‘Mermaid Avenue’ Live: Billy Bragg and Wilco are finally performing their beloved Woody Guthrie albums together
Across his quite brilliant career, Billy Bragg has landed six studio albums in the UK top 20, but never once touched the top 100 as a solo artist in America; a strange imbalance some have attributed entirely to the man’s east London accent.
Meanwhile, for the Chicago-based Wilco, it’s a reversal of the story: six top 20 albums in the US, none in the UK. Is Jeff Tweedy’s gentle but grizzled Midwestern introspection the equivalent of sounding “too regional?”
If we simplify things down to an acknowledgment that Billy Bragg is merely a bit too English for America; and Wilco a tad too American for the Brits, then it only makes it more magical to see how both acts transcended those limitations when they collaborated together on a pair of Woody Guthrie “covers” records in the late ‘90s, known as Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II.
I put the word “covers” in quotation marks because the tunes on Mermaid Avenue, while selected from the massive Guthrie lyrical archive, were never recorded onto tape by the man himself, giving Bragg and Wilco free rein to interpret the songs in whatever style and tone they pleased.
“We are just hired hands,” Bragg said at the time, speaking to The Rocket newspaper in Seattle. “The really important thing to understand is the [Guthrie] archive is all lyrics. It’s the most powerful aspect of Woody Guthrie. That’s what’s been saved. Not his voice. Not his tune writing. But the strength of the lyrics stand up on their own.”
The first Mermaid Avenue album, released in 1998, gained a lot of international publicity, powered largely by the novelty concept of two modern artists bringing lost Woody Guthrie songs to life. It also came out at a very strange point of convergence for these two seemingly disparate acts that Woody’s daughter Nora Guthrie had selected for the challenge.
Bragg had just turned 40 and had a dozen years behind him with loads of success and critical acclaim, outside America at least, with a firm reputation established as a superb lyricist and politically active voice for the working class. Wilco, by contrast, were something of an upstart indie band – a spin-off of the alt-country heroes Uncle Tupelo, led by a 30-year-old Tweedy and 34-year-old Jay Bennett. They’d only put out two records and had yet to release their breakout hits Summerteeth in 1999 or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot three years later.
The songs on Mermaid Avenue, then, served a dual—or triple purpose: honouring the legacy of Guthrie, raising the profile of the upstart Wilco, and introducing the veteran Bragg to a wider audience on the other side of the Atlantic.
Perhaps by no coincidence, Billy sounds a lot less like himself on Mermaid Avenue, adopting a very subtle Guthrie-esque twang that serves the material very well on tracks like ‘Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key’ and ‘Ingrid Bergman’ without sounding put-on or inauthentic. Wilco rise to the occasion, as well, seamlessly folding Guthrie into the ’90s alt-country sound on some of the most beautiful tunes you’ll ever hear, including ‘One By One’, ‘At My Window Sad and Lonely’, and a song that’s remained a staple of Wilco live sets, ‘California Stars’.
Both Mermaid Avenue and its follow-up, 2000’s Volume II, were well reviewed and managed to achieve what Bragg and Wilco’s separate efforts hadn’t. Billy got a charting album on the US Billboard, and Wilco made its first major splash with British audiences, as the two albums peaked at number 34 and number 61 in the UK, respectively.
Like folksy acoustic ships in the night, however, Billy Bragg and Wilco went on their merry ways after leaving Mermaid Avenue, and up to this point, they had yet to do the obvious by actually performing their Guthrie interpretations together as part of a live show.
That oversight, happily, will be remedied next summer, as it’s been announced that Billy Bragg will join Wilco at the latter’s Solid Sound Festival in Massachusetts, June 26th, 2026, to perform a selection of songs from the Mermaid Avenue sessions.
“The world needs all the Woody Guthrie it can get,” Tweedy announced in a press release. “We’re thrilled that we get to bring these songs to life with Billy.”
“There’s an abiding love out there for the Mermaid Avenue albums,” Bragg added, “So I’m really looking forward to reconnecting with Wilco to bring Woody’s words to life once again.”
The concert, 28 years in the making, will kick off the Solid Sound festival’s first night. For those unable to get there, one can only hope the event might inspire a wider tour in the future.
