"It's out, I'm just working on an album that I'm producing and playing on in honor of the hundredth anniversary of a fiddle contest that was really seminal in East Tennessee between Fiddlin' John Carson selling a million 78s in 1923 and the Bristol sessions in 1927; I'm that kind of a nerd," laughed a very upbeat John McCutcheon as he readily elaborated on his latest release, "Field of Stars" and much more.
In the words of Grammy Award winning songwriter and producer Marc Swersky, "Songs are like children; they will mature when it's their time to do so" and in the case of "Field of Stars," the incredibly prolific McCutcheon let it not only mature but blossom with new growth as well.
"This is an album that has actually been sitting on the shelf for five years," he explained. "I came back from a tour of Australia on March 16, 2020 and you can roll your memory back to that period of time and realize that despite the fact that I had studio time booked and musicians hired and all of the songs picked out and arrangements sort of in mind; I always do the arrangements in the studio with the musicians assembled, I realized that nobody was going to be going into a studio any time soon. A windowless, totally enclosed space was the last place you wanted to ground yourself into with five of your best friends. So, I said, "OK, I'll put it on the shelf and in a couple of months when this is all over, I'll just do it," well, we all know what happened. I also hit a pretty creative stride right from the beginning and there have been four albums in the last four years and I finally took this one down after doing the album I did with Tom Paxton last year and said, "Maybe it's time to do this one" and I sifted through the songs and culled some things that just didn't seem to fit anymore or didn't feel up to snuff because I sort of have a whole new way of writing now. I picked some stuff that I'd co-written on Zoom, which is another practice that I've been loving since the pandemic and voila, "Field of Stars" is the result."
Wait, for someone who has had great success with his songwriting; did he say, "Whole new way of writing?"
"I have a different sort of entry into the process of writing that I discovered quite by accident during the pandemic because during the pandemic, especially during the early days; I came back from Australia and had no choice but to quarantine myself. I had been over on the friendliest continent in the world with people who had no idea this was going on with a whole lot of big blokes throwing their arms around my shoulder saying, "Let's take a picture John" and then I rode on a tubular petri dish coming home for 24 hours. So, I was quarantined and relieved of all of the daily activities that I normally would have done; you weren't going to the gym, you weren't going to the grocery store, you weren't going anywhere. I did my usual morning constitutional which is meditation, reading the bunch of poetry that comes in my email box every morning and then I would start writing right away. I discovered, having all of this nothing but right brain activity going on that I was just more open to what was going to happen with a song. Sometimes, I would get just a simple prompt from what I was listening to; I remember one morning, I was sitting out on the porch of this cabin that I have up in the North Georgia mountains where I was quarantining and I heard a truck drive by on the gravel road out front and I wrote down, "Tires crackle in the gravel" and all of a sudden it was off to the races. Out came this song with a story that I'd never thought about telling with characters that seemed to be developed somewhere out there in the ether and I just sort of held on for dear life and that has happened a lot. Part of it is just writing every day; the co-writing I do, I write with six different people every week so I have been going to the songwriting gym and I am really in shape right now (Laughs) and the original album was stuff that was gathered over a number of years and I just felt like they ought to be recorded. Probably half of the resulting album was actually made up of those originally selected songs and the other half is more newly written stuff."
Being a "Nerd" as he said, also has its benefits as history and other passions are often intertwined in his songs but one in particular, "The Hammer" pays tribute to a boyhood idol and love of a sport.
"I wrote that the day that Hank Aaron died," he began reflectively. "Even though I have been associated with the South my entire career, I actually grew up in Wisconsin and his first team was the Milwaukee Braves and they were my team. So, he was just omnipresent in my life and when I moved to the Atlanta area 19 years ago now, he was physically omnipresent. You would see him at games, on the street, he was all of the time doing some philanthropic work and he was a man of generosity and grace after his career in much the same way he was during his career. So, when he died, I just wrote this thing because I was so moved by it, for the first time in my life, not having Hank Aaron in my life. So, that was a pretty easy one to write; it was catharsis really which is as good a reason to write a song as any and it explains why there seems to be so many sports themed and baseball themed songs that end up on my albums."
"MS St. Louis," he continued, "Is the story of a ship out of Hamburg that in 1939 was carrying 900 Jewish refugees escaping Hitler's Germany and it was clear to them at least, what was going on.They came to North America and were turned away from Cuba to Canada and then from the United States and so it went back to Germany but it goes on from there because I often turn to history to sort of chew on contemporary events; we are in the process of turning refugees again as we speak. How do we process history in a way that makes us understand what we've done in the past and how we felt about that? Most Jews know the story of the MS St. Louis but a lot of my audiences, when they hear it for the first time are like, "Oh my God; how could we possibly do that?" I write a last verse that says, "What does our history tell us? Must we live it all again?" "Redneck" is another history based song. One of my great mentors; I had many growing up, was a retired coal miner named Nimrod Workman from West Virginia and he worked 42 years in the southern West Virginia coal fields starting at age 12 as was not uncommon back then. He worked with "Mother" Jones and John L. Lewis to try and unionize the mines in that part of the state and it was open warfare. The Battle of Blair Mountain had some 20,000 participants, armed warfare and the miners, to identify themselves to one another, tied red bandanas around their necks; hence the name, "Redneck." Most people, when they hear redneck these days, think of it as a pejorative and that of course has a long history of people's adversaries taking what they call themselves and turning it into ridicule. So, on the one hundredth anniversary of The Battle of Blair Mountain, I wrote this to honor that legacy and honor my mentor and present some information that I would hope people may find interesting and illustrative, especially about the use of that name. "Hell & High Water," when I moved south when I was 20 to come down and learn how to play the banjo, I never imagined that 53 years later; I still haven't returned to my Wisconsin home. I spent a lot of time in Eastern Kentucky and it's a song that my buddy Trent Wagler who is the front man for The Steel Wheels and I wrote about the flooding in Eastern Kentucky back in July of 2022. There is a particular song that is about the future and that's the title cut. I wrote it with my friend Carrie Newcomer who is one of the six people I write with every week and it's about walking The Camino de Santiago which is a thousand year old 500 mile pilgrimage from Southwestern France to Northwestern Spain to the city of Compostela where supposedly in the cathedral, the bones of the apostle James are interred and Santigo in Spanish of course is "St. James" and Compostela is "Field of Stars." So,Carrie and I have both talked about The Camino a lot. I'm actually walking it this Spring, it's just something that I've always wanted to do and I decided that I wanted to do it while I still can (Laughs). So, it's about four different people who are walking The Camino for four completely different reasons and it's really one of my favorite songs that I've written. It's difficult to explain but singers know that there are some songs that just feel good in your mouth. I never get tired of singing that song and I love the way it turned out on the album. The greatest compliment you can give someone in the studio is, "He or she surprises herself" and I think everybody surprised themselves on that cut."
"Field of Stars" is his 45th album and most definitely not his last as he is forever working alone and/or with others; something that was made easier with help from friends he's made along the way.
"Yeah; it's ridiculous isn't it?" he couldn't help but chuckle as he looked back in retrospect. "One thing that was really helpful to me was that for about 20 years, I was with Rounder Records and they gave me just total carte blanche. I would come to them and say, "I wanna do a kid's record but I wanna do a really different kind of kid's record." Most record companies would say, "A kid's record? Half the budget" and I would say, "No, no, this one is gonna be the most expensive album I've ever done and I'm gonna hire really cool musicians. I want to make it the best for our kids; why shortchange them?" "I wanna do a Hammer Dulcimer Christmas album" or "I wanna do an album of political songs written and performed with my buddy Si Kahn" or "I wanna do a Four Seasons cycle" and they never said no. Sometimes I was doing two albums at a time which was a really crazy juggling act but it gave me a really expansive notion of what you can do with the medium. So, in the ensuing years, on Woody Gutherie's one hundredth birthday, I did an album of all Woody Gutherie songs, for Pete Seeger's hundredth birthday, I did an album of all Pete Seeger songs and invited all kinds of people to come in and perform with me. I'm planning an album right now honoring the one hundredth anniversary of the 1925 Mountain City, Tennessee Fiddlers Convention which was a really unusual; it was the connective tissue between the beginning with Fiddlin' John Carson who was the first million seller that let the recording industry know that there was a market for this Hillbilly music and there is talent to fill it in and it goes to '27 when the Bristol Sessions happened which was the big bang of country music when Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family were discovered on the same day. This was the first time that people who made recordings performed together live and it was amazing. So, I've got Old Crow Medicine Show, Molly Tuttle and Becky Buller and lots of people playing music associated with those people. Now I'm doing another album with Tom Paxton, there is no shortage of ideas. I just wish people bought CDs like they used to so you could actually pay for these things (Laughs) but there is enough interest to make these things feasible. I'm writing like crazy! Besides the stuff I'm writing myself, I get to the end of the week and almost always have between four and six brand new songs. So, it's pretty great; you know? I could've been a football player or a dancer and I'd be retired forever but I'm writing with Tom Paxton, he's not on the road anymore, he's 87 years old but still writing like the master he is, so I'm just lucky that I stumbled onto something creative I can do until I can't pick up a pen anymore."
With the album released and out in the world, McCutcheon says he has no real plans for any extensive touring due to several factors but stated he will be on the road and keeping busy in various other ways; oh, and finally taking some extended time off.
"I just came back from a tour of Northern California which began the day after the album was released and that was fantastic; biggest crowds I've ever had out there. I've done some local stuff and I'm out in the Northwest at the end of the month. I'm not touring as much as I used to because the pandemic taught me how much I like being home and the model I used when I was 25 doesn't have to work when I'm 72 and I don't want it to; heck, I've got a lot of stuff I have to do, I've got albums to produce and record (Laughs). During the pandemic when people weren't feeling comfortable going in the studio, I did the recording at home and it was sending files around on the internet and it was really stupid and expensive. Now, I'm in the studio; I use a studio in Springfield, Virginia which is a southern suburb of Washington, D.C. and a place I've been recording at since the early 1980s. My co-producer and engineer is a guy named Bob Dawson who has the best ears I've ever worked with which is the best skill that an engineer can have. The first time I ever worked with him and before he placed any microphones, he came out and sat in front of me and said, "Play for me." A microphone is just an electronic ear and he just moved his ear around until he found a place where the sound came out and sounded the best. There are people who are "Gear" people and they use gear to fix everything and then there are other people who say, "Ooh, that doesn't sound right" or "Oh yes, that's good" and that's why I love working with Bob. One of the things that reviews frequently say and friends of mine who are musicians say is, "God, your albums sound good" and they ought to because I'm out there competing with every other genre in the world and I've always thought that I want to make Folk music as accessible and beautiful as possible. When you go to a live concert and I do that more than I'm in the studio, I can tell right away whether the sound person out there is into sound amplification or sound reinforcement and there is a real different attitude to that; I think when the PA is invisible to the audience, that's what you want."
"I take lots of days off, like I said, I'm touring about half as much as I used to which is just fine with me. I'm taking the time off to do The Camino so that's gonna be a real pilgrimage and that's gonna take about 40 days for me to do that and then I'm immediately meeting my family in Estonia and we're going to this amazing community choir festival that happens in Estonia every five years. My son-in-law is Estonian and his parents are going to guide us there and I've become friends with the Estonian ambassador to the U.S. and I think he's going to be there as well. So, it'll be a great opportunity to see this amazing tradition and I love choirs. These are not professional choirs, these are choirs in their communities and there is a total of about 10,000 singers over the course of the weekend and 100,000 people show up every day to listen to these choirs and it's the kind of thing that I think, "Man, you've got to see this" and so I'll be gone for about two months without any performances."
To keep up with John McCutcheon and his music, please visit https://www.folkmusic.com/
That's it for this week! Please continue to support live and original music and until next week....ROCK ON!
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