Walt Whitman's Niece/Don't Pass Me By

From the wonderful Mermaid Avenue album, on which Billy Bragg, Wilco, Natalie Merchant and other artists bring to life the unpublished lyrics of the late Woody Guthrie. It's so amusing to think about Guthrie, author of This Land is Your Land,* writing the bawdy lines "As she read I laid my head (and I can't tell which head)/Down in her lap (and I can mention which lap)." Music/Performance: Billy Bragg and Wilco (1998) Lyric: Woody Guthrie (1946) Rating: Luke Hot And for a week or so, when "Walt Whitman's Niece" got in my head, it would lead directly into this quirky traditional pop/honky-tonkish Ringo song from the White Album: Artist: The Beatles Year: 1968 Rating: Luke Hot Note: * "This Land is Your Land," it should be acknowledged, is not the merely the milk-and-cookies version many of us in the U.S. grew up with. It's got verses that are usually edited out of traditional performances of the song. Check out the history of the verses, which involve a high degree of working class consciousness here. Yep, Woody was a proud commie sympathizer AND a perv! His guitar bore the mark "This machine kills fascists."