Man in the Sand

According to British singer/songwriter Billy Bragg, the man handpicked by Woody Guthrie's daughter Nora to write the music for and record a handful of her father's 1,000 some odd unpublished songs, the acknowledged father of American socially responsible folk music shared the "problem of all great artists" in not being able to keep a certain male appendage safely locked up behind his zipper (to which siren-voiced Natalie Merchant responds: "guess I'm not a great artist"). It's a funny throwaway moment in this peculiar hybrid, which combines a running biography of Guthrie; a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Grammy nominated albums Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Vol. 2, featuring Bragg and Wilco (and a chronicle of the creative disagreements between Bragg and Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy); and a performance video featuring full or excerpted versions of nearly two dozen tunes. While the program touches on Guthrie's marital problems, political leanings to the left, alcoholism and peripatetic life (until Huntington's chorea landed him in a hospital bed for most of the last decade of his life), it is the tunes which ultimately sing out Woody's multitudinous soul: from "Way Over Yonder in a Minor Key" and "She Came Along to Me" to "At My Window Sad and Lonely" and the playful "Ingrid Bergman." Recommended. Aud: P. (R. Pitman)