Alec Soth, Billy Bragg and Friends Team Up For a Multimedia Tribute to the American Road

Soth grabbed a videographer (Isaac Gale) and Bragg enlisted an Arkansan musician (Joe Purdy); in August, they all hopped into Soth’s minivan in Chicago and headed south, stopping at the towns and rail stations and penitentiaries depicted by the song’s lyrics. “A train song,” Soth says, “is so close to prison. It beautifully captures that dynamic, that duality of longing and freedom.” On the agenda were shooting (for Soth), filming (for Gale) and writing songs and performing at various venues (for Bragg and Purdy). Here, a clip filmed by Gale shows Bragg and Purdy in the van performing the Woody Guthrie classic “I Ain’t Got No Home,” a version of which appeared on Bragg’s album “Tooth and Nail.”
At times, inspired by the song’s themes, the group wandered off course — to visit a laundry that still used the kind of washboard that can be heard in Donegan’s recording, to perform in prisons, to set up impromptu concerts at a St. Louis bar collecting donated goods for those in nearby Ferguson, where the unrest over Michael Brown’s death had just begun.
The end of the line for “Rock Island Line” came in Little Rock. “We’d just played a proper stand-up-knock-’em-down kind of gig in a local club,” Bragg says. From there, they hit the Amtrak station, where passengers waited to board the midnight train to Chicago. “We got our guitars and sang a young couple a song, and eventually we’re on the platform and there’s this older guy saying goodbye to his son, and suddenly, there he is singing the first lines — ‘I got pigs … I got chickens … I got all livestock’ in this great Johnny Cash voice. It was out of nowhere.”
Alec Soth and Billy Bragg, with Joe Purdy and Isaac Gale, will present their performance of the Rock Island Line project at The Open Road Aperture Foundation Benefit Party Tuesday night from 6:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. at Terminal 5. The Kills will also perform. For more details, visit aperture.org/benefit.
“The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip” by David Campany is available at aperture.org.