercise in nostalgia than a chance to complete something that time and circumstance left unfinished. When the albums were first released, no true Mermaid Avenue tour ever materialized. The songs lived on, but the collaboration itself remained oddly incomplete in public. This year’s festival offers a way to correct that.

A FESTIVAL BUILT BY ARTISTS

The milestone Mermaid Avenue performance could hardly happen in a more fitting setting. Over the years, Solid Sound has become one of the most distinctive boutique festivals in American music—not merely because of its lineup, but because of the philosophy behind it. Hosted by Wilco at MASS MoCA since 2010, the weekend is intentionally designed as a more thoughtful and porous alternative to large-scale festival culture. It is a place where music does not compete against itself in a blur of overlapping stages, but is allowed to unfold alongside visual art, conversation, comedy, and communal gathering. That vision continues with the 2026 lineup, which includes The Breeders, Gang of Four, S.G. Goodman, L’Rain, Rich(ard) Dawson, Souled American, Hannah Cohen, Nels Cline’s Consentrik Quartet, The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, and Bragg himself alongside Tweedy & Friends and a wide range of emerging artists.

The weekend also extends well beyond music. This year’s program includes comedy from John Hodgman, Jordan Klepper, Demi Adejuyigbe, and Jo Firestone, along with pop-up performances, record-vendor stalls, silk-screening demonstrations, artist signings, yoga, hikes, Kidspace art activities, bike parking, a Wilco Yard Sale, and even a Friends of Bill meeting. The point is not simply abundance, but a richer kind of festival life—one that allows people to move between intensity and reflection.

Tweedy has spoken openly about wantingSolid Sound to avoid many of the frustration she associated with festivals as a fan and touring musician: bloated prices, sound bleed, crowd chaos, and a relentless sense of overstimulation. At MASS MoCA, the museum itself helps solve those problems. People can step away into galleries, absorb visual art, or simply find a moment of stillness between sets. The effect is that music and museum life become inseparable. One doesn’t merely attend a lineup; one inhabits an environment.

In that context, the Friday night Mermaid Avenue performance feels entirely at home. Solid Sound has long reserved its opening night for something singular— an unusual concept set, a one-time performance, a reframing of Wilco’s identity. This year, that slot goes not to novelty, but to history: to a body of songs that sits at the cross-roads of Woody Guthrie’s legacy, Billy Bragg’s politics, and Wilco’s evolving sense of American music.

THE BERKSHIRES AND THE GUTHRIE LEGACY

For Nora, the location adds a separate layer of meaning. The Berkshires is not merely a scenic backdrop or a useful festival destination; it is deeply woven into the family’s own history. “It wasn’t just ‘Alice’s Restaurant,’” she says. “We all went to camp there.” She points to the Indian Hill Music Workshop in Stockbridge, where her mother, Marjorie Guthrie, was deeply involved, as one of the earliest and most formative family connections to the region. It was a space for the arts rather than athletics, where young musicians, actors, and visual artists gathered for summers of creative immersion.

Nora’s brother, folk singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie, would later attend school in the area, and the church in Great Barrington made famous by “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” eventually became the Guthrie Center in the southern Berkshire village of Housatonic, which continues to host concerts and community programming.

“We’re pretty embedded,” Nora says. The performance at Solid Sound

is therefore more than a reunion concert. It is also a return to a region that has carried Guthrie family memory in multiple forms for generations. At the same time, it is a continuation of the work she has spent decades doing: opening the archive outward, allowing different musicians to encounter Woody’s words and draw out different dimensions of his humanity. “Each thing I do,” she says, “is to try to include more people in the story.”

That philosophy has shaped projects far beyond Mermaid Avenue, including later collaborations with Jay Farrar and the Dropkick Murphys. Nora often notes that the artists themselves must feel the connection for the songs to live. “Once I make the deal, it’s their baby,” she says. Her task is not to micromanage interpretation, but to protect the spirit of the archive while allowing the music to belong fully to those performing it. That openness has led to wonderful surprises. When the Dropkick Murphys turned “Shipping Up to Boston” into a Celtic-punk anthem, they won Nora over, she says. “They made magic out of it.”

What Nora has spent the past three decades proving, again and again, is that Woody’s legacy grows larger when it becomes more human. The songs about unions and fascism are still relevant. And so are the songs about romance, silliness, baseball, movies, Jewish history, and fantasy. The fuller the portrait becomes, the more people can find their way in. “He becomes more real; more accessible,” Nora says.

In that sense, the Solid Sound performance becomes more than a celebratory reunion. It becomes another chapter in the long unfolding of Woody Guthrie’s afterlife—a story that began in boxes of forgotten lyric sheets and continues through records, festivals, archives, and family memory. For a few hours in North Adams this summer, Bragg and Wilco will carry those words into the air together at last. And in doing so, they will remind listeners that the songs of Mermaid Avenue were never only about the past. They were always about what happens when old words find new voices, and when legacy is allowed not simply to endure, but to live and breathe.