Nora Guthrie

Who is Nora Guthrie?

Nora Lee Guthrie is the daughter of American folk musician and singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie and his second wife Marjorie Guthrie, sister of singer/songwriter Arlo Guthrie, and granddaughter of renowned Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt. She oversees the Woody Guthrie Foundation located in New York City.

In 1995, Guthrie approached Billy Bragg, an English folk/pop singer of similar sociopolitical philosophy, to create music for some of the many poems that her father wrote but never developed into songs. Bragg enlisted the band Wilco to help with the project. The resulting albums were titled Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II, named after the street in Coney Island, New York where she lived with her parents as a child. Guthrie appears in and narrates the 1999 DVD documentary Man in the Sand, which chronicles the creation process of the Mermaid Avenue recordings. Later, she undertook a similar project with singer Jonatha Brooke, which emerged in 2008 as an album titled The Works.

In 2008, 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.