When Woody Guthrie [ tickets ]'s daughter Nora first approached Billy Bragg [ tickets ] with the idea of having him create songs from the thousands of pages of lyrics that her father left behind, one of her requests was that Bragg approach the project in such a way that it would expand people’s knowledge of Woody Guthrie.

People tend to have a one-dimensional image of Guthrie that revolves around “This Land Is Your Land” and the Dust Bowl. But for the last 20-plus years of his life, Guthrie lived in New York during an era that included television, rock and roll and the beginnings of space travel.

“The fact that he got to New York plugs him into our modern world of pop culture,” Bragg said. “He was in New York when be-bop was born. All evidence suggests that he was aware of that world…. The last thing he wrote was while he was in the hospital and he was writing about Sputnik. That was November of 1957, and he could see it on TV in the hospital. And if he was watching TV in 1955, he could not have failed to have seen Elvis Presley.” (Guthrie suffered from Huntington’s Disease, which gradually eroded his ability to play guitar and write, and ultimately killed him in 1967.)

The recently released “Mermaid Avenue: Volume 2,” the second Guthrie-inspired collaboration between Bragg and the band Wilco [ tickets ], includes such standout tracks as “Secret of the Sea,” “Remember the Mountain Bed” and “Someday Some Morning Sometime.” Bragg said that he and Wilco have tentative plans to do a fall tour to showcase the latest batch of tunes.

Bragg said the songwriting process, despite the lyrics offering no explicit direction in terms of tempo or rhythm, was actually really easy, because many of the lyrics had an "internal rhythm" which suggested how they should be played.

Guthrie's multi-faceted personality and interests are reflected in the new songs, whether it's the spiritual speculations of "Airline to Heaven," the romance of "Remember the Mountain Bed" or the whimsical humor of "I Was Born" and "Joe DiMaggio Done It Again."

The lyrics to one of the songs, “Black Wind Blowing,” may have come from a folk song that Guthrie did not write. Guthrie wrote in his notes that the song was "the longest song I can remember." Bragg said he attempted to track down the origins of the tune, but a scan of the Smithsonian Institute’s catalog of American folk songs failed to turn up anything with the phrase “Black Wind Blowing.” “There was something incredibly elemental about those lyrics that drew it to me," Bragg said.

Enough material remains in the Woody Guthrie [ tickets ] Archive for an album of 15 songs to come out each year for the next 100 years, Bragg said. While not agreeing to sign on to record the next 100 records, Bragg that said he would like to see the project be an ongoing thing. For instance, he said he hopes Wilco might work with someone like Steve Earle on the next album, and then Earle could work with someone else, and so on.

Bragg said that during the recording of the first "Mermaid Avenue," there was a moment when he believed that Guthrie had kept writing lyrics in the hopes that such a project might one day happen.

“I didn’t believe that until we recorded ‘Another Man Done Gone’ and we came across that lyric ‘I don’t know/I may go up or down or anywhere/But I feel this scribbling might stay.’ At that moment I believed he knew something like this might happen. The phrase 'whip-smart' comes to mind.”

Bragg said the process of using Guthrie’s lyrics and working with a fixed band has altered the approach he’ll take for his next record.

“Working with a great lyricist like that, I definitely think twice before writing a crap lyric. I think I’d like to make records more in the spirit of ‘Mermaid Avenue.’ For my next album, I’ll have my ensemble behind me. I’ve found that’s a nice way to work and you get more out of the songs that way.”