WHEN American folk legend Woody Guthrie’s daughter, Nora, first approached Billy Bragg with the idea of putting some of her father’s lyrics to music, the Bard of Barking was a mite overawed by the proposition.

“I did find it a very daunting prospect,” he admits now. “Woody Guthrie is such an icon to a lot of Americans, a truly legendary figure and I just thought, ‘How the hell am I going to approach this?’ But Nora was great. She told me to put the legend to one side and to concentrate on the lyrics. So that’s what I tried to do.”

Bragg was also concerned that the project would be seen by many as just a tad too obvious – Britain’s most politically aware singer/songwriter taking liberties with the ghost of an American left-wing legend.

“I can well understand why people might run for the hills when they heard I was doing an album of Woody Guthrie songs,” he laughs. “It probably all seems a bit self-indulgent and it could quite easily have turned out that way. But it’s not a tribute album; it’s more of a collaboration. Nora wanted to give new life to these lyrics and to place them in a modern context. The tunes that he’d dreamt up for these songs were in his head and when he died they were lost forever, so we’ll never hear them the way he heard them.”

Bragg needn’t have worried. The end result of this unique collaboration, Mermaid Avenue, is already shaping up to be one of the albums of the year. Named after the street in Coney Island where Guthrie lived with his wife and children in the years after the Second World War, it features stateside country rockers Wilco, with additional contributions from Natalie Merchant and Eliza Carthy, among others. The sound is joyous and spontaneous on the uptempo numbers, with Bragg and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy alternating on lead vocals.

Despite Guthrie’s reputation as a politically motivated writer, the 15 tracks on the album cover a surprisingly wide range of themes, from plaintive love songs such as ‘Hesitating Beauty’ and ‘Ingrid Bergman’ to nonsense verses like ‘Hoodoo Voodoo’, which was written for his children. It also contains evocative memories of Guthrie’s childhood (‘Way Over Yonder In A Minor Key’) and songs of personal exploration (‘Another Man’s Done Gone’).

“Woody was probably the original singer-songwriter,” Bragg suggests. “When you think about it, the only other thing at the time was Tin Pan Alley or guys like Hank Williams, but even Williams was co-writing with Fred Rose, his publisher. Very few of Woody’s contemporaries were writing personal songs of self-doubt and reflection.”

Nora Guthrie had originally sent Bragg just three or four sample lyrics out of an archive of over 2,000 songs, most of which hadn’t been touched since Guthrie died of Huntington’s Chorea in 1967, aged 55.

“They were stashed away in boxes until around the mid-1980s when Woody’s wife Marjorie died,” Bragg explains. “Nora thought she knew everything about her father but she was surprised to discover there was so much material. She even had to employ a professional archivist to bring all the collections together.”

exhaustive task

When he agreed to take on the project, Bragg accompanied Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy to New York to begin the exhaustive task of going through the material in search of suitable lyrics for songs.

“I had to wear white gloves to examine them,” he recalls. “They were stored in big folders with tissue paper between the pages. Some are the original manuscripts but others are photocopies of pages from notebooks. Woody would write on whatever scrap of paper was available and he was prone to typing over kids’ drawings.

“In the first hour I picked up on lyrics that sounded like Woody Guthrie songs, or what I thought Woody Guthrie songs should sound like. Then I noticed that the most exceptional lyrics were ones that didn’t sound like the songs we all knew. So we stopped looking for dustbowl songs like ‘This Land Is Your Land’.”

The whole experience has, Bragg says, changed his long-held perception of Woody Guthrie and how he lived his life. “Before I began this project, I thought of Woody as a dustbowl figure, a metaphor for the Great Depression. I now know that he lived half of his life in New York City. The movie On The Town with Frank Sinatra was made in 1949, around the time some of these lyrics were written. It was on TV just after Sinatra died and I was watching it. So now instead of thinking of Woody in a Grapes Of Wrath setting, I think of him hovering in the background to that movie.”

Bragg also discovered that most of the lyrics in the archive were easily adaptable to use in songs. “Even though they probably weren’t all meant to be songs,” he concedes. “‘Another Man’s Done Gone’ is more a stream of consciousness but I can’t tell the difference between the poems and the songs. Once a songwriter, always a songwriter, I suppose.”

One piece in particular, he reveals, sent a momentary chill through the pair as they hovered over the archive material.

“It was called ‘Oh God’ and it just goes, “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God,” for about four verses. We reckoned it was written just as he was about to go into hospital. Me and Jeff looked at it and then looked at each other for about 30 seconds and said nothing. But Nora told us not to see Woody as the victim all the time. She said he was full of life, and the best way to picture him was as a guy going out drinking with his mates and chasing women. This was a much more accurate picture of the man than this guy going along to union meetings all the time. He didn’t write a love song about Ingrid Bergman to sing at some union meeting, that’s for sure.”

Bragg hopes that Mermaid Avenue will broaden people’s understanding of Guthrie’s unique talent. “Most people, myself included, usually get Woody Guthrie second-hand, through the cover versions. For example, The Byrds did ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’, on Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, Ry Cooder covered ‘Vigilante Man’ and Springsteen had ‘This Land is Your Land’ on his live album. Few come to him directly, from the raw source. With this album there’s a chance to see him as a contemporary figure, He’s become an icon of the past and I’d like to think this project brings him closer to this time, into today’s culture.”

At this point Bragg has to “ring some bloke in Germany”, so there isn’t time to ask why Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son and a singer-songwriter in his own right, wasn’t involved in the project. Or to ask about the fact that much of the recording was done in Dublin at Totally Wired Studios and at Windmill Lane. Ah well, maybe next time.

• Mermaid Avenue is out now on Electra Records.