Tag: Sam Gleaves

From Appalachia with Love: A Conversation with Sam Gleaves and Tyler Hughes

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Sam Gleaves and Tyler Hughes are very proud to have grown up in southwestern Virginia, a swathe of Appalachia that birthed the Carter Family, the Stanley Brothers, Jim & Jesse McReynolds, and so many more icons of roots music. Released in June, their self-titled duo album is a collection of old-time, traditional country, and mountain music that, on the surface, feels like an album exhumed from a time capsule of southwest Virginian music from bygone eras. But, when you begin to unpack Sam and Tyler’s perspective — yes, they’re native Virginians steeped in their homeland’s musical heritage, but they’re also young and openly gay — you begin to fully appreciate the subtlety, the thoughtful care, and the love that they’ve put into curating and recording this set of tunes.

Speaking to Sam and Tyler was a welcome reminder that, in a time when phrases like, “middle America,” “silent majority,” and “forgotten middle class,” have become daily buzzwords and when the divisions between urban and rural, rich and poor, right and left are seemingly at their greatest, it’s more important than ever that we have these difficult conversations, that we listen to each other, and that we love one another.

So much of what you guys are doing on the record is simply putting a spotlight on perceptions of and presuppositions about people who come from central Appalachia in general. On “Stockyard Hill,” an original song and the first track on the album, you sing, “I’m proud of the way that I came up …” How did your families inspire this song through watching you grow up in the music and grow up to be who you are, living truly and openly?

Sam Gleaves: I wrote this song based on the words and experiences of my great aunt, Corrine Thompson — my grandmother’s sister. She’s an amazing woman, a real matriarch, a really loving, good presence in my life. I feel like she’s a great example of a really open-minded, intelligent, progressive person from southwest Virginia. She’s a great example of someone who defies a lot of stereotypes about people from central Appalachia. I’ve only ever known her to be loving and accepting of all people. She would think that a lot of the political discourse — this really hateful, divided situation that we have now — is so contrary to who she is as a person, the culture that she comes from, and the culture that I come from.

Tyler Hughes: As far as family influence, I grew up in an average, working/middle-class family. They are real people. I think that’s what influences my music and specifically the music that we put together on this album the most. I come from a strong union family: My grandpa was a union coal miner for over 30 years. My family is much like Sam’s in being very accepting and loving. There’s not really a judgmental side to them. They have a great appreciation for the place we come from, but they also have a wider view of the world beyond just what happens in southwest Virginia. I think that’s what influences me most and what makes me most proud to say that I am from southwest Virginia. Probably the number one thing I want to tell people when I meet them is that I’m from southwest Virginia, because people do have such misconceptions, but there are people out there that don’t fit into these exaggerated beliefs and misconceptions.

SG: I came out when I was in high school and I had a really close community of friends around me between my classmates in school, people that I played music with in the old-time music community, and also my family. When I came out to my family, they all knew other gay people. It wasn’t an unfamiliar or unexpected thing, when I came out. [Laughs] I think my parents gave me permission to be who I am. Not only as a gay man, but as an artist and a human being. A lot of people don’t get that permission from their parents. They never discouraged me from singing professionally, and they never told me my writing wasn’t important, but just the opposite. They wanted me to write and they wanted me to travel, to sing, to get to know musicians.

I definitely have had to think a lot about how I talk about these issues because, when I recorded my first album, Ain’t We Brothers, everyone that interviewed me asked me what it was like to be a gay man living in Kentucky and growing up in southwest Virginia. In rural places all across America, LGBTQ people need a lot of support. There are a lot of needs that aren’t met, in terms of communities not being able to come together and celebrate our identities, and also work for equal rights. There’s a lot of work to be done, but I’ve been very fortunate to have a good, welcoming experience being openly gay, in the old-time community, but also just living in Virginia and Kentucky.

Following on that then … I wonder if either of you considered that this project could potentially be that very permission for a listener? There are a lot of LGBTQ individuals in these spheres — Appalachia, the South, roots music — that aren’t out. Did you think this could be validation for other LGBTQ artists to be out and to lay claim to this music in a more assured way?

TH: I think about that quite often, even just for regular performance, even though we don’t stand on stage and advertise that we are gay musicians — that’s not exactly the shtick of our show. It’s nothing that we try to hide, but it’s not the main focus. I try to keep in mind that, to someone who might be struggling with their identity, it could be a very powerful moment for them to see someone they can relate to doing something that maybe society or someone around them is telling them they can’t do, or that something is only reserved for certain people. Any time that I’m playing music, whether it be working on this record or just being on stage, I think about that. Because I had a similar experience. When I first met other gay musicians, it really empowered me to think about how I could also live an open and full kind of life and still do the thing that I love the most.

As diversity becomes more of a hot-button topic in roots music communities, a lot of bystanders seem to assume that, because more LGBTQ individuals are becoming visible in bluegrass and old-time, we’re coming from the outside in or that we’re “infiltrators” and appropriators of the music. But here you both are, born and bred in this area of Virginia and Appalachia that’s such a hotbed for this music. How do you approach people with this perspective?

SG: I think it’s important that you mentioned that. We love the place that we’re from, but I think we have to acknowledge that there’s a lot of work to be done. I don’t know how else to say it. I see this especially in the bluegrass community, which we’re sort of on the fringes of. We also play old-time country music, which is just a blend of all of these things, so we end up in these environments where genre doesn’t keep us from playing in a wide, wide range of places. We want to represent our communities and the Appalachian region well, but we also have to acknowledge that there are people in these genres of music that do feel that it’s not right for gay people to be out in their performances — like just singing a love song about a same-sex relationship. I’ve never had any negative backlash from anyone at a concert or from any producer or from any person on stage that I’ve ever worked with. I’ve never had anyone say openly, “You shouldn’t sing that song, or you shouldn’t tell that about yourself.” I’ve only ever had like one or two people ever walk out of one of my shows that I knew was because of what I was singing.

I’ve had a lot of conversations about these topics in the past several years and that’s certainly not always the case. Why do you think that is?

TH: I don’t know … luck? [Laughs] No, every audience is different and every situation is different, but the number one thing that I think about, when I first walk out on stage or when I first get to a venue or when I go out to meet an audience after a show, is that, first and foremost, I’m a musician and I’m a performer. I think more about that than anything else. If somebody didn’t want to listen to my music anymore because they suddenly found out that I was gay, it wouldn’t hurt me any more or any less than if they found out that I didn’t like bananas so they didn’t want to listen to my music anymore. To me, it’s their qualm and, even if I feel that it’s a silly thing to let get in the way, they may not. I try to understand that — I would have to disagree with them — but I would at least try to understand their position. I think about the fact that I’m presenting myself more on the level of musician and a performer first. And also just being a person. Being gay is only a tiny sliver of my identity, when it comes to all of the things that make up who I am.

SG: You know, in country music, there’s a tradition and an expectation that performers be friendly, that they engage with audiences. I think that is a big reason why people don’t come up to us and say, in person, “I was upset that you all mentioned the women’s movement before you sang ‘Bread and Roses,” or “I was upset that you wished everyone a happy Pride month.” I think it’s because we really do try to be friendly and welcoming to people. Not that other people who experience discrimination and hatefulness are not being friendly — I’m not saying that. To some degree, what you put out can be what you receive back. We do try to be a part of that tradition of being good to people.

That makes me think of “When We Love” from the record. Tyler, what was it like to write this song and to sing this song while you are faced with this loud, mainstream, idea that a lot of people out there don’t love who you are as a person? How do you espouse this kind of love, when it’s not what everyone else is also putting out into the universe?

TH: I really don’t find it that difficult. That’s not to say that I’m not angry with the situation we find ourselves in or that I don’t get frustrated when there are setbacks. I don’t really know where I align myself religiously on most days, but I do think that, no matter who you’re worshipping or what kind of life mantra you’re following, we are all human and we’re all sharing in the human experience. Part of that, to me, is just loving one another. I still live in a small coal mining town, and I would say that at least a good 70 percent of my friends probably voted for the president. They may not agree with everything he says, but they feel that they are supporters of his. I know them as people and I know they’re not judging me — even if deep down in their hearts they may not really agree with LGBT rights or equality for all people. That’s not a big enough issue for me to let friendships or relationships go. Some of my best friends in the world align themselves with conservative values and conservative movements. It just doesn’t bother me, because I’d want them to look at me in the same way. At the end of the day, we still all need each other. These are differences I can put aside for most people, as long as they put them aside for me.

Photo credit: Susi Lawson

WATCH: Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes, ‘When We Love’

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Artist: Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes
Hometown: Wytheville, VA and Big Stone Gap, VA
Song: “When We Love”
Album: Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes
Release Date: June 16, 2017
Label: Community Music, INC

In Their Words: “This song is our way of advocating for love in this time of divisions. Music celebrates our shared humanity. We are grateful for our friends who are doing inspiring work and especially the wonderful young people who appeared in this music video. The evidence is all around us that we can and should work together to build a more inclusive society.” — Sam Gleaves

Photo credit: Susi Lawson

The Producers: Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer

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Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer have devised a clever game to play when they’re traveling — something to keep their ears sharp, when they’re away from their home studio outside Washington, D.C. “We’ll go into a room,” says Marxer. “Big room or small, it doesn’t matter. We’ll clap our hands and see if we can figure out what reverb setting we would need to copy that sound. It’s geeky all the way.”

The pair have visited a lot of rooms together over the years. For nearly four decades, they’ve been playing and recording and touring together: Fink is one of the best banjo players alive, and Marxer plays nearly everything else. They’ve released 45 albums covering a range of styles and set-ups, mostly folk and old-time, bluegrass and children’s tunes. Their latest, Get Up and Do Right, is their first collection of duets for two voices and two acoustic instruments, featuring a handful of originals and covers of songs penned by Alice Gerrard, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan.

Gently political and certainly timely, the album digs into folk’s enormous capacity for dissenting voices combining in beautiful harmony. For Fink and Marxer, making music is a way to get up and do right: an inherently radical act. Their DIY process extends into the studio, where they work as their own producers and, occasionally, their own engineers and mixers. Marxer is the more technical-minded of the two (see below for her favorite piece of equipment), while Fink is the conceptualist — the one who keeps the big picture in perspective. Together and separately, they have produced roughly 150 records, including Sam Gleaves’ 2015 breakout Ain’t We Brothers and Tom Paxton’s new album, Boat in the Water.

What unites this disparate catalog is a warmth of sound and an idea of music as a communal undertaking, a labor and a joy to be shared. “We both do many things and wear many hats,” says Marxer. “Sometimes we produce together and sometimes separately.” Adds Fink: “Even when we have separate projects, we have an open door with each other for what we call continuous consulting. It’s pretty hard for one of us to get involved in something where the other person doesn’t have some influence to make it better.”

How did you move into the role of producer?

Cathy Fink: We’ve both been playing music professionally since the early 1970s and, in the early days, I had the opportunity to work with some really great producers. Two who were very influential on me were David Essig and Ken Whiteley, both from Canada. Ken has produced probably 2,500 albums over the last 40 years. In both cases, I was a musician who was confident in what I wanted to accomplish, but didn’t feel like I had the knowledge to take my dream and get it on tape. By working with lots of producers I really trusted and whose music I enjoyed, I was able to pay attention to how they accomplished things. After a few projects like that, it was time for a transition, so I did an album where I co-produced. Marcy was involved, along with a lot of other people, and I bounced ideas off them. As we continued working together, we really relied on each other to the point where most of these things became co-productions.

Marcy Marxer: I started out very differently. When I was a kid, my dad used to go to the junkyard and collect wires and speakers and thermostats and things like that. He’d come home and give them to me to take apart and look at. When I was in the eighth grade, I built my first tube amp. That really developed the techno-geek side of my brain. Eventually, I got a job with Macmillan/McGraw-Hill producing 120 songs for an educational project. Since then, Cathy and I have been able to join forces, and it just mushroomed. We push each other to get better. We have a bit of a competitive streak, but it works in our favor.

It sounds like together you cover nearly every aspect of the recording process.

CF: You don’t need to be an engineer to be a good producer, but we found it so helpful to get those skills in order to better speak with the engineers we were working with. It really rounded out our abilities, and I’m in a better position to know what I’m looking for, how I might get it, and whether or not we’re getting it. In turn, we try to pass that along to other people. Our Grammys actually say Artist, Engineer, and Producer.

MM: It’s crucial to know every step, but it’s not crucial to do every step. It’s good to have a bigger team, people you trust, people who are fast at certain things, people who are the house painters of their field or the Rembrandts of their field. If we didn’t play and engineer and produce and mix, I don’t think we could efficiently speak with the other team members.

CF: We do lots of projects that we don’t engineer on. The reason we started engineering really had to do with a combination of convenience and health issues a long time ago. We wanted to do these things at home and at our own convenience. When you’re traveling as much as we do, we would sometimes book a date in the studio, and then the day would come and, oh man, we’re just too tired to do that today. So we learned to do our own tracks and our own overdubs at home. It gives us a whole new way of producing our own projects. Time is a big factor, so if we have two weeks to make an album, we’re not going to sit in the studio with all of the crayons and start creating the painting. We’re going to visualize the painting before we go in, and then we’re going to take the right steps to make it happen. When we do it all at home, we have the opportunity to take out all the crayons and try out different colors. We might do a take with different banjos or different harmonies and decide which one works better for a particular track.

Is that how you made Get Up and Do Right?

CF: Most of it was recorded in our home studio. There were two tracks recorded live at AirShow, and there are two tracks recorded at Jim Robeson’s studio. We wanted to do those tracks live, but didn’t want to have to deal with the mechanics of being engineers at the same time. Everything else was done at home, sometimes live, sometimes overdubbed, but always with the feeling of, “This is what it sounds like when we play together.”

MM: The great thing about the studio at home is that all of my instruments are here. When I’m working on other people’s projects, I might be doing some overdubs or filling some holes, and I’ll just fill up the car with instruments and see what I can do to finish it up. If I didn’t bring an instrument with me, then I can’t use it. So it’s much easier having everything in one place.

CF: We don’t have to think ahead to which five guitars we might need. If we’re at home, we can go, “What this song really needs is the electric baritone guitar,” and we can run and get it. But if we’re at someone else’s studio, too bad. We recently produced Tom Paxton’s newest album, and we worked with our engineer Jim Robeson at his studio. Tom did all of his tracks there, and a lot of other people came in, but when it came time to do our own tracks, we decided to do them at home. Another example is the project we did called cELLAbration!, which was a tribute to Ella Jenkins that includes an amazing array of artists, including Sweet Honey in the Rock, Red Grammer, and Riders in the Sky. I’d say about 60 percent of that album was done in a variety of commercial studios and about 40 percent was done at home. It’s a really fun way of filling out the whole puzzle.

Something that strikes me about your new album and Paxton’s new album is how rich and complex the instruments sound.

MM: We mic all the instruments in stereo. We almost never single-mic an acoustic instrument because we want it to sound like we’re listening with both of our ears. Both of those albums are so sparse, and you really want to hear all the detail. If something was going to sound really big, we might be inclined to leave it off. We want you to feel like you’re sitting in a living room with us — a really nice-sounding living room.

CF: We don’t have a giant collection of gear, though. What we’ve found is that we’re very good at using a handful of things, so we stick with a couple of mics that sound fabulous. We know how to deal with them, and sometimes we’ll cart them around, if we go to another studio. What you’re most familiar with is usually what you’re going to sound best with. I just have to give a huge amount of credit to Greg Lukens and Jim Robeson for the incredible tutelage they gave us. There aren’t a lot of female engineers who are well known, and we’ve certainly worked in a lot of studios where it was assumed that we couldn’t possibly know what we were talking about. But Greg and Jim really empowered us to do all of this stuff for ourselves.

MM: Every once in a while, I’ll be working with an engineer that I might not be very familiar with, somebody that I might not have a lot of faith or trust in or just might not know very well. If there’s a man in the room, then all the production questions will be addressed to him instead of me. It seems impossible in this day and age, but it does happen. I’ve stopped working with people like that, people I don’t absolutely trust. I’m not the kind of person who will put my foot down and demand something. Cathy is a little bit better at that, but I just try to avoid those people.

You seem to be at the center of a very large musical community, which reflects in the music itself — not just who’s on the record, but how those people interact.

CF: It is a very large, very close musical community in the D.C. area. One of the advantages of working in a place like this is that, when people think of where the hotbeds of music are in the United States, they may pinpoint New York or Los Angeles or Nashville. But in D.C., there isn’t such a competitive atmosphere. When I moved to town, I was welcomed into the world of session players and there wasn’t really a hierarchy. Musicians are very supportive of each other, and the engineering world, in particular, is not competitive at all. If one person has a problem, everybody’s going to help them out.

The other thing is, we have a pretty active touring schedule both nationally and internationally, so we’ve had a good time making that community even bigger. Twenty-two years ago, we played at the Auckland Folk Festival in New Zealand, where we met a couple of musicians that we’ve remained friends with all these years. One of them is Chris Newman, and the other one is a traditional harp player named Máire Ní Chathasaigh. We’ve played on their records through the magic of the Internet. And we just got back from a UK tour, where we did 10 days with Tom Paxton and then a week in the Orkney Islands in Scotland. Talk about off the beaten track. Our friends Hazel and Jennifer Wrigley have spent 10 or 15 years touring nonstop around the world as a fiddle and guitar duo playing traditional Scottish music. They’re just spectacular. They settled back in their home of Orkney to open up this place called Wrigley and the Reel, which is a music shop, café, venue, and educational facility. We’ve played on their records and, when they come to the States, they stay with us. So the community just gets larger and larger.

MM: We also find that when we meet other producers and engineers, they’re thrilled to discuss equipment and show you their gear. It can get pretty geeky. And if you’re wondering, my favorite preamps are simple and easily accessible. They’re APIs, and we use a full preamp rack mount that would sell online for $2,500 or something like that. They’re absolutely clear, beautiful, pristine sounds.

CF: We do get buried in the geekiness, but we try not to forget that what we’re really doing here is using the medium as a way to share the music that we love. When we produced Get Up and Do Right, we wanted to use all that gear to highlight the music — the feeling of the music and the message of the music. There is always something to discover and that’s what makes it fun.

MM: I’ll tell you two of my favorite recordings. One is Cowboy Calypso by Russ Barenberg. The vinyl sounds absolutely gorgeous. The other, which was done digitally, is John Fogerty’s Blue Moon Swamp. And anything Gary Paczosa produces always sounds beautiful.

There is something very direct about the music on this album, something very refreshing about its optimism during hard times.

CF: We have to stay optimistic. On our tour of the UK, we played to about 4,500 people, and the song “Get Up and Do Right” was a rabble-rouser every single night. It’s a song we loved, when we heard it two years ago and, when we recorded it, no one thought Donald Trump was going to win the election. We just knew that it was a great daily meditation, but we didn’t realize that it could be this ultimate rallying cry. I just finished a down-and-dirty video for the song that’s based on pictures that people sent us from marches all over the world. We went to a march in Kirkwall, in the Orkneys, a very tiny place, and the first night we’re there, there’s a vigil in front of the local church. We were very welcomed. When we got there, Marcy announces, “We’re Americans and we’re with you!” That got a big cheer, and we made a bunch of friends. It feels like our job every day is to get up and do right. Do the best we can to make the Earth a good place to live. Negativity breeds negativity. Action breeds positivity. Rather than get bogged down in the negative stuff, we’re just going to continue to get up and do right.

MM: Cathy and I are old enough to have lived through the civil rights movement, so we’ve done this before and we’ve come out better than we were for it. My parents went to marches, and it was really the music that kept us moving forward. It was the music that brought everyone together and kept us going. This was back when you used to have to dress up in your Sunday clothes and your Sunday shoes for a march. For a little kid, that’s not easy. But music gave us support and energy. Something happens when everybody is singing at the same time. They all take a breath at the same time, and that’s power. It’s real power.

Can you tell me how that sense of social responsibility informs your children’s music, especially the Children of Selma album from 1988?

CF: Children of Selma is a project that I still deeply love. I was brought to that project by Jane Sapp who was, at the time, working with the Highlander Center. That’s the place where Rosa Parks went for a workshop two weeks before she wouldn’t go to the back of the bus. Jane had met a woman named Rose Sanders who had worked with a group of kids after school in Selma. Rose is a civil rights attorney, but her purpose was to give the kids something useful to do after school. She turned out to be quite a prolific and incredible songwriter. I went down there and we went to an old YMCA or community center, where there was an out-of-tune piano, and Rose gathered the kids around to sing a bunch of these songs. I was blown away by the spirit of these songs and by the magic that happened when she engaged the kids who were singing about their real lives. One of the songs that comes back to me every election is “Vote for Me Until I Can.” That project was a big challenge: I had to go to a location where I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t know how to take a group of kids, who had never recorded before, into a studio. But the important part was taking their message to a bigger audience. Even though, commercially, it’s one of the least successful things I’ve done, in my heart, it’s one of the most important projects I’ve ever worked on.

Photo credit: Michael Stewart

WATCH: Sam Gleaves, ‘Ain’t We Brothers’

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Artist: Sam Gleaves
Hometown: Wytheville, VA
Song: "Ain't We Brothers"
Album: Ain't We Brothers
Label: Community Music

In Their Words: "I am so grateful to Sam and Burley Williams for allowing me to tell their story of resilience in this song and for their contribution to this video. Thanks to Cathy Fink for her work as producer; Tim O'Brien, Missy Raines, Tim Crouch, and Marcy Marxer for their fine musicianship on the recording; Jesse Anderson for producing this video; Jordan Freeman for helping me locate coal mining footage from the West Virginia State Archives; and the Mullins family — Nick, Rustina, Alex, and Daniel — for appearing in this video." — Sam Gleaves

Photo credit: Jesse Anderson, CoPhoto

6 Punk Rock Players Reshaping Roots Music, Part Two

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Last year, we highlighted some of our favorite up-and-coming roots musicians who, acoustic instruments aside, embody the punk rock spirit. From one man band Possessed by Paul James to punk-turned-troubadour John Moreland, the nine players listed shared many of the qualities essential to punk music: DIY mindsets, balls-to-the-wall shredding, and a tendency toward the political. 

Since then, we've seen a number of new acts who, regardless of whether their actual sound makes you want to listen to mclusky, are carrying the punk torch just as loud and proud as that first batch. Check out a handful of our favorites:

The Bones of J.R. Jones

 

Similar to Possessed by Paul James from our first installment, New York-based artist Jonathan Linaberry, known to fans as the Bones of J.R. Jones, has been known to play guitar and drums while singing his eerie, blues-influenced folk songs. His latest album, Spirit's Furnace, marries the DIY ethic of his live show with the knack for storytelling for which he has come to be known.

Parker Millsap

 

Parker Millsap may be making waves in the Americana world with his raw vocals and wry tales of evangelical truck drivers, but it's "Heaven Sent," a tune from his most recent album, The Very Last Day, that earns him a spot here. The song finds Millsap inhabiting the mind of a young, Christian, gay man seeking reassurance from both his father and his Father, making for a statement that feels far more personal than political.

Margo Price

 

Much ado has been made about Margo Price and her debut album, Midwest Farmer's Daughter, but it's the 13-year journey — fraught with waiting tables and waiting on a big break — that brought Price to Third Man Records and the Saturday Night Live stage that makes her one of the most punk rock artists in our community. That, and those hard-scrabble songs about drinking and jail.

Sam Gleaves

 

A lot of punk players show off their cred with their gear, and West Virginia player Sam Gleaves is no exception with his rainbow-colored banjo strap. On "Ain't We Brothers," the openly gay Gleaves, whose grassroots efforts have earned him the attention of outlets like NPR, explores the struggles of homosexuality in small-town life, making him one of the first Applachian voices to do so.

Sammy Brue

 

Getting the attention of outlets like The FADER and Rolling Stone at the wee age of 14 thanks to some stellar at-home recordings, Sammy Brue, a Utah-by-the-way-of-Portland songwriter who pals around with Justin Townes Earle and has the songwriting chops to boot, is about as DIY as you can get. 

Julien Baker

While many hear the word "punk" and think angry, Julien Baker — who wrote most of her stellar debut album, Sprained Ankle, in her dorm room at MTSU — reminds us it has a sad side, too, one that is as thoughtful as it is emotive.

Reclaiming Community: A Conversation with Tyler Hughes

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In early February, the Empty Bottle Stringband made their debut at the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, Virginia, a hallowed ground for lovers of old-time and country music. A quartet of old-time musicians based in Johnson City, Tennessee, the Empty Bottle Stringband specializes in the lively, toe-tapping fiddle tunes that fill the floor with dancers at the Carter Fold, and the band is familiar with the musical family who gave the venue its namesake. When Tyler Hughes takes up the autoharp and introduces the Carter Family song, “There’s No Hiding Place Down Here,” the sounding rhythm is closely kin to the style of Mother Maybelle Carter, a living example of the sound that brought Southwest Virginia to the world’s musical attention. Hughes’s performance carries other ties to the cultural ground he’s standing on: in the clear, true tone of his singing, the stories that enrich the music, and the down-home humor that has brought laughter from generations of careworn audiences.

As a solo performer and member of the Empty Bottle Stringband, Hughes has represented Appalachian culture on stages across the eastern United States since his teenage years. Now in his mid-20s, he continues to live, teach banjo, and organize cultural arts projects in his home community of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. Hughes is a graduate of the Old-Time, Bluegrass, and Country Music Studies program at East Tennessee State University and, during his time as a student, he performed extensively with the ETSU Old-Time Pride Band. Whether he is attending a board meeting for a community foundation, calling a square dance, or showing a local kid their first chords on the banjo, there’s a reverence of heritage evident in all of his work. The ties to Hughes's Appalachian heritage are collective — traditions of music and dance which work best when a group will put them to use, not admiring them from a distance, but participating in the present.

Tyler, tell me where you grew up, some of your family’s history there, and how you started to play old-time music.

I grew up in Big Stone Gap, in Southwest Virginia. I grew up in town, but on top of a mountain; we have a really beautiful view of Powell Valley from our front porch. I grew up in the mountains, playing in the woods, and I had some interest in music as a kid, but later in my teen years, I took up music more seriously. My family’s been here for several generations now, and my mom and dad were both raised here in Big Stone. My dad was raised in town and my mom was raised outside of town in Powell Valley in a little holler called Cracker’s Neck, which sounds like a really magical place and it was. My mamaw and papaw lived in Cracker’s Neck, and my papaw still lives there. Both of them were avid country music fans — and so is my mom — so I grew up listening to modern country, '90s country, but I also listened to a lot of older country like George Jones and Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton. I was taught to appreciate all that. I remember going to my grandparents’ house, and my mamaw would get out her record player and her eight-track tapes and listen to those artists. My grandparents were a big influence on me and they were also big fans of the '90s line dancing craze so, when I was younger, they would take me out to line dances, and I would be part of their line dancing group pretty often.

I started playing music when I was about 12. I’d always had an interest in music — I was in chorus in school and in theater — but I really didn’t have an interest in traditional music until a little bit later, when I started taking guitar lessons. I started taking banjo not too long after that, and I attended a local camp here called Mountain Music School. I attended Mountain Music School in its second year, and it was there that I really got introduced to the region’s music — people like Papa Joe Smiddy — but especially I remember the Whitetop Mountain Band came one day and played for us, and Emily Spencer, who’s a really wonderful banjo player from Southwest Virginia, was one of the leaders of the group. I just remember seeing and hearing her play the banjo and I thought, “That’s what I want to do.” Emily’s playing really struck a chord with me, I guess you could say. At Mountain Music School, I learned how influential Southwest Virginia’s music is on the world’s music. I really had no idea about people like Dock Boggs or the Carter Family until I started going to Mountain Music School and hanging around the folks that helped organize the camp, like Todd Meade and Julie Shepherd-Powell and some other folks.

The Empty Bottle Stringband at the Carter Family Fold. From left: Ryan Nickerson, Tyler Hughes, Kristal Harman, and Stephanie Jeter.

One thing we’ve talked about often is how the women who shaped the music of Southwest Virginia, what a great impact they’ve had on both of us, and I know one woman we really admire and look to as an inspiration is Janette Carter, who established the Carter Family Fold in memory of her parents Sara and A.P. Carter. Why do you connect with Janette’s music and what does her life’s work mean to you?

I, unfortunately, never got to meet Janette, even though I’d been to the Carter Fold several times and played at the Fold, but I didn’t start going until after she had passed away. On one of my first trips to the Carter Fold, I bought Janette’s book, Living with Memories, and read it. I was just so impressed with her because she overcame so much. The Carter Family … the Carters were in no way rich, especially growing up in Poor Valley in Scott County, Virginia … so Janette really rose above the poverty that most people see in that region. She was a radio star as a teen and she came back home, married, settled down to raise her family and went to work at the local school — she was a lunch lady there. She still played. She played the autoharp and guitar and sang songs. She felt so strongly about her family’s influence on music and her father’s music that she wanted to keep this promise to him that she would help carry on the legacy of the Carter Family. She gave up her job and really risked pretty much everything to open their grocery store up as a venue, a concert hall. I think it really says a lot about how brave she was, as a person, because there was no guarantee that opening up a 20-by-20 grocery store and putting chairs in it and asking people to come out and pay to hear music would work, especially in a region that’s impoverished.

I do admire her for that. In an interview I’ve heard with her, Janette said, “One day I was working and I thought, ‘I have some talent and why don’t I use it,’” so she started putting on school programs and traveling with her music a lot. Another woman who has really influenced your work and music is Sue Ella Boatright-Wells; she is part of organizing so much of the region’s community music scene. Tell me about her.

Sue Ella Boatright-Wells is also from Scott County — she lives in Scott County today. She doesn’t play music, but old-time music fans who dig deep have probably heard of her father, Scott Boatright, who was really good friends with the Powers Family and Dock Boggs and the Magic City Trio; Scott played with several bands in the area. Sue Ella grew up with music in the home and, when she took her position at Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap, she wanted to use that as an outlet to help preserve that music.

Sue Ella has been an influential part of the Home Craft Days festival at Mountain Empire Community College, helping to get local artists and musicians to the campus each October to showcase their art and their music. She is the mastermind behind Mountain Music School, which was such a huge influence on me, and even today, Sue Ella works tirelessly to help support efforts by the Crooked Road and their Youth Music Initiative and the Junior Appalachian Musicians program, which is now in Wise County. She works very hard to see that those programs succeed and are able to expose children to the music, especially our youth here that probably didn’t grow up with this music. As in any rural area, money never flows freely in the form of grants or government funding for the arts, so it’s sometimes a pretty difficult fight to find funding and to find ways to make these programs go, but Sue Ella never backs down. She’s always got a plan and she always works extremely hard to see that these programs do happen and that they happen to the best of their ability.

I’m very, very lucky to call Sue Ella a friend. I’ve looked up to her for a long time and she was incredibly encouraging to me, coming along as a banjo player. After a few years of attending Mountain Music School, she asked me to come on and be an instructor there, and today I co-direct the program and try to do a lot of work with Sue Ella to see that these youth music programs happen. I do try to model my work after Sue Ella’s.

I guess most people wouldn’t think that organizing music or organizing dance and art, especially in the mountains … people probably don’t put the same value on that as maybe somebody who organizes a food drive or a fundraiser to build a park or whatever. They probably don’t see the same value in promoting the arts because that seems intangible. But advocating for local music and arts is such an important thing to do to build community. Unfortunately, we live in a time where technology, as great as it is, is diminishing our abilities to be together as communities — just humans, one-on-one — and to share experiences like music. That’s why I feel that it’s so important to continue to organize events and programs, especially for youth, to show that this music has continually brought people together for years and years and, hopefully, will continue to bring.

Tyler Hughes demonstrating flatfoot dancing at the Papa Joe Smiddy Festival. Photo by Dan Boner.

Speaking of community and music bringing people together … you’re a square dance caller and a prize-winning flatfoot dancer, so I want to hear about your background in dance.

I started learning to dance not too long after I started learning the banjo. Probably the first person that ever showed me anything was Anndrena Belcher; she was living in Scott County at the time and she’s also someone that I look up to. Anndrena really does see the true value of our own personal stories and songs, and she’s a really wonderful musician and writer and storyteller and dancer. She was the first person to ever show me any steps; I was lucky, I got to do several workshops with her around Wise County where we went out and taught other students to dance.

Anndrena teaches dance not just to preserve or carry on the tradition, but simply to do what any kind of art is created for: self-expression. I thought that was very important and something that we shouldn’t lose when we are passing on these cultural traditions. So often in the region, we just talk about how endangered our way of life can be, and how some tunes and music aren’t getting played as much as they once were, and some dances aren’t being danced as much as they once were. It is important to preserve these arts for the historical aspect, but also for the self-expression and the social aspect. For a long time, one of my very best friends lived here in Big Stone Gap, Julie Shepherd-Powell, who’s a really wonderful banjo player and also an award-winning flatfoot dancer. She taught me a whole lot and she spent a lot of time with me at some workshops and, just on the side, teaching me different dance moves.

Julie Shepherd-Powell is also a fine square dance caller, and I know not too long ago you hosted a square dance in Big Stone Gap, and it was one of the first that had been held there in quite a while.

I started to learn to call square dances about two years ago. For a long time, I was head of a contra dance organization at East Tennessee State University, where I went to college. Along the way, we were having a lot of fun with contra, but we wanted to experiment with square dances because square dances were much more closely associated with old-time music, the music we were playing in the program. We looked around and we only knew a handful of square dance callers, and we found out that there was no young person within our immediate crowd calling square dances in Johnson City. So I took it upon myself to try to learn some and, today, I’ve probably mastered about eight to 10 dances. In December, I pulled together several organizations — the Big Stone Gap Parks and Recreation Department, a couple local business sponsors, Auto World, and the local grocery chain Food City all pitched in and several community members baked goods and food, and we all met here at an old Girl Scouts cabin. Some wonderful friends of mine, Bill and the Belles, came over and played the music and we had the dance and it was successful. The dance was well-attended: People were really receptive and supportive. Dance is a very important tool to get people together to socialize and share experiences about what’s happening in their community.

While we’re talking about Wise County, another woman from that area that you and I both admire is Kate Peters Sturgill, the great songwriter. Tell me why you sing her songs.

Kate was from Josephine, Virginia, a little coal camp just below Norton out in the county. She was a wonderful guitar player and singer but, more than anything, I love her writing. I’ve always said she was one of the most poetic writers from the region that I’ve ever come across. She really puts her passion for her home community into her writing — songs like “My Stone Mountain Home,” which I perform now. Kate is not an incredibly well-known artist — most people, if they’ve ever heard one of Kate’s songs, it’s probably her best-known gospel tune, “Deep Settled Peace” — but she wrote a whole handful of beautiful songs and many of them deal with our home county. She wrote “My Stone Mountain Home” about the mountain chain that runs down Powell Valley and between Appalachia, Virginia. She also wrote about the Trail of the Lonesome Pine, which has a lot of significance here. The book and the outdoor drama by that title, written by John Fox Jr., were based loosely on local people and events here in Big Stone Gap. The context still exists to have Kate’s songs sung and played here.

The Empty Bottle Stringband playing for the extras party for the film Big Stone Gap at the Trail of the Lonesome Pine outdoor drama. Photo by Sam Gleaves.

I really enjoy the way that you use humor on stage when you perform. That’s a real tradition in country music. Why do you think it’s important to be funny and entertain as you present this music?

I think that often, especially as old-time musicians and musicians who want to preserve early country music in the form it was created in, we sometimes forget that we’re pretty much the only ones who are thinking so deeply about the historical context of the way the instruments were played or even what the songs were saying. When we take those out to a wider audience — unless you are playing for a special audience that is there to have this historical significance explained to them — people are still coming because it’s music, and music is fun and entertaining. This music is light-hearted or it can be really deep and emotional, and I think people want to feel all of that.

I think the best way we can present the music, truly, is putting it on as a show, because that’s the way it’s always been done. People in the 1920s weren’t playing “Cottoneyed Joe” or “Turkey in the Straw” to historically preserve the tune from the way it was played in the 1860s. They were thinking, “This is fun, this is entertaining.” I don’t think that’s anything we should forget, especially if we want to bring old-time music to a wider audience. It doesn’t have to be as if we’re presenting a piece from a museum.

I love to hear you tell a good June Carter joke, but in closing, I know another female musician and songwriter we really admire is Ola Belle Reed, and she once said in an interview, “We all need each other, whether we know it or not.” I think that speaks so much to what community organizing is about and what old-time music is about. Being a community organizer and someone who has put old-time music at the center of their life, can you talk about that?

I think that’s definitely true. Unfortunately, we still live in a world where stereotypes get placed on everybody. We all do it, whether we mean to or not. When most audiences think of old-time music, they probably have in mind a hillbilly character or, perhaps, only white men playing it or it being associated heavily with Protestant faiths — the stereotypical images of Appalachia that are often portrayed. Often, old-time music probably evokes those same stereotypes to people outside the region, but the beautiful thing is that old-time music is just as diverse as the region itself and, as anywhere else in the country — or the world, for that matter.

Whether it be old-time music or pop music, music transcends the barriers that society places on all of us. It really doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor or black or white or gay or straight; however you identify, music can touch us all and affect us all. If we aren’t brought together through some type of connecting bridge like music or dance or community events, then we may never know that we’re sharing the same experiences and how important it is — that we’re not alone. Often, I think we get bogged down as individuals in our lives but, by coming together through art, we find many others who are sharing those same feelings and can relate to us. When we relate to each other, there’s empowerment and there’s a healthier sense of community.

Lede photo by Kristen Bearfield.

Sam Gleaves is a folk singer and songwriter from Southwest Virginia. His latest record, Ain’t We Brothers, is made up of stories in song from contemporary Appalachia, produced by Cathy Fink. 

A Story Should Be Sung: Saro Lynch-Thomason on Ballads and Purpose

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On a hot August day in 2011, a long line of demonstrators were crowding the shoulder on the road that winds up Blair Mountain in Logan County, West Virginia. The protesters were speaking out against the threat of mountaintop removal coal mining that endangered the historic site where, 90 years before, 10,000 men and women had taken a violent stand for a working union and human rights in the coalfields. Against the reverberations of history rising up from that mountain ground, Saro Lynch-Thomason stood behind a megaphone and taught the crowd the refrain of “Hold On,” an African-American spiritual and mainstay during the Civil Rights Movement. Adapted for that moment and that struggle, she sang, “We’re gonna march our way to Blair and we’ll meet with our comrades there. Keep your eyes on the prize and hold on.”

Saro Lynch-Thomason sings with purpose. A large part of her singing repertoire and life’s work is Appalachian ballads — the narrative songs which helped an immigrant people remember their homes and histories in a strange land. Noted North Carolina ballad singer Sheila Kay Adams, one of Saro’s mentors, often tells of the older singers calling all the ballads “love songs,” despite storylines riddled with murders, jealousy, and bittersweet, complicated feelings. Whatever they are called, these ballads tell the truth. Set far apart from high-brow popular music, these songs tell the people’s history, brought over time from farmers’ fields and kitchens to concert stages and digital online archives.

In an age when music is most often consumed singularly — and through earbuds — a generation of young singers, including Lynch-Thomason , are committed to learning songs in person and valuing the stories that surround the music. Reviving the old “knee-to-knee” style of sharing stories line by line, Saro collects songs from mentors older than her and her age peers, then adapts the pieces to her own experience. In turn, she teaches workshops that continue to circulate this way of learning. Lynch-Thomason’s work with contemporary media and visual art also serves the mission of rejoining the music with its historical context. She co-produced the multimedia CD and educational resource Blair Pathways; wrote and illustrated Lone Mountain, a children’s book on Appalachian culture and mountaintop removal mining; and has recorded a beautiful solo album of unaccompanied ballads, hymns and group songs titled Vessel. 

Saro, could you tell me some about your first experiences with singing and what drew you to unaccompanied singing, in particular?

I was raised in a church that had a strong children’s chorus, so I grew up with a certain amount of unaccompanied singing in a religious atmosphere. I was raised Unitarian Universalist, and we had a very charismatic chorus director who exposed me to a variety of music styles, including shape-note singing. That was a big influence on me as a kid and, at the same time, my father played a lot of British folk revival music in our house and my mother played a lot of music by contemporary female balladeers — like Sinead O’Connor and Loreena McKennitt — and that music really struck me.

So I learned a lot of ballads growing up, just on my own, by myself, not knowing anyone else, as a kid, who liked to do that. Both of my aunts had been active in the folk revival and taught me a few ballads growing up, too.

I’m wondering, when you were young and learning some ballads — and as you continue to learn ballads today — do you think of them visually? I know you’re a visual artist and illustrator, so I was wondering if those two arts are connected for you.

Yes, definitely. I was raised doing a lot of art and had the intention of being an artist as an adult. When I’m singing ballads, I’m always visualizing the story in my head and I use that a lot as a memorization technique, as a way to stay rooted in the story and know what verse is coming next. In some ballads, I see myself as a character, especially when the ballads are in a first-person perspective, and I feel myself taking on and exploring the emotions and the attitude of that character. But, in other cases, I try to take a step back — especially if there are several different characters in a story. I take a step back and try to use my body in a voice that’s setting the scene for the story, and not be a character, specifically, in the story.

Speaking of singing and how it involves the body, I love your record Vessel, which you put out in 2013. I love what you said, that “with each transfer, the song is refitted and molded to the character of the singer.” So I was wondering if you could talk some about that and making that recording.

My CD Vessel is called “Vessel” because these songs, through the fact that they’re transmitted from person-to-person, sort of take on their own character and life. A lot of singers, including myself, feel like we’re vessels — we’re housing these songs until they pass on to the next person. In a way, we’re holding these songs that have their own spirits. So there’s a balance that you have to find between putting yourself in a story and also letting the story tell itself, and letting an audience or letting listeners interpret the song and take the song into themselves and let it be about their own story and their own narrative.

And Vessel, as my first CD, was an attempt to do honor to ballad singers I had learned from — including Sheila Kay Adams and Bobby McMillon and many singers who are long deceased — who told such beautiful stories and expressed themselves so beautifully … like Texas Gladden and singers from archives who we don’t know that much about. My ballad “True Thomas” comes from a woman named Becky Gordon from Catshead, Sugarloaf, North Carolina, and I don’t know much of anything about her, but she had this beautiful song that wasn’t collected anywhere else.

Speaking of your collecting and how you learn from mentors in North Carolina … why do you think it’s important to learn these songs in person, in addition to studying recordings, but also building these relationships with singers?

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the broader oral tradition around ballad singing, which is what we say about those ballads, what we know and what we share about them, the stories we connect to them. Learning face-to-face with someone, you get to understand so much about them and empathize with them when they tell you how they connect to that ballad and what they have learned from that ballad.

Ballads are intensely personal and intensely public at the same time, and one song can carry so many different stories, depending on who you ask and how they’ve interpreted the song. And so, I think largely learning in what is sometimes called the knee-to-knee style is a practice in empathy and in deep listening to someone else.

I agree, for sure. Can you talk about how ballads, in part, have lead you to North Carolina and how you identify your home there with singing, and also the role of place in this ballad-singing tradition that you’re part of?

I was raised in Middle Tennessee, and a lot of my mother’s family is from East Tennessee and has been in East Tennessee for several hundred years. So I was raised with a big connection to the Blue Ridge Mountains and being in those mountains a lot. I decided to move to North Carolina after college to connect to what I had heard was a vibrant singing community in Western North Carolina, which turned out to be true.

Talking about place in these songs … even though a lot of these songs go back hundreds and hundreds of years, people’s experiences — and, I believe, their physical landscape — changes how they interpret a song and what the song is for. I think there is a way that you can hear the landscape in these songs and, of course, the topic matter of the songs themselves is often about the experiences in the mountains and that connects to experiences that my own family has had and contemporary experiences, too — anything from out-migration from Appalachia to digging ginseng to opposing mountaintop removal. This is a contemporary tradition, and what I’m compelled by is when that sense of place and attachment to this region becomes expressed in these songs in a way that other people can empathize with and understand.

That’s really well said. Tell me about your identity as an activist and how this kind of cultural preservation and singing that you do is tied to your work in social justice movements?

A big connection point for me, coming to Appalachia, was learning, really in college, about social struggles in Appalachia and about mountaintop removal mining. I started to learn in college about the West Virginia coal mine wars and fights for union rights and safety rights for coal miners and that really intrigued me, especially because I was raised in a social justice-oriented household. So I became interested in how people in this region had fought for their rights and how they had used music as a part of that.

Part of what’s intriguing about Appalachia, as a place and how it is viewed by the rest of the country and the world, is that it's a very historicized place — it’s a place that is put in the past. What I love about ballad singing and traditional music from the region is that it can educate so much about Appalachia’s rich and diverse history and it is used as a contemporary tool to express Appalachia’s current situation and its people. Something that I really enjoy doing as an educator and as a ballad singer is doing workshops specifically on Appalachian movement songs, mostly for the reason that it brings people up to date on Appalachia!

Yes, I struggle with some of those same things out on the road and I think it’s important work you are doing. What about your teaching, workshops, and also the Asheville Community Sing that you lead?

I mentioned a little earlier that, as a kid, I was raising myself to be an artist and through whatever I’ve done, it’s always been about stories to me, whatever media I’ve been working in. I like to lead workshops and performances that focus on a theme, like Appalachian movement songs or women’s stories in ballads. My goal is often to give people a sense of history, a sense of our heritage through song, but also to give people confidence about these traditions being a part of their lives and being a way for them to express their stories and to not feel stuck with the stories they’re given, but to feel that they can change them and keep on the oral tradition that way.

The Asheville Community Sing … that’s a monthly event that I’ve been running since 2010. I started the Sing when I moved to Asheville because I wanted to build a traditional singing community around me — kind of a selfish thing! What I wanted to do was build an environment where anyone was welcome, where everyone felt like they could sing as much or as little as they wanted, and share these fantastic traditional songs, most of which were designed for group singing.

So much singing in our contemporary culture is focused on work by singer/songwriters that is not designed to be sung in groups. I wanted to create a space where people felt empowered to sing and, in order to do that, you need to provide songs that are easy for people to sing together. We sing work songs and sea shanties and hymn songs and union anthems and all sorts of songs that people can feel confident doing together.

You talk about how the ballads still have this contemporary relevance, and I know you sing some recently composed ballads. Also, you compose tunes — I know you wrote a beautiful melody to that text of “True Thomas.” So you’re both performing old material and bringing new material into the present?

Different folklorists and singers have different ethics around how much to change a song or not change a song, and I’m basically of the opinion that, if it’s a good story, it should be sung! I think that the most important work that these songs do is to help people connect to their own emotions and their own narratives and to affirm their own experiences. If I connect to a song, but it’s not quite saying what I want to say, I’m all right with changing it … as long as its history is acknowledged in the process.

I found this text of “True Thomas,” which is the only American variant of this particular ballad that I’m aware of, and I just thought it was too precious to not bring back, so I put a melody to it that felt appropriate. There are other times when I have taken a song and politicized it or taken a song and made it much more personal.

A song I like to sing a lot is called “I’m So Glad Today I’m Ready,” which came out of the archives at Berea College when I was studying some there. This song was originally from the perspective of a woman who is going to Heaven and how glad and ready she is to go, and I changed the song to be, instead, about going back to the Blue Ridge Mountains and going back to the New River, which flows through Asheville and has sustained me and given me water. Those are the places I want my body to return to when I pass on. I wanted to keep the spirit of the song, but make it about where I feel rooted and what my story is in Appalachia now.

I think both those stories are important. It’s odd to think about, but perhaps 200 years from now, some folks are going to be referring to singers like you and me as the ancestors who were singing these songs. So we’re constructing these stories and other people can take them or leave them and whatever is relevant will stick.

Ballads are so functional. People sang them in their homes while they worked or were rocking their children or passing the time on long journeys. People really held dear that history and that singing of the ballads. What role do ballads and singing play in your life — what function do they serve for you?

I think, at my core, these songs, what they help me do is emotionally process my experiences. I was teaching a workshop recently on women’s stories in ballads, and something that came up from a lot of people is that there are songs on pretty hard topics for women that many of us enjoy singing by ourselves, but would not share in a group because the content can be disturbing. And, yet, we sing these songs all the time by ourselves because they help us process our experiences. I think that’s a big resource that these songs can provide.

They also help me connect to my fellow humans in that magic way that, when a group of people are sharing vibrations in a room — making vibrations together with their voices — we learn to immediately connect with each other no matter how different we are or how much we might agree or disagree politically, et cetera. When we share our voices, we learn to connect so quickly … and you can think about that from a practical perspective or a spiritual perspective, but that’s another way that these songs help me in my daily life.

Sam Gleaves is a folk singer and songwriter from Southwest Virginia. His latest record, Ain’t We Brothers, is made up of stories in song from contemporary Appalachia, produced by Cathy Fink.

Photo credit: Sarah Morgan

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