Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight: “Christ For President”

As it’s Inauguration Day (Congratulations Joe Biden & Kamala Harris!), I was inspired while watching the coverage to chose this song for the Song Spotlight. Then I saw Jennifer Lopez sing Woody Guthrie’s Americana classic “This Land is Your Land,” at the event and I was doubly inspired. So here goes:

“Christ For President”
(Jay Bennett, Woody Guthrie, Jeff Tweedy)

Jay Bennett: banjo, piano, clavinet
Billy Bragg: National guitar
Ken Coomer: drums, percussion
John Stirratt: acoustic bass, bass pedals
Jeff Tweedy: acoustic guitar, vocals

Writing in No Depression magazine, Linda Ray noted how “Christ For President” “reflects a synthesis of Guthrie’s views on religion and socialism that prefigured by more than two decades the Liberation Theology that fostered revolutionary activity in South and Central America throughout the 1980s.”

A decade after its recording on the first volume of the Wilco/Billy Bragg collaboration, Mermaid Avenue, this spiky, satirical protest song would subsequently be well used in Larry Charles’s 2008 documentary, Religulous, which focuses on political comedy pundit Bill Maher’s diatribes against religion. It can be heard during a montage showing protestors with shirts that advertise “religious freedom” holding signs that say things like “Christians Take Action!” The montage also features former Republican presidential candidate John McCain saying that “the constitution established the United States as a Christian nation.” 

When performing this snarling song for the first time in a solo acoustic performance at the Lounge Ax in March 1998, Tweedy introduced it by saying, “This is probably one of the only lyrics we did that you’ve maybe seen before if you have Pastures Of Plenty,” referring to Guthrie’s book, Pastures Of Plenty: A Self Portrait - The Unpublished Writings Of An American Folk Hero, published in 1990.

The first documented performance by Wilco on “Christ for President” took place at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. The band played the song at nearly every show during 1998-2000 (the most being 60 times in 1999), then went down to several times a tour. Its tally is at 137.

No Depression scribe Ray, wrote that “Christ for President” “may be the band’s first foray into explicitly religious or political content.”

It sure wouldn’t be the last.

This is an edited excerpt from Wilcopedia by Daniel Cook Johnson, published by Jawbone Press (www.jawbonepress.com). Order your copy here.

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Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight: “One by One”

The Wilco Song Spotlight shines this time on “One by One,” one of my favorites from the band’s 1998 Mermaid Avenue collaboration with Billy Bragg. So let’s get right to it:

“One by One” (Woody Guthrie, Jeff Tweedy)

Jay Bennett: piano, organ

Ken Coomer: drums

Bob Egan: pedal steel

John Stirratt: electric bass

Jeff Tweedy: acoustic guitar, vocals

This heartbreaking lament offers a wizened take on a man’s fading mortality, but surprisingly the words were written by Guthrie in 1939, when he was only twenty-seven. Tweedy wrote the melody for the song in 1997 and polished it off with the Being There–era line-up of Wilco, when Bob Egan was still around, in late 1997 or early 1998.

The song fades in to a swirling wall of sound, in which Tweedy’s echoed vocal blends into the mix yet gives each word profound weight. “One by one,” the narrator’s “teardrops fall,” his “dreams fade,” and his “schemes fall fast away.”

On the popular radio show and podcast Sound Opinions, rock critic and Wilco biographer critic Greg Kot added this song to the ongoing feature The Desert Island Jukebox, noting, “The wonderful rhythm section on this song, the way Ken Coomer’s drums and John Stirratt’s bass surround Tweedy’s voice, is just remarkable. And Tweedy embodies Guthrie’s lyric ... it’s basically talking about a man who’s aging and seeing his life filter away, and looking back on missed opportunities and saying, I don’t have many more days left to get it right.”

Tweedy premiered the song at one of his many late-90s solo acoustic shows at the Lounge Ax, on March 26, 1998. He flavored the song with harmonica—an instrument he had just taken up during the Mermaid Avenue sessions in Dublin, Ireland. He would play it several more times at the venue on subsequent occasions, but sans harmonica.

Here's a stellar version of “One by One” from Wilco's 2005 live album Kicking Television:

After the song’s first airing elsewhere, at Park West in Chicago on September 13, 2000, he remarked, “Tough song—every line starts with ‘one by one’ - you need to really be on your toes.”

This is an edited excerpt of Wilcopedia by Daniel Cook Johnson, published by Jawbone Press (www.jawbonepress.com). Order your copy here.

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Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight: “Hoodoo Voodoo”

This edition of Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight shines on “Hoodoo Voodoo,” from Wilco’s 1998 collaboration with Billy Bragg, Mermaid Avenue. The collection, which was followed by two more volumes, concerned Bragg and Wilco setting rare Woody Guthrie song lyrics to new music. This particular song was no doubt the wackiest from the sessions. 

The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book, Wilcopedia: A Comprehensive Guide to the Music of America’s Beast Band (releasing 9/17; pre-order here):

“Hoodoo Voodoo” (Woody Guthrie, Jay Bennett, Billy Bragg, Ken Coomer, Corey Harris, John Stirratt, Jeff Tweedy)

Jay Bennett: organ, Farfisa bass pedals
Billy Bragg: electric guitar
Ken Coomer: drums
Corey Harris: electric guitar
John Stirratt: electric bass, piano (bass)
Jeff Tweedy: vocal

With lines like “Hoodoo voodoo, chooka chooky choochoo, true blue, how true, kissle me now” this song stands out from the rest of the Mermaid Avenue material obviously because of its absurd lyrical scheme.

Based on Woody Guthrie lyrics written at an unknown date, this extremely goofy song, the only one from the sessions that is musically credited to everyone who performed on it, instructs the listener to ‘dance a goofy dance’ among other silly suggestions.

In his excellent 2004 band bio, Wilco: Learning How To Die, Greg Kot wrote “‘Hoodoo Voodoo,’ a nonsensical children’s song that sounds like it could’ve been a precursor of both Dr. Seuss’s ‘The Cat In The Hat’ and Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ was transformed when Stirratt and Coomer began exaggerating the groove, goofing on its herky-jerky possibilities. Tweedy jumped on the microphone while Bennett rocked the organ and Bragg joined in on electric guitar, and a song that had been dead in the water suddenly sailed.”

“Hoodoo Voodoo” was first introduced by Wilco at the Lounge Ax in Chicago in June of 1998, and its singer comically struggled to convince the audience that it was written by Guthrie (“I’m not kidding, I’m dead serious”). Tweedy had previously premiered the song for the first time solo acoustically at the same venue during the summer of 1997.

In over two hundred performances, the jaunty jingle has maintained its status as a fan favorite that usually pops up during Wilco’s encores. 

Billy Bragg has also performed it live over the years, solo and with his backing band, the Blokes. On a live import by Bragg and the Blokes, entitled MA Tour/You Can Call Me Cupcake, Bragg released his ska arrangement of the song, “Hoodoo Ska Voodoo,” in 1999, and another variation on the track by Bragg, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8” appears on Daddy-O Daddy! Rare Family Songs of Woody Guthrie (2001).

Last year, some rare recordings of Guthrie performances were found at the Shel Silverstein Archive, one of them containing his own version of “Hoodoo Voodoo.” Of course, it was assumed, like with all the other Mermaid Avenue material, that he hadn't written music for it, so it's a thrill to hear how different, and strangely similar his take on it is to Bragg and Wilco. You can hear it here via Variety, who broke the news of its finding last December.

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