Tag: folk music

STREAM: Wild Skies, ‘From Far Below’

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Artist: Wild Skies
Hometown: Chicago, IL
Album: From Far Below
Release Date: April 14, 2017

In Their Words: “We really concentrated on using our voices and harmonizing to create a sound that was bigger than our four individual parts. We wanted to capture that synergy to tape, while making this album. The inspiration was the drive to make music with the four of us and have it come out really big, but still organic without a ton of production. We were careful not to over do it, and we really wanted to be able to recreate anything we recorded in a live setting. It’s our first real effort as a band, so we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to make it count. At the same time, we wanted to showcase our strengths and really show what we could do, so we looked at it as somewhat more of a mixtape than a super cohesive collection of songs. We were aiming for every song to not sound the same, but to still sound like us.” — Aaron Lechlak

LISTEN: Lee Watson, ‘You Sail Alone’

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Artist: Lee Watson
Hometown: Owen Sound, Ontario
Song: “You Sail Alone”
Album: Lee Watson
Release Date: May 19, 2017
Label: Dead Radio, Love

In Their Words: “The original thought was to layer the sounds like a landscape — the bass, the water; the drums, the trees; the acoustic guitar, the sky; and the singing and pedal steel like the birds. This song in the studio happened very organically; I wanted to capture the feeling of a group of musicians playing like it was 3 am at someone’s cottage after everyone else has gone to bed. Jadea Kelly did a great job with the backing vocals on this one.

In retrospect, a lot of the songs on the album are reflections on growing up in Ontario. This is one of those songs. It comes from me thinking about the friends I grew up with — how you can all come from the same place, share so many of the same experiences but, in the end, choose to take such different paths.” — Lee Watson

Photo credit: Wayne Simpson

MIXTAPE: Peter Mulvey’s Favorite Folk

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I’ve been making my living in the folk music world for 25 years and I still don’t know what those two words mean. Long ago, I realized had no more need to figure it all out. Here’s a playlist of tunes that fall easily into my whereabouts: from Tom Waits’s thunderous take on the touchstone “Shenandoah” to Anais Mitchell’s daringly inventive confessional “Now You Know” to Birds of Chicago and their straight-from-the-ages “Barley.” — Peter Mulvey

Tom Waits — “Shenandoah”

This. This is folk music. Nobody wrote “Shenandoah.” It was coughed up out of the doings and workings of a people. Rivermen, turning wheels and winding ropes. In its complexity and simplicity, it is as deep as anything a PhD in composition could aspire to (Five lines instead of four! Echoes of pentameter! The surreality of personifying Shenandoah as a person! The song is called “Shenandoah” and yet the river continually referenced is … the Missouri!) and yet this song is as clumpy and mossy as a stone in the shallows. Tom Waits and Keith Richards do it immense justice here.

Anaïs Mitchell — “Now You Know”

There is an ongoing tension in folk music between deep folk influence and personal expression. Anaïs Mitchell’s work in revitalizing old myths and old folk song forms, whether through rewriting Greek myths or un-ironic direct wrestling with child ballads, is unimpeachable. And it is the raw power earned by all that work which lends such immediacy to the naked outpouring of “Now You Know.”

Birds of Chicago — “Barley”

“Barley” could be as old as the hills, as old as Appalachian dirt or Irish turf, and yet it’s modern, with a modern, family dedication. Allison Russell, formerly of Po Girl and now a Bird of Chicago, has been a force in folk music north and south of the 49th parallel for years, and her writing deepens alongside that of bandmate JT Nero.

Suitcase Junket — “Wherever I Wake Up”

Matt Lorenz takes old junk and makes it sing. His one-man band of a dumpster guitar, suitcase drums, bones and buzz-saws surrounds him, and his clarion voice calls out from the center of this suddenly animated junkpile. He also does throat singing, which is as folky as it gets: an ancient human skill, used for thousands of years to communicate across the vast steppes. All that, and he can write a tune.

Anna Tivel — “Lillian & Martha”

Quiet details, laid out with patience and care, illuminate this trembling, vulnerable human story of two women finally able to marry. There are anthemic protest songs that help to sweep change through our history, but there are also the true human stories within that sweep, and Tivel’s singing of the unsung here is an act of quiet decency.

Kate Rusby — “The Fairest of All Yarrow”

Let’s return to pure folk music for a moment. Kate Rusby dedicates herself to the singing of songs, with heart and vividness, with deference but also daring. Sparks strike. Flames ensue.

Kris Delmhorst — “Since You Went Away”

Jim Harrison said that “poets are the weeds of the plant kingdom: not much in demand.” In terms of poems, Kris Delmhorst is a naturalist of the highest order. Her startling 2006 record, Strange Conversation, re-imagines Whitman, Millay, Byron, Rumi, and the poetry of many more as songs. This setting to music of James Weldon Johnson’s poem “Seems Lak to Me” takes sadness and makes it beautiful. That’s a quiet feat.

Kelly Joe Phelps — “House Carpenter”

Kelly Joe Phelps blew into the landscape like a mysterious thunderhead in the late ’90s, bringing an unmatched musicianship, a towering sense of improvisation, and a depth of hard-earned soul. His sound was all his own. This blazing version of the mythical “House Carpenter” story is a dizzying journey, crossing wide high seas in just the span of minutes.

Sam Gleaves — “Two Virginia Boys”

Sam Gleaves wears his musical identity authentically, unironically, and with true grace. This simple, plainspoken song of love between two men is an act of dignified, courtly bravery. By using the traditional “East Virginia Blues” as his chorus, he roots this song where he wants it to grow.

June Carter Cash — “Tiffany Anastasia Lowe”

As a descendant of the First Family of American Folksong, June Carter was (no doubt rightly) alarmed to learned that her granddaughter planned to go to Los Angeles to make movies with Quentin Tarantino. This marvelous song is her warning. Take heed, people.

Woody Guthrie — “This Land Is Your Land”

Writing about this song is a bit like writing about the Mississippi River, or Denali. I’m just going to put this on the list and let it speak for itself.

Kendrick Lamar — “Alright”

But speaking of protest songs, of songs that the people sing in their time of need, crowds in Cleveland, having been pepper-sprayed during demonstrations in 2015, spontaneously broke into the refrain of this anthem from Lamar’s masterpiece, To Pimp a Butterfly. Folk music is for folks. Listen, if you’d like to know what’s going on.

Photo credit: Elisabeth Witt

The Turns of Humor and Terms of Happy: A Conversation with Aimee Mann

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In an age of rampant anti-intellectualism, it’s imperative that we cling to the brainiacs among us, be they scholars or scientists, pundits or poets. One of the smartest of the songwriter smarty pants has long been Aimee Mann and, thankfully, she’s back with a new album to get us through 2017, the more-than-aptly titled Mental Illness. The set finds Mann pairing lyrical introspection with musical intimacy in a way she has never fully explored. By stripping away the pretense of production, her superlative songwriting shoulders the weight of the album, and easily so. On what is, perhaps, her finest release of the past 15 years, Mann wanders in and out of stories that revolve around the hub of dysfunction that is the experience of being human.

When I first heard the record a few weeks ago, I posted on Facebook about how great it is and people came out of the woodwork to declare their fandom for you.

[Laughs] Wow. That’s really nice!

There were folks I never would’ve pegged as Aimee Mann fans, but … right on. They earned a new level of respect in my book.

That’s very sweet, very encouraging.

Right? I go all the way back with you, music-wise, to the ‘Til Tuesday days. But it wasn’t “Voices Carry” that locked me in. It was “Coming Up Close.”

Is that right?

Yeah. I still remember watching that video on my tiny dorm room TV. I feel like it was one of the songs that helped form my musical tastes in college. When you look back to those early days, can you see the whole trajectory to where you are now in them?

I sort of can, honestly. When I first started playing music, I played in a band called the Young Snakes and it was a real clunky art-rock band. It was one of those bands when you’re 19 and you go, “I’m gonna break all the rules!” [Laughs] But mostly because you don’t know how to play and don’t know what you’re doing. But also because it’s fun. Then it’s funny to see what your idea of rules are. Our ideas of what the rules were was nothing melodic, nothing with a steady beat. [Laughs] We had no cymbals on the drum kit. I don’t know why. I don’t know why we came up with that rule. So that was my first band.

Then I had an equal and opposite reaction when I formed ‘Til Tuesday because I felt like that’s its own purity, where you can’t do anything melodic. You can’t write any songs about love. You can’t do anything that’s pretty. Then I was listening to a lot of dance-funk, like the Gap Band. So that was the influence of ‘Til Tuesday. But I feel like that wasn’t that natural to me, either. It was just what I was interested in.

I used to write all my songs on bass because that was my main instrument, but also that was more like the dance-funk stuff. That’s where that sprung from. Then I started writing songs on acoustic guitar and it was like, “Oh. This is really more my thing.” So I can totally see why “Coming Up Close,” which was probably one of the first — if not the first — songs I wrote on acoustic guitar … it was me starting out going, “I’m going to really try to write songs.”

And it stands up. I still love that song so much.

Well, thank you.

And I’m really grateful to be the age I am because it was artists like you, Crowded House, and the Story, who were at least somewhat mainstream when I was coming up. You guys all made — and continue to make — grown up music. Where do you think you’d fit if you were just starting out now?

I don’t know. I think that, once you get out of the loop in popular culture, it’s really hard to get back in. I think I got out of the loop in popular culture really early because, when you go on tour, you can’t really keep up with stuff. I remember going on tour in 1984 or 1985 and I missed the whole Morrissey thing. I missed the Pixies. I missed everything because I was in a van and that stuff wasn’t being played on the radio.

I think that, if you have more word of mouth from friends, you can keep up, but when you’re older, you don’t really have that. You don’t have people saying, “Hey, you gotta check out this band.” There’s a little bit, but not that much.

For this exact moment in history, Mental Illness is really a perfect album title. Though you drill down deeper in a few songs, the human condition is, all on its own, a mental illness. And that’s what you’re examining here, right? It’s the co-dependency, compulsive behaviors, bad habits, and poor decisions that everyone suffers, in one way or another.

There’s certainly that. There are a couple of songs that are written about someone my friends and I had intersected with who probably had a sort of sociopathic … I mean, I think scientists don’t yet know what that diagnosis is, exactly. I think it’s probably a combination of things. So, to have interactions with someone who probably is a sociopath … I know people who are bipolar. And I’m certainly no stranger to depression and anxiety. I think the role obsession plays in people’s lives is interesting. Everything you said — poor decision-making and all — it all comes under that umbrella.

Yeah. And having a potential sociopath, certainly a pathological liar, on such a huge stage for us all to witness right now … we can all say we suffer from the abuse that type of personality inflicts.

Well, yeah. That’s why half of us are filled with a paralytic fear because we recognize, when you are led by someone with no empathy, things can go very, very wrong for you. I think the other half feels, “I don’t care. He’s on my side.” Or, “I’m one of them.” But my experience tells me that no one gets out. No one escapes. You’re never on that guy’s side for long. You never cozy up to the bully for long. Eventually, he turns on you, too. So it’s very scary. We do depend on some amount of human compassion and understanding to protect us from people who are powerful.

Is your humor part of that? As anyone really paying attention knows, you have an incredibly sharp wit that, sure, doesn’t always get reflected in your songs, but it’s definitely in there. For every “Real Bad News,” there’s also a “Superball.” Is that part of how you stay strong — turning to that humor?

I think that helps. And thank you for saying that because my comedian friends are the ones I envy the most. The ability to be funny, the ability to choose exactly — and this is what I aspire to, as a songwriter — the ability to choose exactly the right word and the right phrasing to create a certain effect. It’s so impressive to me.

But, for me, humor turns on being able to accurately identify something, and there is an intersection where the accurate identification becomes funny. That was why calling this record Mental Illness is funny because it’s so blunt and sort of dumb, even. But it’s so accurate, it makes me laugh.

Otherwise, if you didn’t have that humorous part of you, the melancholy might be too overwhelming and Mental Illness might be too spot-on to be funny.

Yeah. Yeah. You have to lift yourself up somehow.

I also love that you fully embrace the narrative about yourself — as cliché or stereotyped as it might be — that you write depressing tunes … which you don’t. What do you think it would take to shake it off?

I don’t think my songs are depressing, but they are often sad and introspective. That doesn’t bother me. Happy songs are dull. I would defy you to play me … Well, there was that one song, “Happy,” that was good. [Laughs] But the reason it’s good, for me, is because it has chord changes that are a little melancholy and I like the contrast. There’s a little wistfulness in those chord changes and the contrast is very nice.

What you were saying before about choosing words … there are always a few lines on every record of yours that just slay me in the simplicity of their brilliance. On this album, there’s “It happens so fast, and then it happens forever” in “Stuck in the Past” or “I know the tumbleweed lexicon” in “You Never Loved Me.” When you land lines like that, do you know it in your bones right away? Or do they sneak up on you?

I think, when I’m writing, I’m just trying to explain the feeling. That sense of satisfaction comes when it’s, “Yeah. That’s really what it feels like.” Something happens and it feels like it happens fast, but it lasts forever. Then, in your mind, you just replay and replay and replay it, whatever that pivotal moment is for you or a variety of pivotal moments. And it’s brutal. That’s brutal, because everybody has those. I don’t know. There’s a satisfaction in feeling like, “YES! That explains it! There’s a really specific feeling and that explains it.”

The other line, the narrator is going, “Yeah, I get what you’re saying to me.” That’s one of the songs that’s about the friend who had the encounter with the sociopath. They had talked about getting married. She moved across the country to be with him, and he never showed up. There’s an element of real cruelty in that, like, “Oh, you’re actually trying to send me a message above and beyond breaking up with someone.” The person is just rolling out of your life. I know how those people talk and what they’re saying.

What’s the ratio in your writing of how much you’re writing to or for yourself versus to or for or about someone else? Or does it all just mish-mosh-mingle together?

That’s a really interesting question. It’s not as much as you might think. I have to say, it’s all stories I can relate to and, sometimes, getting inside someone else’s story is more relatable than my own story. Do you know what I mean? Sometimes my own story is kind of effuse with details that don’t necessarily make sense, that only have a significance to me. But, if I tell someone else’s story that I can relate to, I can make it more cogent so that it’s then relatable to you. In a sense, it’s both our stories, then it’s all our stories.

Right. Right. Because, your own story, sometimes you’re too close to it. You’re on the inside of it so it’s harder to, like you said, sort it out in a way that’s easily expressible, I would imagine.

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. I think, also, you can write about other people in the first person and it’s easier to have compassion for other people than yourself, even though you’re essentially in the same boat.

 

I love the fact that you were listening to Bread and [Dan] Fogelberg in the run up to recording this thing. That was my childhood soundtrack, all that ’70s-era folk-rock.

Yeah, totally.

Do you feel like placing these songs in a soft sonic setting helps smooth out some of the themes and lyrical edges a bit? Would they have worked in another setting, these songs?

I don’t know. It’s possible. I was just really in the mood for a record that, from beginning to end, had a real intimacy where you could really hear the acoustic guitar on its own. You can hear the fingers on the strings and the string noise. Hear the voice really closely. There are some other elements, but those are the two things coming through.

Superego Records aside … when critics call you “one of the top 10 living songwriters” and “one of the finest songwriters of [your] generation,” is that something you can get your head around? And does it complicate anything for you, in terms of internal or external pressure?

Well, I’ve never seen that in print, so I don’t know. [Laughs] I almost feel like it’s a trick question! “People say you’re the greatest ever songwriter alive!” Well, is it happening? Is that happening right now? Are you telling me I’m one of the greatest songwriters? In which case, I haven’t yet felt pressure, but maybe after this phone call, I will! [Laughs]

[Laughs] Damn it, Aimee Mann, I’ll say it: You’re the greatest ever!

You know what? I just love fucking writing songs. I love it. It is the most fun. It is so satisfying. I have ways to keep it from getting too ponderous. I have little tricks and games that I play to keep it fun, because it’s fun. And I don’t want it to not be fun.

I know a lot of songwriters who struggle and worry: “This song I’m working on is …” Or, “The song I just finished is the last good song I’ll ever write.” They tie themselves up in knots. It’s just so much fun. I just wrote this song for Julie Klausner for her show, Difficult People. It’s a funny song. It’s a duet she’s singing with herself and it’s meant to be funny. Of course, I wrote it, so it’s also sad. But it was just the most fun thing to do. It’s goofy, but it’s also unbelievably sad. And that is my favorite thing. I love it.

My last question was going to be … At this point, 30-some years on, what’s the goal with your music and has it shifted over the years? But I think you just answered what the goal is.

Yeah. Maybe. [Laughs] There are things I want to get better at, because I’m writing a musical … which is to say that, every three months, our writing team gets together to talk about what should happen next and then everybody goes and does their own thing and forgets about it until the next three-month meeting. So that’s been going on for years. But that is an ongoing, long-term project, and I would like to get better at writing for a really specific situation and specific characters and a specific voice. That’s harder than just writing for myself. When I can use a metaphorical shorthand, I know what I’m talking about. I don’t have to explain it to anybody else. It can be in the realm of this murky, dream-like image. But you have to be a lot more specific in musicals. I just think that’s a talent I would love to develop more.

Photo credit: Sheryl Nields

LISTEN: Peter Mulvey, ‘The Last Song’

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Artist: Peter Mulvey
Hometown: Milwaukee, WI
Song: “The Last Song”
Album: Are You Listening?
Release Date: March 24, 2017
Label: Righteous Babe

In Their Words: “We were circling the beast in Big Blue (Ani’s home studio) trying to find a way into this, when she suggested I play it on the guitar given to her by Michael Meldrum, an early mentor for her as an artist. Suddenly the song fell into place.” — Peter Mulvey

Photo credit: Elisabeth Witt

WATCH: My Bubba & Mandolin Orange, ‘Satisfied Mind’

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Artist: My Bubba & Mandolin Orange
Hometown: Iceland & Sweden / Chapel Hill, NC
Song: “Satisfied Mind”

In Their Words: “We’re happy to have captured this backstage version of ‘Satisfied Mind,’ which we sang as an encore touring with Mandolin Orange in the Fall of 2016. ‘Satisfied Mind’ has been with us for a long time, and we always come back to it in new contexts. It’s such a simple, strong, and grounding song, and always a pleasure to play with new musical friends. It’s message honoring peace of mind is always relevant and is somehow contained in the melodies of the song.” — Bubba Tomasdottir

Photo credit: Terri Loewenthal

New Alan Lomax Materials Now Available Online

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It’s no secret that Alan Lomax is a hero of ours here at the BGS. We’ve spoken with modern musicians like Sam Lee about the immense influence of the famed folklorist, as well as taken a trip or two through Lomax’s digital archives. That first foray into the digital world of Lomax yielded all kinds of goodies, like a Lead Belly concert poster from 1950 and an interactive map of Louisiana musicians playing and performing in 1934. 

We pulled those materials from a number of sources, including Lomax1934.com and the Association for Cultural Equity. We also spent a great deal of time surfing the Library of Congress’s online archives which, as of last month, just expanded its collection of Lomax-related content.

The new collection, which adds over 300,000 pieces to the Library’s Lomax archives, is culled from the Lomax family’s papers, so you can now feast your eyes on thousands more letters, writings, and research documents. The new material is housed in the same location as the some 25,000 pieces that were made available when we first began digging around in the digital Lomax realm. 

We’ve yet to make it through all 300,000 new additons, but we’ve already found some pretty cool pieces. Here are some of our favorite finds so far. Get to digging!

A transcript of Lomax’s interview with folk singer Vera Hall, conducted for The Rainbow Sign: A Southern Documentary in 1959. See the full transcript here.

John Henry Faulk’s Master’s thesis, “The Negro Sermons,” circa 1940. See the full document here.

A 1945 letter from Woody Guthrie to the Lomax family. See the full letter here.

A birth announcement for Woody Guthrie’s son, Arlo, circa 1947. See the full announcement here.

Transcript of a presentation, “The Homogeneity of African-New World Negro Musical Style,” by Lomax to American Anthropological Association in 1967. Read the full paper here.

Script for Lomax’s 1953 play, The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Read the full script here.

All photos via Library of Congress

Counsel of Elders: John McCutcheon on Telling Powerful Stories

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In late 2015, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist John McCutcheon received the kind of news capable of derailing any person, let alone a creative individual with lots left to say and the imagined time left to say it. Doctors found a lump in his lung and wanted to send him for a biopsy, but the discovery fell around Christmas and most services were, at best, delayed or, at worst, unavailable. McCutcheon eventually learned the lump wasn’t cancerous, as doctors initially believed, but the abscessed strep infection he did have required rest, so he cancelled the first two months of his tour in 2016 and followed doctors’ orders.

Like any storyteller who requires words to make sense of experiences and then lets those experiences out into the world as songs, McCutcheon spun his experience into music. He certainly had the time do it. “It afforded me lots of time to do writing and thinking and appreciating the fact that I get to do this amazing job,” McCutcheon says of recovering from the infection. McCutcheon gave himself over to writing and the result inevitably formed his 38th album, Trolling for Dreams. The songs encompass stories large and small, detailing everything from the epiphany he had after discovering a Bible at a garage sale to dancing with his wife in the kitchen as supper cooked on the stove. But amid those tales exist an incredibly personal tune — “This Ain’t Me.” In the song, McCutcheon details his cancer scare, describing with scalpel-like precision the way it forced him to reexamine the connection between his mind and his body. “I know people get news like this every day. Still, I gotta say, this ain’t me,” he sings in the chorus, sharing how the lump at first seemed something apart from him and eventually a part of him. It resonated in visceral ways with listeners, who saw the universality in his subjective experience. Stories, after all, exude that power.

You channeled your cancer scare into the song, “This Ain’t Me.” Has it made you appreciate music even more? That it, in some ways, gave you the form and the feeling to work through something so difficult?

Well, it’s same thing I did when I was a kid. I was working through the world, and music was a big part of it and it continues to be. Now I get to write, which is a completely cathartic experience. I never intended “This Ain’t Me” be anything but a private meditation, but I run a couple of songwriting camps, and there are good local people who have come to the camps numerous times. They have a songwriting group and they invited me one day, so I went over and they asked, “What have you been writing?” I sang them that song, and I said, “But this is just a way to write through what you’re going through.” I was trying to be the teacher. They said, “No, no. This is so universal. Remember what you taught us at camp that sometimes the most personal is unwittingly the most universal?” More than a lot of songs in recent years, when I sing that one in public, people come up to me and say, “That’s my story.”

That’s the sentiment I gathered from it. It’s something so many people deal with, but I found your articulation of the experience so compelling: This reckoning that some foreign body is a part of you, and, more than that, is hurting you.

I was pretty raw in those days. It was Christmas season; it was impossible to get a biopsy scheduled. My wife — God bless her; I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her — she started hunting around branches of the hospital in little rural communities and that’s where we went. One of the things that may not seem quite as obvious, which is in the last verse of the song, is before they started the biopsy, they all prayed. It was the interesting juxtaposition of spirituality and science. I thought, “I’m so glad I’m in a place where there is that kind of submission to things you don’t know about,” because in some ways that’s what music is about.

All art is built on a foundation of discipline, but art is about abandon; it’s not about control. I’m doing a workshop these days called Holy Ground, which is the place where politics and spirituality meet, because that’s kind of where I came from as a kid. I think a lot of people dwell in that world, where you realize that you don’t know everything and there are things driving your life that you can’t put a finger on. To some, it’s Marxism or Ayn Rand or whatever; and to other people, it’s sort of how you grow up feeling that this is the right way to do things. And when you trace back its provenance, it probably goes back to you sitting in Sunday school or hearing your mother say something and it actually took.

It’s interesting that you say that people dwell within that space of politics and spirituality, because it strikes me how much those two concepts become almost antithetical, as you get older.

Well, I think we instinctively take big ideas to extremes, and things become really unnecessarily binary: You are liberal or conservative; you’re a Jew or Muslim. Everything is black and white.

Very either/or.

We love to think that the people in our group are deliciously diverse, are nuanced in every possible way, and the other is monolithic because we’re too lazy to get to know them. It’s one of the interesting things: The evolution of my thinking about political music. I grew up in a union movement and was really involved with the musician’s movement — still am — but I was a president of my local, which was formed to serve people in the traveling musicians world, so we got blues players, bluegrass bands, folk singers, gospel groups, and so on. I had to be involved in negotiating union contracts with presenters and festivals and stuff. I realized that I needed to know what the other side wanted, what was really important to them, so I knew what the parameters were. You’re just getting to know people. That’s the core of it. As we launch into this weird new world that seems to be so polarized, I’m not interested in playing into that anymore. I like political satire and I think humor proves that the emperor has no clothes, and here’s a guy who’s stark naked who would be really fun to write humorous, excoriating songs about, but that only plays into the disease that got us here.

That divisiveness.

Yes, we’re isolated and we’re insulated from each other. I know how to do that. I did that for a lot of years. Now, I think there’s a more creative way to move forward, and I’m interested in being part of that.

As someone who has taught songwriting, how do you keep from being too heavy-handed with a political message?

I have a number of credos that I adhere to and I teach. One of the most important is to remember that you just have the microphone, that doesn’t mean you have the answers. I remember the first time I stood up in front of a microphone, I thought, “Wow, this is an incredible privilege and, with that, comes responsibility.” Not many people get the microphone in this world, so how are you going to use it? [That development] was tempered by lots of things that happened in real life. I became a parent. What am I going to do to really parent them? Part of it is what I do with that microphone. The job of the artist is to ask interesting questions; just as important is “Don’t tell people what to do.” Give us a good idea.

How do you do that at a time when so many people seem to be shouting over one another to get their message across?

I think you can present ideas in all their messy glory. I’m interested in giving people new ideas — that’s what I’m searching for in the songs. In one respect, every song I write is a political song. You’re presenting your idea of what the world could be and, in some respects, you’re opening up the world to people. When I write songs based on my experience touring in Alaska, where I got to learn a lot about small commercial fisherman, that was opening up a world of the other to an audience that would otherwise have no experience in that.

It’s interesting that you say political, because I know the humanities continue to come under fire as being unnecessary, but I always viewed literature or music as being incredibly important because they taught empathy. And there’s a political aspect to understanding another person, another perspective.

Well, it was Kafka — and he talked about books, but substitute music, art, theatre — who said, “It is the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

I love that.

It’s beautiful. It does the best it can do, as far as creating compassion. Look, I’m a word nerd. My wife is a writer, and we have the entire 22-volume Oxford English Dictionary. I frequently go there and I look up words I feel I’ve overused or people tend to overuse, and one of the words was “compassion.” It is what every great religion, all the wisdom in literature, teaches us is a supreme virtue. I looked up “compassion,” which is really sharing in someone’s pain and, unless you are a participant, that is impossible. You’re not sharing directly in their pain. The closest you can come is empathy, and that’s one of the things that music is so powerfully able to do.

I write frequently in the first person, and I learned to do that from Woody Guthrie. “I’ll take you through a door and up a high stairs” … it’s so cinematic. Everybody in their own mind knows what that door looks like. If you ask four people, you’d get four different answers, but they were right there — they were invited in by the power of the first person and, all of a sudden, the magic can start. It was brilliant. I liberally steal from other good writers.

Well, that’s a creative trick. Or at least how you learn your craft at the beginning.

I don’t think you know that you’re doing it. I don’t think Woody would have taught a class in songwriting, saying, “Here’s how you do this.” He was just an instinctive genius, and had the ability to tell a story. And that’s what so many writers lack is the power of that connective tissue that is primal to human beings. We love stories. It’s what makes country music so popular into the 21st century. It’s the one kind of music that truly, consistently tells stories. It’s what makes Bruce Springsteen such a powerful songwriter. And it’s what drew me to folk music right away.

Is the power in the telling or is there more to it?

I’ve been a lifelong fan of the poet Pablo Neruda, and my friend took me to this place up the Pacific Coast in Chile six or seven years ago. I was walking through the courtyard and there was a boat there. The director of the Neruda Foundation said as we passed, “Oh, that’s a boat that Pablo built.” I stopped. I said, “Really? He was famously frightened of the sea.” He said, “Oh, he never put it into water and sailed it. He just built it. “ I said, “Well, then it’s not a boat.” He said, “Of course it’s a boat.” I said, “Until you put it in the water and it functions as a boat, it’s nothing more than sculpture.” And the same thing is true of the song. Until you take it out of the ivory tower of your imagination and turn it lose and let it be imbued with the meaning other people feel, then it’s just creative narcissism. I’m not an art-for-art’s-sake kind of guy. The song has to get out there; it has to do its work. And the people have to do their work on it.

Photo credit: Irene Young

LISTEN: Will Johnson, ‘Patient, Patient Man’

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Artist: Will Johnson
Hometown: Austin, TX
Song: “Patient, Patient Man”
Album: Patient, Patient Man/Uinta
Release Date: February 24, 2017
Label: Different Folk Records

In Their Words: “Those first lines of ‘Patient, Patient Man’ kept rumbling around in my head on a trail run. I’d been kicking around some religious themes in my songs around that time, and was considering the idea of how a person can seem like a hopeless case to many faith-based people, and a prime candidate for forgiveness (and ultimately saving) to others. In the eye of the beholder, I guess. I took the narrative on first-person, and the melody unraveled from there. When I got home from the run, I recorded it in the middle bathroom of our house.” — Will Johnson

End of the Road: A Conversation with Norman Blake

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Few would dispute Norman Blake’s place on the Mount Rushmore of acoustic guitarists. He’s spent 50 years defining a flat-picking style adopted by guitarists from Tony Rice to Dave Rawlings. He’s also been a translator of traditional ballads, an influential folk songwriter, and an A-list sideman for the likes of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Kris Kristofferson.

But the bullet point version of his career misses what makes him fascinating: a stubborn integrity in his approach to making music — commercial pressures be damned — and a bizarre serendipity that’s led him right into the center of some of folk music’s most important moments of the past half-century. Now he’s capping off his long career with Brushwood (Songs & Stories), an album of beautiful, spare folk that is jarringly modern and political. The songs would sound timeless except that Blake is singing about social media and the Internet — and he often sounds righteously pissed off. It’s hard to explain Norman Blake briefly, but the back-story is worth it.

Born in 1938 on a farm near the Georgia-Alabama line, Blake grew up without electricity, learning songs from a radio jerry-rigged to an old car battery. He dropped out of school at 16 to play in bluegrass bands, made it to the Grand Ole Opry in his early 20s, then was drafted into the Army where he played mandolin in a bluegrass group voted “best band in the Caribbean Command.” Fresh out of the service, he ran into Johnny Cash at a recording session in Chattanooga. Cash asked him if he played the dobro, and 25-year-old Norman said, “Well, yeah.” Cash hired him on the spot.

Then, on the seminal, tide-turning albums of the era, he was right there. It’s hard not to notice the Forrest Gump-ian serendipity of it all.

Blake played guitar on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline in 1968, one of the founding albums of country-rock; on John Hartford’s Aereo-Plain in 1971, which marked the beginning of Newgrass; and on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken in 1972, which sold approximately as many copies as there were college students in America and introduced old-time country and bluegrass to a longer-haired generation. Thirty years and dozens of albums later, Gillian Welch recommended Blake to producer T Bone Burnett as just the guy to help introduce classic American old-time and folk to another, slightly shorter-haired generation. The O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, in 2000, won a truckload of Grammys, sold eight million copies, and made enough money for Blake — along with his wife and frequent collaborator, Nancy — to start his retirement from the road.

Now, in true Norman Blake style, he’s adding an unexpected chapter to his idiosyncratic story. The sound of Brushwood (Songs & Stories) is classic Norman and Nancy: guitar and fiddle and voices in harmony. But its content is mostly no-holds-barred fire and brimstone of the modern, progressive variety — as well as some instrumental rags, a couple of train ballads, and a spoken word ghost story. In other words, this 79-year-old master of the craft just put out an album of traditional folk songs about climate change, old time religion, the Koch brothers, train wrecks, the NRA, and Wall Street greed. He predicts it will be his last album, and damn. What a way to tie a bow on it. God bless Norman Blake.

I know, in your music, you’ve never shied away from being political, but it seems like, on this record, there’s a lot more explicitly political songs.

Yeah, I somehow just felt like doing that. I don’t know why. It just came out that way, some of the stuff that I ended up writing.

On some of these songs, like “The Truth Will Stand (When This World’s on Fire),” you’re combining observations about modern life — climate change, the NRA, billionaires running the country — with the spiritual language you’ve been using in traditional songs for a long time. Did that feel like a new thing to do? Or did that come naturally?

Yeah, what I write is just the way it comes out. There’s nothing calculated there. It’s just how I write, yeah.

Well, maybe I’ll go back in time a little bit here. I’ve read that the success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack allowed you and Nancy to stop touring, and you felt that was a welcome relief. I’m wondering what your feelings about performing were earlier in your career. Was there a time when you enjoyed touring, when it was an important part of making music to you? Or did you want to stop earlier?

I had considered stopping earlier, yes — 2007 is when I actually quit touring, quit the road due to age and things like that. You know, just getting tired of the actual road itself at that point. Of course, we did everything on the ground, driving. Just got to where we couldn’t stomach that part of it anymore.

I guess what I’m getting at is, do you think if money hadn’t been a part of the equation, your career would’ve been very different? Would you have traveled less, written more?

Yeah, money was a factor in why we did it. I suppose so, yeah. I had the artistic inclination to want to do it, but the money — certainly making a living … we had a family and everything and had to do something. A lot of times, when we made records through the years, the reason we’d make the record was, we had so much money from the record company — they’d give us x amount of money to make a record — and what we had leftover then that we didn’t spend, we’d usually use that to pay our income tax every year. [Laughs] So we made a record about every year, in some ways, you might say, to pay the income taxes. But it was also artistic at the same time.

So why do you make records now?

More for an artistic sense, I think. The way the world is now, the record business is nothing like it was when we started. It’s a whole different thing. My records have never been huge sellers, so they had to be artistic on one level, I guess. Now they’re more artistic, certainly.

At the end of this record, particularly with “Nameless Photograph” and “Stay Down on the Farm,” I couldn’t help but think it sounded like a goodbye.

It’s trying to be. I think maybe this might be my last one — my last full record that I’ll make. I’ll be 79 years old here in less than two months. So I’m pushing 80 years old. I had a light stroke four years ago, had artery surgery on my neck, and that kind of thing. I never was a great singer, as far as having a great voice, but that’s left my voice pretty gravelly. I just wonder, how long do you inflict yourself on the public as you grow old? [Laughs]

It’s a lot of work to make a record, and I just don’t have the inclination. I have vowed this year — like I said, we quit the road in 2007, but we’ve played a few gigs around home — but this is the first year that I have said that I will not perform this year in public. And I will say this: I may never again perform in public, if possible, unless it’s a money consideration and I have to. I may never perform in public again. That’s what I’m thinking.

Do you still enjoy making music at home?

Oh, I play all the time. I play every day. Oh yeah, yeah. I’ll never quit that. I’m totally committed to playing. But not in public. As you grow older, for me, it takes a lot more practice to keep the playing and the voice and everything to where it’s passable to make records. As far as the performing, that’s also something that’s getting to be too much for me physically. All of the getting ready for it, and all of the traveling that you may have to do, even if it’s around home. I just don’t weather up that good. And I just don’t need the performance pressure, with these medical conditions and things. And I will say this, not to belabor the point, but we — speaking of Nancy and me, both — feel very much that with the climate of the country right now, the political climate and the attitude in the country in general, I don’t feel like I want to entertain some people. I don’t want to go out and put my music before some of them.

That’s interesting. I remember your song from the early 2000s during the Bush administration, “Don’t be Afraid of the Neo-Cons.” I guess the natural follow-up would be, do you think we should be afraid of Trump?

Yeah, I suppose so. But I don’t know that I would go and do that. I feel like there are enough people — obviously, as we saw this past weekend — there are enough people speaking out. I don’t know what the outcome is going to be. The political climate we don’t agree with at all. So we maybe just as well stay home. That’s, like I said, that’s one reason I said I don’t feel like trying to entertain some folks. I don’t feel like putting myself out in front of them when I know that I disagree with them and they disagree with me so radically. The way that people are nowadays, there’s so much weird stuff going on, I feel like some — excuse my French, but I feel like some son of a bitch is liable to shoot us or any of us for being freaks or for playing hillbilly music or singing the wrong song at the wrong time. Somebody is liable to shoot you up there on a big stage in front of a big crowd at a festival. You never know what the hell’s going on now.

Well, a lot of folks have compared the current political turmoil to what happened in the late ’60s. You lived through that, and you were a musician then. So are you optimistic at all about the country now? I think a listener to the new record would hear that you’re not.

Am I optimistic about the country? No, I’m not, in some ways. In other words, considering what’s just happened, how can you be? I understand why a lot of people might have elected him, voted for him, but he took them for a ride. He’s a con man. He conned a lot of these people. And I feel like a lot of them that put him where he is today, how can they look at what he’s doing … it should be painfully obvious, just from the time he got into office, that he’s doing exactly the opposite to what he told them, in a lot of ways. So, no, I’m not optimistic about it. I feel like they really got snookered. Just a minute …

[Nancy’s voice in the background: “Democracy doesn’t come with a guarantee!”]

Nancy says that democracy doesn’t come with a guarantee.

That’s a good reminder.

Yeah, she has some good ideas. She says some good things. In fact, some of the songs on there are inspired by her. She helped write them. I get some good ideas from her!

Speaking of writing, I’m really curious about how you became a songwriter, because it seems like — and you can correct my dates, if I’m slightly off — but you became a professional musician in the late ’50s, early ’60s, but you didn’t make your first solo recording until ’72.

That’s right.

Were you writing songs all along, or were you learning along the way from the great songwriters you were playing with?

No, what singing I did then was mostly just singing harmony parts or something on the chorus in bands, things like that. When I got ready to make that first record — people were saying, “You should make a record” — when it came about that I had the wherewith to do that, with Bruce Kaplan — he was with Rounder at that point, then it became Flying Fish, but it was still Rounder at that time … I thought to myself, “Well, I won’t make a record unless I have some original material.” So I said, “Well I need to write some stuff.” So I started writing then.

Wow. Just like that. For a while after that, you toured pretty hard, and it seems like you didn’t write as much. Is that because you lost interest in it?

Too busy. Too busy driving and performing. And competing in the bluegrass world, trying to survive in the bluegrass world knowing we were playing something that was completely off the beaten track and away from what they were playing. So we just took too much time being professional and performing and driving and getting to gigs and all that. We just didn’t have time to want to be that creative.

What do you mean by competing?

When you sent me and Nancy and James Bryan [The Rising Fawn String Ensemble] out on a bluegrass festival with a fiddle and a cello and a guitar, you know, out there in five-string banjo world, so to speak, we were kind of an oddity. We were fish in a tree.

How did it feel to be so different at those festivals?

Well, we did a lot of musical crusading to survive in that world. And we managed to. But that’s something else — we grew tired of crusading musically over the years.

It seems like you’ve influenced a lot of people over the years that have become very influential in their own right. Might even say you’ve influenced people even more than the folks in strictly five-string banjo world. I’m thinking of Gillian Welch and others. Do you feel like your crusading kind of won in the long run?

Oh, I don’t know. I never knew who I really influenced in the long run. I do relate a lot to Gillian and David. They’re some of my friends, and I respect what they do. They do some great things, and I admire their grit to do it. But I never thought about who I influenced or didn’t. I was never sure about that. I guess I’m never sure of my role in any of it. I just was too busy trying to survive and make a living in the music business, and it was hard enough for any of us. Playing acoustic music has always been a hard way to make a living.

Sure. It seems like, from the outside, at least, that it must’ve taken a lot of backbone to do what you did just because you felt like it’s what you should do, rather than because it was lucrative or because there was a successful niche for it.

We always did what we felt like doing artistically. We played what we knew to play and what we could play and felt like playing. We didn’t really tailor ourselves into any particular thing. We never tried to be commercial in any sense.

Just doing what you felt like you needed to do — is that what it felt like to drop out of school at 16 to become a musician? Was that a popular decision with your family?

I was always pretty well supported by my parents in what I did musically. But they were never quite up for me leaving home at the point that I did starting off on it. I think that worried them a little bit. But they encouraged me, musically, very much in what I did …they were surprised by some of it, you know, that I’d had as much success as I’d had. They didn’t expect that! I think they always considered it as something you couldn’t make a living out of.

After growing up listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio in the ’40s, what did it feel like to get up on the Opry stage in your early 20s? To play on that program you grew up on.

Oh, it was a big deal. It was a big deal for us to be on it in any way back in the day. That’s back when it was down at the Ryman. It was the world. It was it. In fact, when I was real young, we couldn’t think past the Opry, hardly. That was the pinnacle, the top of the heap.

I’m wondering about your early guitar education. On the Opry, when you were growing up in the ’40s, there wouldn’t have been many lead acoustic guitar players, right?

No, no, it was not a thing you heard featured very much. It was in the bands. But Sam McGee was playing guitar. He was on there. He was playing solo-type guitar, playing with his brother Kirk. So I heard him.

Sam McGee? I’ve never heard of Sam McGee.

You’ve never heard of Sam McGee!

Well … [Laughs] I’ve heard of a good number of guitar players from back then, I think, but I don’t know of him.

Well, the McGee brothers. Sam and Kirk McGee, the boys from sunny Tennessee, they were billed. They played with Uncle Dave Macon. Sam played a lot with Uncle Dave, made records with him, and then he and his brother Kirk also made records. And then they played with Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith, band called the Dixieliners.

What was his guitar style like?

Sam was a finger-style guitar player, played guitar-banjo and played guitar, kind of a ragtime style. They were extremely good, some of my favorite people. I used to hear them on the Opry when I was a kid.

Did you study his style, learn to play like him?

I never tried to play their stuff that early on. I’m sure I play in that style, that same old finger-style playing — similar songs and stuff. They were very good performers.

Who else was an early influence on your guitar playing?

Mother Maybelle [Carter] was a big influence. Very much so. On those early records of the Carter Family, then later on when I got to know her in Nashville.

What did Doc Watson mean to you when you first heard him?

After I came out of the army in ‘63, I was giving guitar lessons in Chattanooga. One of my students asked me had I ever heard of him, and I said no. I had never heard of Doc. They brought me some records, loaned me some of his records to hear. I was doing mostly finger-playing at that point. I always had played mandolin with a flat pick. I had picked the guitar a little bit that way, too. Then I heard him, and he was getting popular, getting a lot of notice at that point, so I thought to myself, “My goodness.” I thought this was a novelty to play the guitar this way! I had learned from the old way, the thumb and finger style, but then I thought, “Well, I can do this too. This is something I know how to do.” So I started working on it more at that point …

Then, when I got to Nashville, the whole thing opened up. I realized there was a whole word of this going on, so I got right in the middle of it quick as I could. I went through a phase that played both ways. I played with a flat pick part of the time — did that with John Hartford — then I also played alternate thumb and finger style, you know, single string stuff. Ended up finally just pretty well flat-picking.

It’s interesting to think — I mean, a lot of folks listened to the Skillet Lickers back in the ’20s and must’ve known Riley Puckett’s style, and then also were familiar with Maybelle Carter’s melodic guitar playing, but then you said people thought more modern pickers like Doc Watson sounded like a novelty. Why do you think that is? What was the difference?

Well, they just weren’t used to hearing that much played on the guitar with a pick like that. The guitar was more in the bands. When it started becoming a prominent lead instrument, it created a whole new thing. And we never called it flat-picking. That’s a term that came on later. We always referred to a pick like that as a “straight pick.”

Did Doc ever teach you or give you any advice?

Well, I’ve always said I learned from anybody I ever liked. We played gigs with Doc. I’ve had the good fortune to hang out some with him, had some good conversations and things. Got along pretty good.

Compared to learning from folks you’ve played with and folks you listened to and by going on the road, nowadays a lot of young musicians — even folk and bluegrass musicians — are going to conservatory programs to study. Do you think there’s a big difference between those learning styles?

Nowadays, people do everything in a different way. They have to. There’s so much going on. They’ve got access to so much that we didn’t have. I guess any way you can learn it is what you do. We were a lot more rural in our approach. Nowadays, rural life is a lot less involved with it. It’s become more of a fad, in a lot of ways. But they just don’t come from the same world that we did. They didn’t grow up down in the country. A radio to listen at is all we had, and a handful of records on a wind-up Victrola or something. Nowadays, they can access anything that’s out there.

Do you think that access to everything, that lack of common influences, is changing the way people make music? It seems like older generations of musicians always talk about these common touchstones, like listening to the Opry on the family radio or watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show …

Yeah, I don’t know. I wouldn’t know. But when I first started hearing music, we just had the Opry on the radio and a few other radio programs — of course, it was live music on the radio, on our battery-powered radio. We didn’t have electricity, when I was a kid, so we had a battery radio, a phonograph, a few records, and whatever you heard people playing around the community. That’s all we had to draw on.

Why did you decide to incorporate storytelling onto this record — I mean, spoken stories?

Just stuff I’d written. I figured, “Well, if I’m not going to make another record, then these things are never going to get heard.” Whether they should or shouldn’t. They were just things I’d written that weren’t a song, so I said, “Well, I’ll put them on there.”

Do you think younger folk musicians have a responsibility to tell it like it is, like you do, to talk about the modern world or politics in their songs?

I don’t think they have a responsibility to, no. They just have to do what they feel like. It’s their own decision. If they feel like that, they should do it … I always felt that I didn’t want to overdo that aspect of things, I mean politically. If I was really trying to entertain people like years ago, out where people would expect me to play the guitar, I didn’t feel like going out and getting too political — just like a lot of performers get too religious on stage. I think it turns people off, if they didn’t go there for that. If it’s a political rally and you want to be political, then that’s a different thing. But just to go out in a general manner to entertain people, I think politics and religion are some things that should be avoided to some degree. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sing a religious song! We always did. But I mean, you shouldn’t go out and get on the stump, if people aren’t expecting it or didn’t go there to hear that.

So now that you don’t perform live, you feel free from those considerations?

Yeah, I put it on a record. I’ve always said I’ll use a record for any kind of soapbox I decided to get on. In public, I wouldn’t want to play this latest record. If I went out to play, I wouldn’t do that stuff!

Well, let me finish with one more question for you.

Go ahead.

I haven’t really heard anyone sing about social media or the Internet in a folk song before, and it was sort of … well, refreshing, I guess.

[Laughs] Well, thank you.

It strikes me as funny that most young folk musicians seem committed to using their parents’ and grandparents’ vocabulary and, as far as using modern words, you’ve beaten us to it.

Well, I feel like it’s all there, you know. The old stuff’s there and the new stuff’s there and it’s out in the world. It just fell out that way. It was not calculated, it just came out that way.