Tag: mountain music

Country Pickers, Center Stage

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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Double-, triple-, quadruple-threats are not uncommon in country music, not in the least. It’s a frequent occurrence, tripping over or into a country artist that’s a songwriter, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, writer, thinker, and so much more. In fact, until more recent decades, wearing many hats was seen as a sort of prerequisite to making hillbilly music. After all, this is “just” country music, it’s got a wide and deep DIY tradition, and the folks who make it often have to also load in the gear, sell the merch, post on social media, and produce the albums, play the demos and scratch tracks, write the lyrics, and otherwise steer the creative ship.

Some of the most successful artists and most original voices in country music are perfect examples of how multifaceted skill sets translate directly to star power. You may not need to be a Telecaster shredder to make it onto the radio or you may not need to be able to pick like Mother Maybelle to make a living, but if you can back up your songs with mighty playing, it certainly translates with audiences.

From Chet Atkins, Dolly Parton, and Wanda Jackson to Charlie Daniels, Willie Nelson, and Bonnie Raitt, here are just a few legendary examples of hugely successful country artists who are or were excellent musicians and instrumentalists, too.

Chet Atkins

A record company executive, producer, and pioneer of the “Nashville Sound,” Chet Atkins was also a one-of-a-kind guitar picker, renowned across the globe for his unique style – which was inspired by Merle Travis. Atkins certainly made “Travis picking” his own, arguably eclipsing all of his predecessors and continuing to influence guitarists today. An inductee of the Country Music, Rock and Roll, and Musicians’ Halls of Fame, Atkins’ impact is hard to understate and his resume includes work with Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley, Hank Snow, Waylon Jennings, and countless others.

DeFord Bailey

One of the first superstars of the Grand Ole Opry, DeFord Bailey was a world-class harmonica player who was also the first Black performer on WSM’s fabled stage. Some sources also credit Bailey as being the first musician to record music in Nashville. However you approach his career and music, Bailey was a seismic presence in the earliest days of country. Born in 1899, Bailey faced constant racism, bigotry, and marginalization on the Opry, in Nashville, and as he traveled and performed. He passed away in 1982 and was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005.

Glen Campbell

Even at the highest heights of Glen Campbell’s superstardom, he refused to let his superlative instrumental skill take a backseat to his roles as frontman, songwriter, Hollywood actor, TV star, and tabloid veteran. Campbell’s approach to country music as a true multi-hyphenate celebrity bridged generations, connecting the hardscrabble, DIY generations where multiple skills were necessary to make a living to the modern era, where he helped pave a way for famously multi-talented picker/singer/writers like Vince Gill and Brad Paisley to not be pigeonholed as one thing or the other.

Ray Charles

Any conversation around or collection of superlative country pickers and musicians would be glaringly incomplete without the inclusion of Ray Charles. His incursions and experimentations in country music are many and infamous. His 1962 album, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music is routinely listed as one of the best country albums of all time. He’s worked with and performed with Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Ricky Skaggs, Travis Tritt, Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, and many, many more. Plus, his country forays demonstrate a deep, holistic understanding of the genre. Charles is a quintessential country multi-hyphenate and country-soul in the modern era would feel especially lacking without his seminal contributions to that tradition.

Charlie Daniels

It’s hard not to wonder what young, hippie, “long-haired,” Vietnam War-opposing fiddler Charlie Daniels would have thought of his older self, and his more harebrained and often hateful beliefs later in life. But the controversial and outspoken musician, at all points of his career, was a picker’s picker. Over the course of his life he performed and recorded with Earl Scruggs, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and many more. But his chief contribution to American roots music may just be his fiery, unhinged fiddling on “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Just wander down Lower Broadway in Nashville on any given Saturday night to feel the impact of that particular show-stopper. In this clip, he chats and performs “Uncle Pen” with Scruggs and Del McCoury.

Vince Gill

That buttery voice, that stank-face inducing chicken pickin’, that high, lonesome sound – Vince Gill is all at once country and bluegrass, Nashville and Oklahoma, western swing and old-time fiddle. Whether with The Eagles, preeminent pedal steel guitarist Paul Franklin, the Time Jumpers, or so many other outfits, bands, and iterations, Gill is simply right at home. Because, at his core, he’s just a picker. He may play arenas, but he knows he belongs at 3rd & Lindsley or the Station Inn. Or Bluegrass Nights at the Ryman. A quintessential picker-singer-frontman, Gill continues to define the myriad ways country stars can maintain their selfhood and personality – instrumentally and otherwise – even in their wild successes.

Merle Haggard

Speaking of chicken pickin’, country’s most famous Okie was a shredder, too. A sad song, a glass of (misery and) gin, a Telecaster, and the Hag – that’s all we need, right there. Merle’s playing style, even at its most technical and impressive, was simple and down to earth. You could tell he cut his teeth playing bars, fairs, and honky tonks. You could almost hear him pulling himself up by his bootstraps as he played.

Wanda Jackson

The Queen of Rockabilly has been slaying rock and roll, hillbilly music, and the guitar for more than seventy years. In 2021 she released her final album, Encore, when she was 84 years old. It features her signature passion and fire – and performances by Elle King, Joan Jett, Angaleena Presley, and more. Jackson has been representing the vital contributions of women to rockabilly and rock and roll for her entire career, just as often commanding the stage with her growly, entrancing voice and her powerful right hand.

Willie Nelson

Who would Willie Nelson be without Trigger? Without a tasty, less-is-more, nylon-string guitar solo? For decades, Nashville, Music Row, and guitar players around the world have been emulating his particular sound as a guitarist – whether they know it or not. Sure, he’s a hit songwriter, a star and front-person, a collaborator of Snoop Dogg and Frank Sinatra, and a connoisseur of fine bud, but perhaps more than all of these accomplishments, Willie is an impeccable picker. He can hold his own with the best of the best, because he is the best of the best.

Brad Paisley

Brad Paisley’s fame crested at perhaps the perfect time for him in country music, combining a rip-roarin’ guitar playing style with a sound that was entirely trad while carrying touches of the bro country wave that was about to inundate the genre. As such, he was able to build a career on the diversity of his skill set, before Music Row and the power behind it began prioritizing music that didn’t need to be musical and voices that didn’t need to be singular. Luckily, Paisley is both those things and more, and despite the many eyebrow raising moments across his career, our faces more often show shock at his mind-bending skill as a guitarist than anything else.

Dolly Parton

How is it that Dolly Parton can play so many instruments so impeccably with those iconic acrylic nails!? Nowadays, you are just as likely to hear Dolly performing to a track – yes, she does lip sync and pantomime playing along with recordings – but don’t get it twisted, she absolutely can play a passel of instruments from her beloved “mountain music” traditions. She plays guitar, banjo, auto-harp, dulcimer, and has even been known to pick up a bedazzled saxophone from time to time – though we can’t guarantee she actually knows how to play that one, we’re still blown away.

And what about thatone viral video with Patti LaBellewhere they play their acrylics like washboards? Dolly can make music with just about any instrument.

Bonnie Raitt

How many people do you think enjoy Bonnie Raitt’s soulful blues and Southern rock sounds without knowing she’s also often the one playing the guitar solos and making that bottleneck slide weep? Raitt is a Grammy winning songwriter, a fantastic vocalist and song interpreter/collector, and – above all, in this writer’s opinion – a superb guitar picker, especially playing slide. She can hold her own with just about anyone, and she has. Her phrasing and use of melodic space demonstrates that she’s been honing her craft for her entire life. That taste can’t be taught, it has to be found. Boy, has she found it.

Marty Stuart

Marty Stuart’s long, fabulous, superlative career began with him filling the role of sideman for such luminaries as Lester Flatt, Johnny Cash, Vassar Clements, and Doc Watson. He plays guitar and mandolin, working up his chops as a youngster with pickers like Roland White as his mentors. When his solo career took off after his Columbia debut in the mid-eighties, his ear for fine picking remained present throughout his music – however far afield from those early bluegrass and country days he may have traveled, stylistically. Whether bringing in psychedelic surf sounds or Indigenous flavors of the American West, Stuart’s catalog of music centers virtuosity that’s never gratuitous. And his band, the Fabulous Superlatives, featuring crack guitarist Kenny Vaughan and multi-instrumentalist Chris Scruggs, represent a high level of picking prowess, too.

Tedeschi Trucks Band

By many measures, Derek Trucks is the world’s foremost living slide guitarist, but don’t overlook powerhouse vocalist and co-band leader, Susan Tedeschi in order to venerate Trucks! Both started playing as youngsters – Trucks when he was a kid and Tedeschi when she attended Berklee College of Music. These two are guitar and blues royalty, helming one of the most impactful modern blues and Southern rock orchestras on the planet. They’re consummate musicians, knowing just how to surround themselves by players who support and challenge, both. Even with their laundry list of personal accomplishments, together, Tedeschi & Trucks – who are also married – are so much greater than the sum of their parts.

Keith Urban

Keith Urban brings a scruffy, down to earth guitar playing style to his polished and glam mainstream country sound. Yes, even as far away as Australia, having instrumental chops means having country currency. When he moved to Nashville in the early ‘90s, with a few Australian radio hits and awards under his belt, he immediately found work as a side musician and co-writer in Music City. It wasn’t long until his star ascended stateside, too – and then, as quickly, around the world – bolstered by arena-ready guitar. Now readying his first album since 2020, Urban shows no signs of slowing down, with the music or the picking!

Photo of Glen Campbell courtesy of the artist.

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Wilma Lee Cooper: A Mountain Music Star Shining Through the Decades

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Wilma Lee Cooper, who died in 2011 at age 90, is being inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame this month. Many of her fans, friends and followers say it’s about time.

A snapshot of Wilma Lee. Wilma Leigh (later changed to “Lee”) Leary, was born in West Virginia in 1921. Her first performances were as a young girl in the family band. Her last performance as a band leader was in 2001 at the age of 80, when she had a stroke while singing at the Grand Ole Opry. Determined to finish the song, she was helped off stage to a standing ovation.

Between these times, this tiny woman dressed in home-made ruffled dresses and high heels impressed everyone she encountered in the music world.

She had a powerful voice and was an equally powerful guitar player. With her inherent smarts (she skipped several grades) and business degree, she successfully navigated the music industry and kept all the band’s books, first with her husband, Dale Troy “Stoney” Cooper, and then on her own after Stoney’s death.

She traveled with a sewing machine and a coffee maker. After every tour, she would wash all her stage clothes and spend 45 minutes ironing each dress.

She also drove the band bus and fixed her family’s television sets. She was a kind and generous boss, a nurturing mother, an ethical and caring woman and a force of nature on stage.

(Above, read an article on Wilma Lee Cooper published in 1977 in Sing Out! written by Alice Gerrard)

From church socials to radio. Reviewing Wilma Lee Cooper’s musical life is an immersion course in the evolution of country and bluegrass music. The Leary Family Band – Wilma Lee’s parents, plus Wilma Lee, her two sisters, and a fiddle-playing uncle – started as a local gospel group. The girls later incorporated secular music sets.

Their prize for winning a statewide contest was the chance to perform at the National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C. A stop at WSVA in Harrisonburg, Virginia, on the way home brought a job offer – and big changes. In one day, the Leary Family went from a local ensemble to professionals with a show of their own. And, when their fiddling uncle returned to his teaching job, the family recruited a young fiddler then called “Smiley” Cooper. (Radio listeners voted for the new name, “Stoney,” to avoid a conflict with a state yodeling champion called Smiley).

Soon, the beautiful oldest daughter and the movie-star handsome fiddler were singing duets with the band. They married in 1941.

Foregoing music to raise their daughter, Carol Lee, in one place was short-lived. Wilma Lee is quoted in Bear Family liner notes as saying, “I was goin’ nuts at home… Stoney wasn’t happy… and it was awful hard to settle down that way.”

On to the Grand Ole Opry. Plunging back into performing, Stoney and Wilma Lee followed the common path of moving from radio station to radio station. They hired back-up players, eventually settling on the band name, “Clinch Mountain Clan.”
In a 2023 Bluegrass Unlimited article, Jack Bernhardt referred to “Stoney’s old-time/bluegrass fiddle and Wilma Lee’s propulsive rhythm guitar and soul-stirring vocals.” Stoney also sang harmonies.

Their 1947 move to Wheeling, West Virginia, and the WWVA Jamboree, broadcast on a 50,000 watt station, propelled the Coopers into the national spotlight. By the mid-1950s, they were charting high on Billboard. Within a year of their 1956 hit record, “Cheated Too,” they joined the Grand Ole Opry. They had seven hit records by 1961, with some of Nashville’s top writers, like Don Gibson and Boudleaux Bryant, writing for them – as well as songs written by Wilma and Stoney, themselves. While the recording business was moving away from what had been called “hillbilly music,” the Grand Ole Opry continued to welcome the eclectic range of country music, from Grandpa Jones and Bill Monroe to “Nashville Sound” crooners.

Dan Rogers, Vice President and Executive Producer of the Grand Ole Opry, said, “It was this cavalcade of great artists, all doing something similar, but also all doing something with their own stamps and styles. It didn’t need characterization. It was just, ‘This is Wilma Lee and Stoney.’ It might have been one of those songs that took them to the Top 10 of the country charts, or it may have been an instrumental or a gospel piece.”

Over time, the Coopers found themselves in conflict with the Nashville labels. Wilma Lee said a producer denied her request to record “I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven,” claiming no one would buy it. It later became a huge hit for Tex Ritter. And they wanted her to record songs she would never perform.

The welcoming bluegrass world. While country radio was pushing away mountain music, new audiences were inviting the Coopers in. Folk and bluegrass fans loved their traditional sounds, as well as their stellar musicianship.

The Clinch Mountain Clan attracted top sidemen. To name a few, Butch Robins, Vic Jordan and Tater Tate went on to play for Bill Monroe, and Jimmy D. Brock later joined the Osborne’s. Dobro master Gene Wooten was in Wilma Lee’s band, as was Woody Paul, shortly before forming Riders In the Sky, and Terry Smith, now of the Grascals.

Marty Lanham (musician, luthier and a founder of the Station Inn) had just moved to Nashville, where he was befriended by Wilma Lee’s sisters, Jeraldine (Jerry) Jonson and Peggy Gayle. They told him the Coopers were looking for a bass player. So, he borrowed a bass, took some lessons – and become part of the Clinch Mountain Clan three weeks later.

The Coopers always gave their audiences what they expected. Lanham said, “Bill Carter would play Dobro and electric guitar, and Mike Lattimore would play either banjo or drums. At a bluegrass festival, they would use the bluegrass instrumentation and then switch over to electric guitar and drums,” at a country booking.

In 1974, the Smithsonian Institution dubbed Wilma Lee, “The First Lady of Bluegrass.” In 1976, Rounder Records – dedicated to promoting roots music – invited Stoney and Wilma Lee to record. Marian Leighton Levy, a Rounder co-founder, remembered Stoney as “tall, dark and handsome,” with an Errol Flynn aura, while Wilma Lee “was outgoing and friendly, in a low-key and down home way. She looked and played the part of a real professional, and yet at the same time she was warm and made you feel welcome.” Wilma Lee also worked with Rounder to select material, and she seemed to be “the business person in the group and in the family,” Levy remembers.

Wilma Lee takes the lead. Wilma Lee was 56 when Stoney died in 1977. She wasn’t ready to sit back and put her feet up. She reassembled a band, which after some initial shuffling included Gene Wooten; Stan (Stanjo) Brown, who later played with Bill Monroe; Gary Bailey; and Woody Paul. (Wilma Lee continued her preference for an electric bass, even after getting pushback from bluegrass critics who hated it on recordings.)

Their first year, the band traveled 110,000 miles, playing about 140 gigs. On one 3,600 mile week-long trip, Wilma Lee drove about one-third of the time.

Brown remembers that Wilma Lee embraced the bluegrass world as it was embracing her. “She was doing the same material (as when Stoney was alive), but it was approached a whole different way. Her guitar really drove the rhythm and the energy in the band. And her voice… it set the timing… it was so precise. I had never played with anybody up to that point who had that much energy and drive.”

And she always connected at an emotional level. She would be sobbing by the end of the song “A Daisy a Day,” about a man who leaves flowers on his wife’s grave. “It was really sincere. There was nothing theatrical about her,” Brown said.

She told Alice Gerrard for Sing Out!, “…I see the story a-happening while I’m singing the song… I guess I’m one that likes what you call your heart and story songs. They tell a story – you’ve got to believe it.”

Rogers of the Opry said, “I always think of her music as pure, and I think that her heart was the same. I don’t think she could have been any other way if she’d tried.”

Wilma Lee continued to record, as well as perform, until her stroke in 2001. In 2010, she appeared on stage once more at the Opry to thank her fans for their years of support.

Wilma Lee and the world of bluegrass. Stoney and Wilma Lee were stars, no matter what genre they were playing. Their partnership was one of a kind. And Wilma – as a singer, as a guitar player, as a fireball on stage and a huge heart off stage – has left a powerful legacy.

In 1994, the International Bluegrass Music Association presented Wilma Lee with its Award of Merit. This year, she will receive its highest honor, induction into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.

Rounder’s Levy said, “There are very few women of her generation in the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.” (In fact,
only eight of the current 70 inductees are women or have women members.) And Levy believes Wilma Lee clearly belongs there.

“In terms of being on the Grand Ole Opry, making lots of records, having a substantial career… the uniqueness of her vocal style, playing guitar when most women in bands weren’t playing guitars or instruments… She was a bandleader and a featured voice, face and name, right up there in her own right,” Levy said.

Ken Irwin, another Rounder co-founder, said, “She was an energy source that people didn’t see very often… She would put it all out there. She brought not only the tunes, but the sensibility, of the old-time music that she grew up with, and that she didn’t change.”

Gerrard said the popular female folk revival singers at the time, like Joan Baez and Judy Collins, sounded high and sweet. But Wilma Lee’s voice – like Molly O’Day’s and Ola Belle Reed’s – had grit and strength. “They weren’t holding back. They were letting go – putting their voices out there.” That’s what Gerrard was striving for and what made her duets with Hazel Dickens so compelling.

Andrea Roberts, principal of the Andrea Roberts Agency, was an adolescent when she first saw Wilma Lee perform. “She carried herself so professionally, looked like a star – and backed it up with talent and business leadership. She was a dynamic vocalist – a big, booming voice – and she played the guitar like she meant it! She was not timid… and that left an indelible mark on me even when I didn’t realize it was happening.

“Not until I started my own band as a 21-year-old woman did I realize the significance of Wilma Lee’s role as band leader and front person. At that point in my own career, Wilma Lee’s accomplishments became very important to me, and I looked to her as a role model for persevering in a male-dominated business.”

A daughter’s thoughts. Carol Lee Cooper, Stoney and Wilma Lee’s daughter, who first sang on stage with her parents at age two, has carried on the family musical tradition. As an adult, she joined her parents’ show at the Opry. Eventually, she became a Nashville legend as the long-time leader of the Carol Lee Singers, the back-up vocalists at the Grand Ole Opry. A great vocalist, she was Conway Twitty’s favorite harmony partner.

Carol Lee is proud that her parents’ work is recorded in the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. Of her mother’s induction into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, Carol Lee said, “She would be so honored to know that.”

Author’s Note: Many excellent accounts of Wilma Lee’s life and career have been written. A great starting place for anything you want to know about women in bluegrass is Murphy Hicks Henry’s Pretty Good for a Girl. Some other good sources, in addition to the Gerrard interview mentioned above, are Bluegrass Unlimited and liner notes from a Bear Family compilation.

Editor’s Note: “You Can’t Talk About Women in Country Music Without Talking About… Wilma Lee Cooper” by Alice Gerrard (SING OUT! Volume 26 Issue 2, 1977) appears with permission; courtesy of Mark Moss and SING OUT!

Photo Credit: David Gahr, from SING OUT! Volume 26 Issue 2, 1977

Bluegrass & Roots Songs to Strike To

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Hot. Strike. Summer!!

It was just announced that hundreds of thousands of Teamsters driving for shipping and logistics company UPS will avert a strike after their negotiations came through, but even so, dozens of strike authorization votes are happening all across the U.S. as workers the world over watch WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, Amazon and Starbucks unionization drives, and smaller pickets like that at dinner theater Medieval Times. Union membership and public opinions toward unions are at highs not seen since the ’60s, and millennial and Gen-Z workers are joining unions, striking, and picketing at astronomical rates.

It’s important to remember that, although bluegrass in its modern iteration can often feel staunchly conservative, militantly patriotic, and delusionally nostalgic for “old-fashioned values,” it’s a genre that was born from the creativity of working class and impoverished Southerners, Appalachians, and immigrants – and it has always had a pro-worker, leftward bent. Singers, pickers, songwriters, and performers like Hazel Dickens, Ola Belle Reed, the Country Gentlemen, the Johnson Mountain Boys, Mac Wiseman, Earl Scruggs, and so many more were ardent supporters of the working class and hostile towards corporations, mines, and management. There are truly countless, never ending pro-worker, pro-labor songs to choose from in the bluegrass, old-time, and roots-music canon.

Bluegrass and old-time music, though entangled in a dense constellation of roots music and occupying space adjacent to folk music and the folk revival, were anti-corporate greed since before they had names, before Pete Seeger, before the folk revival itself. That legacy is important to place at the very center of bluegrass, a genre of music that was born out of industrialization (see also: Industrial Strength Bluegrass) as mountain folk, Appalachians, and Southerners migrated out of their rural homeplaces to urban industrial centers. Bluegrass was born from radio stations, railroads, from company towns and workers’ barracks. Whether rubber or auto plants in Ohio and Michigan, factories in Chicago, cotton mills and tobacco warehouses in North Carolina, or anywhere else in the region, as poor folks bled out of their ancestral homes to find work and upward mobility, they brought their music and their community mindsets. As bell hooks puts it in Belonging: A Culture of Place, the mountains and rural spaces are where mutual aid and anarchy are concrete, everyday practices, not just philosophies or concepts.

With those people and their music came a penchant for workers’ and labor rights, suspicion of management and company stores and towns, and a vehement, righteous anger at the injustices suffered by working class Southerners no matter where they migrated. It’s easy to find pro-Union songs, songs in support of workers’ health and agency, lyrics that espouse conservation and environmentalism in old-time, bluegrass, and string-band traditions. So easy, in fact, we quickly amassed a 4+ hour playlist featuring some of our favorite songs (bluegrass and beyond) for marching the picket line, raising a fist, and redistributing the power – and wealth – back to the world’s 99%.

Scroll to find the full playlist of Bluegrass & Roots Songs to Strike To. Below, enjoy a few selections from the list.

“In Tall Buildings” – John Hartford

John Hartford describes the doldrums of daily work as almost no one else can. (John Prine gets close with, “How the hell can a person/ Go to work in the mornin’/ And come home in the evenin’/ And have nothing to say?”) At the end of our 30-some years working, what will we have to show for ourselves besides a suit, haircut, and no more life left to give to our “retirement?” Plus, as any career musician can tell you, planning a life around retirement isn’t exactly a good option to begin with.

“Ain’t Gonna Work Tomorrow” – Wilma Lee Cooper

Ain’t gonna work tomorrow, cause it’s STRIKING day! Wilma Lee Cooper will, at long last, join the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame this September. A bluegrass forebear who saw broad commercial success before the genre had a name or an understood identity, she regularly landed tracks with decidedly bluegrass aesthetics on Billboard‘s early country charts.

“Lazy John” – Bruce Molsky

Under capitalism, laziness is a radical act! Be like Lazy John! If you’re working all week in the noon-day sun just for 16 cents, yes, it’s strike time.

“Cotton Mill Man” – Jim & Jesse

As we remember the life and legacy of Jesse McReynolds, who recently passed, it’s striking that although he and his brother Jim performed largely cover songs and tracks written by others, they were still able to express with great subtlety their own points of view through the material they chose. Like “Cotton Mill Man” and Prine’s “Paradise,” which was a hit for the duo, their catalog of recorded and performed material is dense with class awareness.

“Black Waters” – Jean Ritchie

A truly timeless classic that remains as relevant today as in the time of its writing, as clean water protections across the U.S. have been repeatedly gutted since 2016 – and before. Our country continues to show where its priorities are, beating down protests and demonstrations even as popular and supported as Standing Rock, in order to force us to acquiesce and give up protection of our waters. The lyrical hook is even more poignant to someone, like myself, living in Tennessee Valley Authority territory in the Tennessee River Valley – where coal ash and pollutants are still regularly dumped into our waterways. These tales, these experiences, are best told directly from their sources, as in Ritchie singing this song.

“Carpal Tunnel” – Tristan Scroggins

One can find many a recording of “Carpal Tunnel” from across the years, but mandolinist Tristan Scroggins, in his mid-twenties, pointedly places this track in the present, delivering the lament in stark a capella accompanied only by body percussion. He deftly ties the lyric to embodiment and agency and reminds all of us – especially in an age governed by devices causing carpal tunnel writ large – we’re all merely one injury away from bankruptcy. Musicians know this fear intimately, as many a livelihood has been threatened by tendonitis and carpal tunnel.

“Tear Down the Fences” – Ola Belle Reed

A perfect encapsulation of solidarity across our differences – differences constructed by the ruling class to keep us quibbling amongst ourselves while they amass their wealth. This sort of community awareness often feels like a pure byproduct of the internet’s version of globalization, but even a woman banjo player from a tiny town in rural Western North Carolina understood that “all we have is each other,” way back before the worldwide web. It feels obvious to state. It shouldn’t seem remarkable, except that we’ve accepted the narrative that such compassion and ideas couldn’t possibly be born from rural spaces or the South.

“Blue Collar Blues” – Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers

From the shop steward of Industrial Strength Bluegrass himself, Joe Mullins, a classic working-man-blues-style bluegrass number about that paycheck to paycheck life. An all-too-common reality for so many pickers! Though that might be more accurately described as blueGRASS collar blues.

“Dark as a Dungeon” – The Country Gentlemen

Bluegrass mining songs are just as iconic in the bluegrass songbook as train songs, cheatin’ songs, murder ballads, and singing about moonshine. This version of “Dark as a Dungeon” by the Country Gentlemen is one of the best examples of the form – many of which made it onto our full playlist.

There are so many more bluegrass, old-time, string band, folk, and Americana songs for striking. Check out our full playlist below and let us know: What is your favorite pro-worker roots song?

Playlist selections by Justin Hiltner, Shelby Williamson, Jon Weisberger, and Amy Reitnouer Jacobs.

Photo Credit: By John Vachon in 1938. “Untitled photo, possibly related to picket line at the King Farm strike. Near Morrisville, Pennsylvania.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

STREAM: Laura Baird, ‘I Wish I Were a Sparrow’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Laura Baird
Hometown: Philadelphia, PA
Album: I Wish I Were a Sparrow
Release Date: October 20, 2017
Label: Ba Da Bing
In Their Words: “After spending over a decade learning and exploring the banjo, I wanted to document where that journey had taken me. I had been lucky enough to spend some time with some of the best old-time musicians and traditional ballad singers at the Swannanoa Gathering in North Carolina and Allegheny Echoes in West Virginia, and I’ll never forget the joyful feeling of staying up all night playing and listening as one big musical family. I took these experiences and turned them inward, recording alone in an old farmhouse in rural New Jersey. I think of this record as my ode to the banjo and to the old mountain songs.” — Laura Baird

Photo credit: Allen Crawford

Songs in the Key of Life: An Interview with Shirley Collins

Posted on by Editor

“It seems such a contradiction, really,” says Shirley Collins with a bright, lively laugh. “I’m such a cheerful person, but I love all these dark songs.” Her new album, a gem titled Lodestar, is full of viscera and violence: drownings and stabbings and poisonings, what might be a bloody disembowelment, and a man dancing on the grave of the woman who rejected his proposal. Most of the songs are hundreds of years old, missives from deep within English history, and Collins sings them with a solemn matter-of-factness that lends heft to the human suffering.

She has been singing these songs for most of her life. In the late 1950s, she joined Alan Lomax on a three-month song-collecting tour of America, which she still speaks of fondly and excitedly. In the 1960s, she was at the vanguard of the English folk revival, recording old tunes in new settings, often a cappella, but sometimes with accompaniment by her sister Dolly Collins. In 1965, she paired with the guitarist Davey Graham for Folk Roots, New Routes, a landmark album that launched several generations of co-ed folk duos.

However, at the end of the 1970s, Collins abruptly stopped singing, recording, and performing. She retired to her cottage in Essex, where she raised her children and kept listening to the old songs. During that time, she developed a reputation as the grand dame of English folk music, inspiring musicians on both sides of the Atlantic, including Billy Bragg, Will Oldham, and the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy (who recorded a covers EP in 2006).

It’s only been in the last few years that she has found her voice again and returned to singing; Lodestar is her first record in nearly 40 years, and it’s one of the best and most welcome comebacks of 2016, a bright spot in a sorry year. The time away has added some grain and texture to her voice, which is lower and less steady than it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s but still careful in its phrasing and sensitive to the material — not just the human horrors contained in the songs, but the long histories they represent.

When you’re singing a song that’s several centuries old, are you thinking about the real people who might have sung it? Are you thinking about characters?

Not necessarily. You connect with the songs, but they’re not personal songs. What you’re doing is passing them on. You’re slightly removed from them, in a way, because we don’t sell songs, people who sing folk music. We don’t sell it. We don’t push it at you. We let you come to it, so I think it retains its essence. You don’t have to sing them in front of an audience, necessarily.

I just feel these people behind me — the people who have sung the songs down through centuries — and they know them by heart. I want to treat them with a warm respect and present them with the best accompaniments I can make, then just let people make up their minds about the songs. Just sing them as straight as I can, no embellishments really. Because that’s not the way we English sing, really. The Irish have great deal of ornamentation in their singing, but the English don’t. It’s just a different tradition. We sing the songs quite straightforwardly, but that doesn’t mean they’re not crammed with emotion. I think they are.

Singing these songs sounds like a very immersive experience for you, like you’re being swallowed up by history.

That’s absolutely right. You focus in on the song and you inhabit it, as well, but without it being pretentious. I can’t bear it when people show off when they’re singing or get too dramatic and overload a song. I just sing it as straightforwardly as I can, but recognizing that virtually every song has a fantastic history. So I feel responsible for doing the best I can with them. That, in one way, is why I stopped singing for so long: I felt I wasn’t doing the songs justice, and I couldn’t quite bear that. It was very difficult.

In what way?

My voice wasn’t up to it, for quite a long time. And I had a very bad marriage breakdown. My husband had left me for another woman almost overnight. I was singing in public every night at the National Theater with the [Albion Band]. We had a promenade audience right in front of us, and I was in such a state of heartbreak that, some nights, I opened my mouth to sing and I would croak. My voice would break or nothing would come out at all. Martin Carthy, who was also in the band, would help me out on those nights. Some nights it was fine, but it just got more and more scary because I didn’t know what was going to happen. I kept trying and trying, but finally I felt I couldn’t put myself through it and I can’t put the songs through it, either. I had two kids to bring up, so I had to find another job for quite a long time. But a friend said to me, "You listen to field recordings of old singers, and you don’t mind their voices being old." No, I guess I don’t. In fact, I love it. So I summoned up all my courage and started singing again. So here I am again and happy about that.

Do you revisit your old recordings? Especially for something like the new version of “Death and the Lady,” which you recorded in 1970.

I recorded that in the first instance with Dolly, my sister who did arrangements for flute and organ. Why did I go back to it? It’s a song that’s haunted me for ages. A musician friend of mine named David Tibet persuaded me, after some years of asking if I would sing at one of his concerts. He kept saying, "Just one or two songs." It was the first time I had sung in public for some time, and I knew I could manage to sing “Death and the Lady” because it wasn’t a huge range. I’d slightly altered the tune anyway. David played it on guitar, and it just felt so appropriate. It’s so dark, and there’s a real sinister quality to it, so I decided to put that one on the album.

Ian [Kearey], the guitarist who also produced the album, he and I meet regularly. It was Autumn and we were rehearsing “Death,” and I suddenly broke into a Muddy Waters version of it. You know “Mannish Boy,” of course. When I got to the verse about death, the verse that goes, “My name is death,” I went, “I spell it D. E. A. T. H.” I don’t think it’s disrespectful, really. It’s such a strong song that it can take it.

These songs provide such wonderful raw material. You can mold it into something new without losing its integrity.

Some purists might not like it, but it worked really well. The thought of death stalking the country is quite relevant these days, isn’t it? There’s so much many horror. Some people think that song comes from the time of the Black Death in Europe, when death really was stalking the land. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. It might be even older.

Were you choosing songs with any particular thematic criteria in mind?

We started off just with the first song, “Awake Awake Sweet England,” the penitential ballad, and it just grew from there. I jotted down one or two songs that I really like and had never really sung, like the “Banks of Green Willow,” which is a favorite of mine. It was collected here in Sussex, but I had never sung it and I wanted to. I had three or four songs jotted down, and then other things just filtered through into my mind. Other songs, like the last one, “The Silver Swan,” we used to sing it at home when we were children. Just the three of us: Mum, my sister Dolly, and me. It’s a five-part madrigal, and I was given the bass part or the tenor part because I had a deeper voice than mum or Dolly. When Ian and all of us were sitting around the table talking about the album, for some reason it just slipped into my head. I just sang it and everybody said, "We’ve got to do that." Every once in a while, there’s a bit of real good fortune and the right song comes to the forefront of your mind. You might have been lodging somewhere in the back of your mind for too long and suddenly it pops up and says, "Sing me! Sing me!"

I’m very pleased that I’ve recorded two American songs. Both were songs that Alan Lomax and I collected when I was over there in 1959. I actually collected “Pretty Polly” in Arkansas from Ollie Gilbert, who was a wonderful mountain singer. That’s a lively song about the American War of Independence — and I’m on your side! Otherwise, the songs are all English.

Do you know a singer named Horton Barker? He was in his 70s when we were there. He was recording a song for Alan called “The Rich Irish Lady,” and he forgot the words. He got halfway through singing it in a very gentle and beautiful way, but then he forgot the words. He said to Alan, "I’m sorry, sir. I can’t go on." And Alan said very gently to him, "Can you speak the words?" And he did. So there’s the complete ballad, half sung and half spoken. I have it and I put it all together with Horton’s tune and recorded it.

That song definitely has an Appalachian flare, especially with the coda.

That’s where it came from. It came from Virginia. And then, of course, we tacked on a fiddle tune from Kentucky on the end, and I will just tell you that, when we were in the studio listening to the playbacks, there was a young engineer there, and he listened to the words of the song — “I’ll dance on your grave, when you’re laid in the earth.” He turned to me and said, "He doesn’t mean it, does he?" And then the fiddle tune comes in hard and strong, and he said, "Ah, yes, he does mean it!" It’s great, because it means we achieved what we meant to.

I’m always surprised by how dark and brutal some of these songs are.

It’s not the most cheerful album, but then so many folk songs aren’t cheerful anyway. The thing is, every single subject was sung about in folk songs, so some of them are very dark and very brutal. It’s extraordinary for many of us that people wanted to still sing them, but they still do. There’s a sort of courage in it: You can sing about murders and suicides and revenge and Lord knows what, and it’s all acceptable. In fact, I find those songs particularly fascinating because they own up to what human beings are.

On the other hand, there are also songs of great beauty. There are gentler ones. I love them all. I’ve always loved old things. I loved history when I was in school. I just love the age of some of this stuff and how it’s clung over the centuries. This is before words or tunes were written down and before there were field recordings. People just sang them and they learned them by heart, because a lot of the English laboring class in the countryside couldn’t read or write. So they had to learn them by heart. The songs must have been important for them to do that. Because of that, there are thousands of songs that are still around.

What I’ve learned from the folk albums of the ‘60s and your recordings, in particular, is that these songs document a history that we can all take part in simply by singing and play them.

It’s a great social history. There’s always that behind it. It’s so valuable. In a way, it’s a bit like archaeology: You dig up the ground and you find something remarkable, even if it’s just a piece of pottery from medieval times. That’s how I feel about this stuff: You find it and it should be treasured. Like the very first song on the album, “Awake Awake Sweet England,” which was written in the 1560. There was an earthquake in the center of England, but it was a big enough one that some of the tremors reached London and toppled part of old St. Paul’s Cathedral. So this chap, Thomas Deloney, wrote a song warning the people to improve their behavior and look to God to become more righteous. This was God’s judgment on them, sending an earthquake. That happened! But I hadn’t ever heard of it until I found it in the book Folk Songs of Herefordshire from 1907, and it was in that book because Vaughan Williams heard it sung by a farmer and his wife in Herefordshire. Where had it been in the meantime? But there they were, this farmer and his wife, singing it 400 years later. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? I’m bowled over by the wonder of it all.

Not only does it survive after so many centuries, but it still seems relevant today. “Awake Awake” could have been written about Brexit.

Nothing really changes. Well, certain things change. Lives are much easier now, but there are certain deep truths that never change. They’re permanent. People are so different nowadays, but deep down, we all must have something in common.

 

Tell me about your trip to America. That seems to have informed Lodestar .

I did have a wonderful time in America when I was there in 1959. I remember hearing the Stanley Brothers for the very first time, I think at a fiddle gathering in Virginia. I was on my feet! There were the Stanley Brothers in their Stetson hats and their smart maroon suits and playing something virtually impossible on a banjo. I was on my feet clapping and cheering. I had never seen anything quite so exciting as that. Those memories are still very vivid, despite it being such a long time ago. The music made such a great impression on me. So did the people I met. I was so fortunate to be on that trip, at that time, when there were still enough people in the mountains singing the way they always had done and playing wonderful old fiddle tunes. That was just the most incredible experience and just reinforced everything that I was starting to learn about traditional songs. It reinforced the wonder and the beauty and the excitement of it.

Where did you travel?

We started in Tennessee, then went up into Kentucky and down to Alabama and Mississippi, where we recorded for the first time Mississippi Fred McDowell. Then we went down to the Georgia Sea Islands to record the people who lived on St. Simons. It was quite a comprehensive trip, and it took us three months. And I’ve been to Arkansas, where we met Jimmy Driftwood, whom I absolutely loved, and Almeda Riddle, who is perhaps the greatest singer I’ve ever heard in my life. She sings some wonderful ballads and love songs, and they’re absolutely haunting.

It was a great experience just meeting people of that generation. I was just 23 when I was there, and I was meeting people in their 60s and 70s. It was such an honor to hear them sing and make friends with them. They were often thrilled, as well, to meet us, especially people like Almeda and Ollie Gilbert. When they sang a ballad, I was able to sing the English version that is still going in England. They were so delighted to know that the songs were still being sung back at home. They spoke of England as the old country. I think perhaps, at that time, they thought the interest in songs and old singers was fading a bit, so it was wonderful to share that with them. About 15 years ago, I wrote a book about it called America Over the Water, so it’s absolutely been kept alive in my mind in the freshest way possible.

One other thing about Almeda Riddle singing: She was right deep in Arkansas, and she’d never see the sea in her life. She sang a ballad called “The Merry Golden Tree,” which is a song about unpleasant happenings on the high seas, set in times of galleons — probably older than that. When she sang the chorus — “As she sailed upon the low and the lonesome low, as she sailed upon the lonely low lands seas” — the way Almeda sang it, you could just see a seascape. She just brought the sea right in front of you, though she’d never seen it. That’s just the power of words and the power of music and the power of the voice. I get goosebumps when I think about that now.

Do these songs change for you or reveal new meanings or significance that you hadn’t caught before?

I think perhaps I appreciate them even more than I did at first because, when you’re young, you’re a little bit superficial, aren’t you? Because you don’t know much. But it all still holds up so wonderfully and I get very emotionally attached to it, too. It’s a great tug of memory for me to go back to when I was a young woman in America and I’d never left home before. It was quite extraordinary, really. I went over on a boat because that was cheaper than flying. Flying was for film stars, and going on a boat was for ordinary people. Quite the reverse nowadays. But I think I still have the more or less same response, but an even greater admiration for it and an even greater emotional attachment to it — which I don’t think I’ll ever lose.

There is one thing I wish I’d learned to do, and that was Appalachian flatfooting or buckdancing. Oh, I wish I’d learned to do that when I was in America. I think it’s magical stuff, but it’s beyond me now for sure.

Photo credit: Eva Vermandel

WATCH: The Lowest Pair, ‘When They Dance the Mountains Shake’

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Artist: The Lowest Pair (Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee)
Hometown: Olympia, WA and Minneapolis, MN
Song: "When They Dance the Mountains Shake"
Album: Fern Girl & Ice Man
Release Date: April 15
Label: Team Love Records

In Their Words: "The music video for 'When They Dance the Mountains Shake' was recorded in my friend Sara Sparrow's studio in Olympia, Washington, by my good buddy Kevin Rainsberry (drummer for RVIVR). I wanted to feature the strength, art, humor, and camaraderie of my friends and community, and illustrate the retrospective story of the (if you could call it a) chorus-line that repeats itself in the song …'on the other side.'" — Kendl Winter

Photo credit: Joseph Daniel Robert O'Leary

Marked by Places: An Interview with Sam Gleaves

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Whether you grow up in the mountains or the city, the geography of your youth never really leaves you. It informs and influences you, even when you might not think so. Sam Gleaves certainly knows this to be true. His southwest Virginia upbringing defines almost everything he is and wants to be. As a songwriter, he's dead-set on sharing those stories, those values, that music with the rest of the world. And his new Ain't We Brothers release does just that.

I have a hypothesis about the different lenses that we all look at the world through: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, sexual. I feel like, though we're informed by all of them, we each have a primary lens that colors our vision and blazes our trail. Which do you think is your primary filter?

I was born and raised in southwest Virginia, so my family and the way they speak and the tradition of storytelling and the traditional music I grew up with is my first lens.

So maybe a social or cultural lens?

Yeah. In a way, I think we're all marked by the places we connect with and identify with. So, for me, home is Wythe County, Virginia. Country music … I like it best when it speaks plainly, like the people I knew do. That's my first lens, I would say. Then, being an openly gay singer/songwriter is another. I always feel like I'm traversing the line between the traditional music that I love — which has been handed down and many voices have shaped it — and the new music that I want to write about contemporary stories and what's happening now in the mountains. That has a newer feel, but it uses old language and old sounds and old ways of speaking.

For all of us who are queer, it's a part of who we are, but certainly not all of who we are. So how important is it for you to strike a balance between the visibility of being out and the striving toward anonymity — as in, “We're just living our little queer lives … nothing to see here”?

I'm really fortunate to have had a family that loved me unconditionally and that never burdened me with any kind of shame. That is the number one thing. If you're a writer, you have to reflect on your own experience. You have to look at painful things. You have to be honest about what you're feeling, which is a real challenge. I try to do that, as a writer. Lee Smith, one of my favorite novelists, said, “I refuse to lead an unexamined life.” I believe that.

My family loving me for who I am and raising me to … it was okay to be an artist. My mom's a writer. My dad's a writer. My grandmother's a singer. My dad's a great storyteller, also, and my grandparents all told stories. It gave me permission to be who I am. So, when I sit down to write, I don't think, “I'm going to write a gay love song or a gay country song. Isn't that edgy?” [Laughs] I don't think of it that way. I think of it as writing about my own life and I don't have to be ashamed. I can be honest because that's how I look at every day of my life — not only in my writing and my music, but each and every moment. That's a gift from my family.

It's also the gift that music gives all of us. It's a medium that both transcends and transforms, if we let it. You can sing your truth and it's about whatever it's about to you, but somebody else can hear it and it relates to their truth, as well … even if it's, as it always is, a completely different experience.

Yeah. I think so. I think that people are hungry to hear stories about working class people. Real stories. Songs that are absorbed in community and not in self. I think people are really hungry to hear that kind of music. And that's what traditional music does because it has to serve a people. Of course it's an emotional outlet for the singer, but it's also serving a community. That's what I love best about old songs and that way of … there's a long tradition of protest singing using old hymns and stuff that people were familiar with because you can latch on to it, somehow. I hope that people will listen to the music first and leave their preconceived notions at the door — listen to the music and the stories and then evaluate how it relates to what they believe and where they're from.

Let them get into how they feel about it rather than what they think about it.

Yeah. Which is why I have to be kind of cautious. Like, I was saying, “I'm a gay, traditional musician.” But I don't want people to think that's what I'm putting out front. I'm putting it out front as an activist, because I believe that you have to. It's not a dirty word. But, then, I've been a musician longer than I've known about my sexuality. [Laughs] My first identity really is as an Appalachian musician. So I hope people will look at it all inclusively.

Well, “Ain't We Brothers” is a great example. You simultaneously draw and challenge the traditional idea of manhood in, showing that the singular difference between Sam Williams and his co-workers in the mine is who's waiting at home at the end of the day. Interestingly, it reminds me of a Marge Simpson quote: "Our differences are only skin deep, but our sames go down to the bone."

Yeah. That's the truth. Wow. I've never heard that before. That's powerful.

It has stuck with me. I have it written down somewhere because, hey, Marge Simpson is a prophet. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Thanks for saying that. I wrote “Ain't We Brothers” in 2011, not long after Sam Williams' story had come to attention. My friend Jason Howard wrote a great article about Sam — then, his name was Sam Hall. I just thought he does have more in common with the fellow miners he's working with than he does differences. And what gives them the right to say he's less of a man when he's being brave, living with his partner and not hiding, making difficult decisions that impact every single moment of his waking life.

People say, a lot of times, that LGBTQ people endure micro-aggressions. Every day, you have to make your decisions differently. He was being brave and open. And he was more of a man. That's how I felt. Integrity, to me, is what defines a person, regardless of gender. That's what I was trying to say in the song. I was really pleased, when I met Sam a few months ago — he and his partner Burly at their home in West Virginia — that they identified with the song and they liked it. That meant a lot to me.

The other fascinating thing about what you're doing is that you're coaxing out the similarities of struggle between LGBTQ folks and other communities that have been oppressed throughout history. And what's always been so surprising and hurtful to me is that those oppressed communities are rather often the ones turning around to oppress us.

Yeah.

So I love that you're drawing those parallels. It's the same struggle.

Thank you. I believe very much in the philosophy that's taught at the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee, that all oppressions do intersect somewhere. You can't go far without finding a commonality with somebody who's up against it. I do believe that. That's another thing that intuitively comes out in your writing because it's what you believe. So that's been an intuitive part of the process for me.

I'm not from the coal mining community, but I learned that history in my Appalachian studies background at Berea College. And I realized that my daddy working for the railroad was hauling the coal and, every time I turned a light on, I was part of the system. You can't escape the working class, especially because I was brought up to value hard-working, blue collar people like my dad.

Of course. You talk a lot about your heroes, and rightfully so — Joan Baez and Cathy Fink and lots of folks. But who are the contemporaries you look to — the other artists who are helping shoulder the present and future of this music you're working with?

I just did a double-bill with Amythyst Kiah. She's incredible. She's from Chattanooga and she calls herself a Southern Gothic musician. I love what she does. She knows country-blues. She knows country music. And she applies that to a modern, kind of alternative sound. She's making great progress, and it's great to see her representing a lot of communities.

My friend Saro Lynch-Thomason is a great ballad singer, originally from Nashville but now living in Asheville, North Carolina. She's incredible. She knows the history of music and labor, inside and out. And she sings ballads with all the heart and knowledge of the old singers.

And my partner, Tyler Hughes. I love his music greatly. He's a wonderful, old-time banjo player. Plays autoharp and guitar, kind of in the style of the Carter Family. He grew up in Wise County, in southwest Virginia. I love his music because he's so in touch with the older way of life, and humor in music, and dancing … the aspects of it that bring so much joy to it that kind of get swept under the rug sometimes, I feel like. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Yeah, a lot of stuff gets swept under the rug. But that's why we're here. Like you said, activism through art. It's all one thing, in the end.

Yeah. I think so, too. I sure do.

Photo credit: Susi Lawson