Left wing folk hero Woody Guthrie, who died in 1967 and was best known for his anthemic "This Land Is Your Land," has been re-born -- in a way -- with the "Mermaid Avenue" collaboration between Billy Bragg and Wilco.

The songs on "Mermaid Avenue" were taken from a stash of 3,000 lyrics Guthrie never set to music, and that his daughter Nora compiled for a Guthrie archive in Manhattan, New York.

After hearing Bragg sing at a Guthrie memorial six years ago, Nora asked the British singer, who's also championed political causes in the U.K., to set some of the lyrics to music, and the alt. country outfit Wilco joined the project in '96.

In an interview with MTV News, Bragg admitted he wasn't exactly a Guthrie groupie, but was drawn to the project by Guthrie's personal and political pathos, which he believes would fit very comfortably alongside some of Bragg's punk rock idols.

"My biggest influence was the Clash," Bragg said, "who wrote anti-fascists slogans on their clothing and their guitars. But it is Woody who wrote an anti-fascist slogan on his acoustic guitar before electric guitars had even been invented. So you have to ask yourself, who was the first punk? Was it Joe Strummer or Woody?" [1MB QuickTime]

"Mermaid Avenue" is named after a street in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where the Guthrie family lived in the late '40s and '50s. Bragg is now working on a Guthrie documentary of the same name, and next Tuesday he will play the Crystal Theater in Guthrie's hometown of Okema, Oklahoma.