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Mermaid Avenue
06/23/1998 3:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Bob Gulla
Let's be honest. The songs that lend themselves best to tributes are the simplest ones, in which the artists covering those songs have full musical reign over the material. The recent Pete Seeger tribute Where Have All The Flowers Gone is a good example, and so is this new Woody Guthrie homage, Mermaid Avenue. Executed mainly by Billy Bragg and the Wilco gang, with help from Natalie Merchant and English fiddler Eliza Carthy, Mermaid Avenue finds the artists taking command of Guthrie's skeletal, strum-and-voice folk and molding it into rich, faithful and beautiful pop. Like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs before him, troubadour Billy Bragg is Guthrie incarnate, only British--a politically savvy, life-on-his-back performer with all the right intentions and a scruffy approach to music. His songs on Mermaid Avenue--"Walt Whitman's Niece," "Birds And Ships" (sung warmly by Merchant), "Ingrid Bergman"--dovetail perfectly with Guthrie's own originals, as do Wilco's, whose renditions, as expected, take on a fleshier, more rootsy feel. All in all, excellent intentions, excellent results.
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