BRAGG ON TRACK WITH TRAIN SONGS
Songwriter/author rode parallel paths to pen book, record album
It was in a train station in Little Rock, Arkansas where Billy Bragg first found the intersection between his two latest projects.
That’s where his historical book, Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World, and the album of train songs he made with American singer-songwriter/ producer Joe Henry, Shine a Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad, first overlapped. In 2014, the British musician was enlisted by Aperture magazine to participate in a photo documentary celebrating the life and work of Robert Frank, the Swiss photographer who gained fame for his 1958 book The Americans. Bragg has been touring the U.S. for decades and had seen most of the country, but was asked if there was anywhere he would like to go in America where he had never been. He suggested Rock Island, in part because he had recently been researching the origins of the American folksong Rock Island Line for his book. At that point, he had already written 30,000 words, which included chronicling how the song was first recorded by Lead Belly and his fellow inmates at the Cummins State Farm prison in the 1930s. It would later be covered in 1955 by Lonnie Donegan, the socalled King of Skiffle who directly played into the research Bragg was doing for his book. So, alongside a photographer, Bragg travelled by train from Rock Island in Illinois to Cummins State Farm in Arkansas, where Lead Belly and the inmates had been recorded by musicologist John Lomax.
“On the way we stopped at the Little Rock railway station where the train from Chicago to Los Angeles came in,” says Bragg, who will be headlining the Calgary Folk Music Festival’s mainstage on Thursday. “The one passenger train all day came at midnight. So we went down there with our guitars to play Midnight Special for part of the documentary. The train just sat there for 20, 30 minutes. People got on. People had a smoke. People wandered around.
I thought that was interesting. I realized if the trains were stopping of that length of time in the bigger cities, you might have time to jump off and record a song there. That’s where the plot came from.”
It led to the unique recording process for Shine a Light, which found Bragg and Henry making field recordings in rail stations across American during a train trip from Chicago and Los Angeles. The two musicians had known each other since the 1980s and Henry produced Bragg’s most recent record, 2013’s Tooth & Nail.
Bragg is known for both his political activism and overt political songwriting. So it’s not surprising that he wanted the unusual modus operandi of Shine a Light to provide something deeper than just a great backstory for the record.
“Americans have very few passenger routes west of the Mississippi, yet they put more freight on rail than any industrialized nation,” Bragg says. “They rely on the railroad yet they don’t use it. I think that’s part of the reason why Joe and I wanted to make the record on the train so we could talk about that. It wasn’t just a nostalgia trip. We could have made the album ‘Bill and Joe like trains’ in a studio. But we really wanted to be able to talk about the railroad and connect with it and bring back some stories from it as well.”
Released in 2016, Shine a Light is a collection of songs with connections to trains and the railway, even if only loosely in some cases. Everything from Lead Belly’s Midnight Special to traditionals such as Railroad Bill and In the Pines to more recent offerings such as John Hartford’s Gentle on My Mind and Gordon Lightfoot’s Early Morning Rain were recorded in train stations with sparse backing and effortless harmony between the two singers.
“Both of us were amazed at how well our voices fit together,” Bragg says. “We don’t have similar voices. Neither of us have pure singing voices, but they seem to work really well together.”
The album is another reminder of Bragg’s fascination with music history, an interest he also showcased by writing music with Wilco to old Woody Guthrie lyrics on the albums Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue II. While he may have cut his teeth in the British punk scene, where fledgling musicians tended to disown or at least be deeply suspicious of past trends, Bragg has always immersed himself in what came before him.
“I’ve always been like that, I’m afraid,” Bragg says.
“I’ve always been the guy looking on the sleeve to work out who wrote the song and where it came from and stuff like that.”
As an amateur music historian, he has always had an interest in skiffle, guitar-based music with roots in 1920s American jazz rudely played by teenagers in postwar Britain. The short-lived skiffle craze played into the early music development of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, Jimmy Page and Ronnie Wood, among others.
It first popularized the use of guitar in Britain and gave young people living through the hardships of postwar life an outlet.
Despite all this, for the most part it has been regarded by academics as little more than a blip in the history of pop culture, something that lasted just over a year before giving way to rock ’n’ roll. But Bragg said he was first attracted to studying skiffle because of its parallels to the punk movement that he grew up in.
“A lot of the things I experience in punk rock were also true about skiffle,” he says. “For instance: ‘Here’s three chords, now form a band.’ That’s true of skiffle and it was the slogan of a punk fanzine. It was the whole idea DIY music. The skiffle kids were making their music from stuff they bought at the hardware store. What could be more DIY than that? More importantly, it was the idea of rejecting mainstream culture and making your own music.
“Donegan said to British kids ‘ You don’t have to be a musician to make music. More importantly, you don’t have to be an American to sing American songs.’ That’s a revolutionary idea and an empowering idea. That’s what punk did. It empowered people and said ‘you can do this.’”