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Brooke’s work offers an example of how archived material can be brought to new and vibrant life when creative artists are let loose among the stacks.
HAT happens when you set a singer-songwriter loose in the
archives? Jonatha
Brooke talks to Matt Finch about the creation of her album The Works, based on material in the Woody Guthrie archive.
All you gotta do is touch me All you gotta do is touch me All you gotta do is touch me Touch me good Finish later.
Jonatha Brooke held a tattered yellow slip. It wasn’t promising. These scrawled, repetitive lines were the treasures of Woody Guthrie’s archive? She’d been invited to create new songs from decades of unused material by the late folk legend, following in the footsteps of artists like Billy Bragg and Wilco, who had brought Guthrie’s lyrics to life in the Grammy-nominated Mermaid Avenue sessions.
Freed from trespassing Guthrie’s daughter Nora had asked for Brooke, an acclaimed pop singer- songwriter with stronger affinities to Joni Mitchell and Suzanne Vega than the man whose guitar was emblazoned with the slogan: “This machine kills fascists”. Now Nora offered these simple scraps as a teasing challenge: Can you make something from this? It turned out Brooke could. She shared Nora’s cheeky sense of humour, and her own pop background meant she felt “freed from trespassing on the territory of an American folk icon”. Exploring Guthrie’s collected papers, she discovered more than just the legend who gave us This Land Is Your Land.
“He could write dumb goofy songs April-May 2021
about the nurse in the hospital alongside lyrics of amazing insight and clarity,” she explains. “At every stage of his life, on napkins and torn paper, in journals and on legal pads, he was always this explorer.”
Brooke spent two full weeks working her way through decades of scribbles, sketches, paintings, lyrics, and notes to self, from the fluent work of Guthrie’s prime to the hard-won scrawl forced on him by Huntington’s chorea in later years. She encountered a Guthrie who was romantic as well as strident, a Guthrie who could write:
I fully aim to get my soul known again
As the maniac, the saint, the sinner, the drinker, the thinker, the queer I am the works, the whole works And it’s not ’till you have called me all of these things That I feel satisfied.
Fresh light
“This was a guy fully in his essence, ravenous for experience, expressing himself through paint on the page, words on the page,” Brooke says. “I didn’t have any interest in the political songs. I guess I set out to find the lover in this guy, and I ended up finding the lover in myself.”
In one of the pieces Brooke uncovered, Guthrie wrote, “let me come to you as close as I can with whatever poems or scattered pages you want me to bring”. By juxtaposing such scattered pages from the archives – combining the first, repetitive scraps of “all you gotta do is touch me” with “the maniac, the saint, the sinner, the drinker, the thinker, the queer” – Brooke created new songs that spanned years and decades, casting an American icon in a fresh light. Like Guthrie, who often built songs
Matt Finch (@drmattfinch) is a writer and consultant who specialises in strategy, foresight, and innovation work with institutions worldwide. See more at www.
mechanicaldolphin.com
from refurbished folk melodies and spirituals, Brooke never trained as a musician. She writes songs “by ear and then by feel, the choreography of fingers on strings and keys”. After days going through archived papers with white gloves and spatula, she picked up her guitar and brought words written in Guthrie’s hand to life, feeling a “physical kinship with Woody’s energy” that went beyond language. Brooke’s work offers an example of how archived material can be brought to new and vibrant life when creative artists are let loose among the stacks. Her unique engagement with Guthrie’s legacy meant she came to know the songwriter in a way few others could.
Reading across the eras of his life, she says: “You could see: he’s still the same guy. He was still fighting his battle even when he could barely get his pen to the page, and he was finding ways to make his peace with this.” One of the finds which Brooke prized most was a couplet:
I’ll never dread the day I die Cause my sunset is somebody’s morning sky
Could anyone express the power of the archive better than that? IP
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