Every other year since 2011, Chicago-based band Wilco has hosted and curated the Solid Sound Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (better known as MASS MoCA) in North Adams, Massachusetts, a tiny hamlet tucked into the Berkshire Mountains. Over three days in late June, around 8,000 people gather for music, art, food, and experiences like breaking the world record for the most people yo-yo-ing at the same time.
On June 26, the night before the yo-yo-ing, listeners packed Joe's Field, the museum's outdoor amphitheater, to witness the first-ever full concert with Wilco and Billy Bragg playing a set of songs from the music that had thrown me and many other Gen X-ers in the alt country pipeline onto Woody's trail so many years ago: Mermaid Avenue, a 28-year-old, three-album collection of Woody Guthrie lyrics with music composed by Bragg and members of Wilco.
With the 2026 Solid Sound set, a vinyl re-issue, and a recently released book about the making of Mermaid Avenue, these songs are back in the Americana music zeitgeist. With them come Guthrie’s own questions and answers for a generation that’s facing struggles not so different from the ones his own fellow Americans faced.
It's not ideal that his ideas are still necessary more than 80 years after his career began. But the surge of his songs—those from Mermaid Avenue and others about labor organizing, deportation, and racial injustice—back into the cultural bloodstream suggests that there’s more to his legacy than nostalgia.
Back in 2012, while finding solace in the Mermaid Avenue albums during an early midlife crisis, I hit the road, hobo-style, in search of Woody Guthrie. My travels took me across the country, following the trail of commemorative events during his centennial year, including the first of over 20 trips to Tulsa and four weeks of research in the Woody Guthrie Archives.
It took 14 years, but all my Woody-chasing turned into a book-length memoir. As I started sending query letters to literary agents earlier this year, the Solid Sound Festival lineup was announced, and I knew it would have to be included. And so I’d have to get there. Woody has been key to my own discovery: personal, musical, and political. This summer, thanks to him, I hit the road again, from North Adams to Okemah, with an ear to how he’s traveling into the future.
Reconciliation And Resistance At Solid Sound
The Woody I know best is the protest musician who influenced Wilco, Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer, and the alt country stalwarts of my 1990s early adulthood. In 2026, with so much to protest, that influence is only growing louder.