Nora Guthrie

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Nora Guthrie (b. January 2, 1950) is the daughter of American Folk musician and singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie. She oversees the Woody Guthrie Foundation.

In 1995 Nora approached Billy Bragg, an English Folk/Pop singer, to create music for the many poems that Woody Guthrie wrote that never were created into songs. The resulting albums were titled Mermaid Avenue (released 1998), named after the street where Woody lived with his second wife in Coney Island, NY (where Nora grew up). For help on the album, Billy Bragg brought in the band Wilco, and had Natalie Merchant help with vocal duties on two songs. A second album, Mermaid Avenue Vol. II, was released in 2000, comprised of the songs that didn't make the cut for the first volume, but released after the favorable reviews of the first album. The album cites Woody for the lyrics.

In 1999, the DVD documentary Man in the Sand was released. It chronicles the creation process of the Mermaid Ave recordings. Nora appears in this, as well as narrates much of the documentary.

In 2008, Nora Guthrie won a Grammy Award for Best Historical Album for her work as a producer of The Live Wire, a re-engineered release of a recording of a live Woody Guthrie concert recorded on a wire recorder.

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