Formerly a mill town in the Berkshires, North Adams, Massachusetts, reimagined itself around MASS MoCA, a converted factory complex. By all measures, the museum is massive, consisting of twenty-six acres of brick buildings that have been converted into performance spaces, exhibition areas, and open courtyards. It’s the type of place where it takes a minute to catch your bearings and where the contrast between modern art and industrial construction creates a unique mood. Wilco hosts an event here every alternate summer. Additionally, something occurred at a recent edition that turned out to be more economically intriguing than initially thought.
Billy Bragg and Wilco left the MASS MoCA stage together. The audience was aware of what was about to happen. The entire 1998 record Mermaid Avenue, which resulted from one of the most bizarre creative choices in American folk history, was set to be performed. For some songs, Natalie Merchant joined in. Jon Langford gave others a voice. Songs like “All You Fascists” and “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key” moved through a crowd that had come especially for this. When something is truly landing, the sold-out courtyard was silent, unlike most festival crowds.
The backstory is important to comprehend why this was not only culturally fulfilling but also commercially significant. Woody Guthrie’s daughter and steward of his estate, Nora Guthrie, decided to let outside collaborators access her father’s personal notebooks in the mid-1990s. Before he passed away in 1967, Woody had hundreds of finished lyrics that he had never put to music. To make them come to life, Nora selected British folk-punk singer Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. In addition to receiving high praise from critics, the resulting Mermaid Avenue volumes accomplished something more enduring: they opened up Woody Guthrie’s catalog to a new generation of music lovers.
It is worthwhile to follow the economics that resulted from both the live revival at Solid Sound and that 1998 decision. The streaming effect is real and quantifiable when a back catalog performance at a festival becomes the kind of event that people talk about afterward. Younger listeners have turned back to Guthrie’s original recordings after discovering “California Stars” or “Hoodoo Voodoo” through Wilco’s rendition. That curiosity generates digital royalties for the Woody Guthrie estate. Sales of original Guthrie collections and Mermaid Avenue vinyl reissues surge in the weeks after live performances. At the festival itself, commemorative memorabilia sells at prices that aren’t quite as high as those of a typical Wilco concert.
The music industry has been gradually realizing that there is a larger pattern here. Historical folk and roots catalogs react to real-time activation, making them dynamic assets. The estate value of an earlier catalog grows in ways that can be directly tracked through streaming data when a major current artist plays and contextualizes older material in front of a live audience. Folk music has benefited more from this than most other genres, in part because the political and emotional content of songs from the 1930s and 1940s tends to feel newly relevant, and in part because the performers most associated with revivals—Bragg, Tweedy, and other artists in that tradition—attract audiences with strong catalog-buying habits.
The original source materials, including his drawings, handwritten lyrics, and recorded audio, are preserved for educational and preservation purposes at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Institutional backing for that preservation effort comes from the continuous commercial interest created by occasions such as the Solid Sound reunion. A sort of feedback loop is at work: the festival revival generates revenue, which supports the archive and improves the sourcing and historical foundation of subsequent revivals. It’s more practical than the usual connection between commercial music and historical preservation, but it’s not a perfect circle.
When you watch the Mermaid Avenue performance at MASS MoCA, you get the impression that what makes it financially successful is also what makes it emotionally successful. You get the impression that the songs arrived late, that they have been waiting, and that hearing them performed by the people who made them famous is a moment that won’t last forever. Economic behavior is driven by scarcity, even artificial or event-based scarcity, just as much as by quality. In addition to being actually excellent, Solid Sound has worked out how to create that scarcity inside a festival setting.