Tag: Woody Guthrie

Counsel of Elders: John McCutcheon on Telling Powerful Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very either/or.

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

That divisiveness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit: Irene Young

A Million Woody Guthries (Op-ed)

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I’m a songwriter.

I was asked to write a piece about the 2016 election.

My first thought was, “What the hell will this have to do with being a songwriter?”

My second thought was about how easy it would be to write this piece about the people in my songs and show that they weren’t directly responsible for the election of Donald Trump.

I don’t have any mixed emotions about this election.

Donald Trump used a time-honored tradition utilized by bullies and scoundrels to shout down the truth and feed the racist, misogynist anger of his devoted followers.

I think he’s dangerous and I think that anybody who voted for him will be hurt just as badly as the people who did not. I also believe that the Republican party, unable to win a fair election in a demographically changed country, used every technique — legal and illegal — to steal the election.

The country is having a too-little-too-late conversation about exactly who voted for Trump, where they live, and how they think.

Some people have suggested to me that I write about the Trump voters because I write mostly about the white, formerly middle-class, American working-class.

My subjects usually are the people I know from my life as part of that group.

And it’s true: Some of them have been screwed.

And it’s true that they are so frustrated with PR-spouting politicians, local and national, that they might have seen a non-politician who never seemed to use a speech writer — let alone a public relations company — as their best hope.

Hopeless people are desperate.

Many of them voted for something new and different.

Something less Washington, D.C.

But, in doing so, they just voted for another one of the people who have been screwing them.

This is what happens when people get most of their information from liars and crooks, political charlatans, TV characters, bald-faced liars, and hate mongers who are as effective at turning their hearts as any faith-healing, religious, scam artist.

This is how a person thinks when they look at social media 20, 30, 1,000 times a day, at a site like Facebook, that pretends to a social greater good, yet behaves as if money is the only God and pits people against each other for advertising dollars.

Or at Twitter, where celebrity is everything and lies look just like the truth, only shorter and easier to digest.

I feel bad for many of them. The media on the coasts shames them and the voices that purport to be for them lie to them.

They could use defenders.

They could use a voice or two in support of their lives spent working for their families, exchanging long hours for a life of safety and love, a kind of life that has always been hard to come by if you don’t start somewhere near the top.

Living in the South or the middle of the country (condescendingly called the flyover states by the heads on the screens) isn’t enough of a reason to be ignored and insulted.

And because I’ve been them, I am them, and I owe them for my songs, it should be me.

I can’t do it.

But I’ve thought hard about what impact I would have defending the position of a single Trump voter, however misinformed or misguided.

My father is Jewish and my family started in the United States as immigrants from the Diaspora.

Now, we are in danger, again.

In a Trump society, our daughters and sons are in danger. The planet will die, for all intents and purposes, in their lifetimes.

In a Trump world, our wives will grow older in a society increasingly more misogynistic with drastically reduced health care options for everyone.

I may know where these Trump voters are coming from, but they are dead wrong to have given our country over to rich, white men.

I can forgive them and hope that they will become less hateful and more helpful.

But I can’t defend them.

So, what the hell does this have to do with being a songwriter?

If Trump’s behavior toward journalists is any indicator, there will be an attempt to silence all writers of conscience.

And that’s what the hell this has to do with songwriting.

Being a songwriter is a selfish profession.

Donald Trump will change that.

In a change that is already in progress, American journalism will die and be replaced by propaganda.

In a Trump society, as in the former Soviet Union, Apartheid South Africa, and current-day China, the writers and artists will become the only truth tellers.

Songwriters will have a mantle of artistic responsibility that has been largely missing for a very long time.

We will need to go back as far as the 1930s and Woody Guthrie.

There will need to be a million new Woody Guthries.

To succeed, this million-songwriter army will need to stop writing about their own feelings, their love affairs, their exhausted life on the road.

These new truth tellers must stop writing about working people like they were happy laborers, excited about the possibility of another day in the factory.

They will have to abandon their clichés about Southerners and people from the flyover states as simple, noble, unaware beasts.

There will be no place for art that ignores people who dream of simple, attainable, and quiet goals.

Some people’s dream is just a house like the house in the song “Little Boxes,” the insulting and inaccurate ’60s folk song dreams — used recently as the theme song of the popular show Weeds — that mocked anybody remotely interested in conforming to what was then considered middle-class values and dreams.

Songs like “Little Boxes” can never again be written.

The condescension of saying that somebody who isn’t chasing a bigger dream isn’t in pursuit of something valuable must cease.

No songs can be written that reduce a person’s value.

And it will be untruthful to write songs that straddle the divide, refusing to take any other stand than “We could all be cool to each other.”

People listen. Songs can make an impact, reminding us of why we strive to be human and humane.

Songs can, and do, bring people together.

But being a songwriter isn’t an act of courage.

The racist American right wing armed themselves while we songwriters were singing our songs.

Then, while we were singing some more songs, they took over our government.

Writing the truth is an act of courage.

And let’s prepare for whatever comes next.

Let’s hope that we need arm ourselves only with the truth.

— Nathan Bell, December 22, 2016

Photo credit: AK Rockefeller via Foter.com / CC BY-SA

Guy Clark, ‘Just to Watch Maria Dance’

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This year, by so many accounts, was a terrible year. From the complete atrocities in Aleppo, to the never-ending police brutalities, to the election of Donald Trump, it's often felt like one disaster after another with no sign of stopping soon. In times of trouble, it's always helped to look to our idols for guidance — particularly in music, for me, at least — which is another way that 2016 was just so damn awful: So many of those very people passed away. Prince. David Bowie. Merle Haggard. Leonard Cohen. Phife Dawg. When the world starts to slide into the ocean like a sand castle that seemed so safe from its waves, these legends always present a certain sense of consistent solace and, once they started to disappear, it seemed like nothing, and no one, was safe.

It's impossible and irresponsible to rank the value of any one departed soul over another, but one of the losses I grieved the hardest was Guy Clark, who died in May. I was quite pregnant at the time with my second baby, and the onslaught of hormones left me staring at the computer screen in shock, tears joining with remnants of last night's mascara and forming trail-maps down my cheeks. Clark's words had always served not only as the basis of his beautiful music, but as something aspirational — even a journalist can take a lesson from the way his lyrics evoke a scene, the way he picked up on the smallest detail or nuance of human emotion. Should he have wanted to, he would have made a world-class reporter.

The last time I saw Clark, in the basement of his home for an interview, I was actually pregnant with my first child. I'd asked him before leaving if he had any advice to me as a new parent — if he knew how I could assure he'd grow up as curious about the world and the art it contains as he was. He said, simply, "Read him Dylan Thomas and play him Woody Guthrie." I took the advice to heart. A few years later, when my daughter was born three months after Clark's death, we named her Dylan. It just seemed a fitting thing to do, and a permanent reminder.

The amazing gift of such prolific minds as Clark's is that, even once they pass, there is often more music hiding in tapes and basements and hard drives, and such is the case with Guy Clark: The Best of the Dualtone Years, out in March. While most of the collection focuses on his work from the last decade of his life that had already made its way onto other records, there are a few unreleased treasures, too. One such song is "Just to Watch Maria Dance," written with Lady Goodman (aka Holly Gleason), included in a demo version. Clark was never one for artifice or studio polish, so his demos sound quite similar to anything mastered up — here, his vocals perhaps just a touch more ragged and the plucking perhaps a little more stiff, like a pair of his signature denim jeans just a hair short of worn-in.

"Empty threats and no regrets, it's time for moving on," he sings. The words are new, but the voice as familiar as ever, even though Clark has now moved on for good. This may have been a terrible year, but little treasures like this add glitter to the darkness, and true gifts, like a daughter who will never forget to read Dylan Thomas, make it still worth living.

Are We on the Verge of a Golden Age of Protest Music? (Op-ed)

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A few weeks ago, I finished the final draft of an editorial about the modern state of protest music. The Bluegrass Situation had asked me to write on this topic because I had just released an album called How to Dream Again — a largely political album in which I attempt to examine the current state of America by asking questions about the American Dream, the failures of our economic and political systems, the ongoing issue of racism in this country, and whether there's any hope for potential solutions. The tone of the piece I wrote was measured, and largely optimistic.

Then, Donald Trump was elected president.

In my original piece, I wrote that we're living in the most turbulent time in America since the 1960s. That now seems like an understatement. We’re now living in the most turbulent time in the world since the 1930s.

Everywhere you look, people are uncertain about the future and angry about problems that seem to have no immediate solutions. On an almost weekly basis, another Black or brown person is killed by a police officer. The middle and working classes have been eroding for decades, there aren’t enough jobs for those who need them, and many of the jobs that exist are unstable and low-paying. Our governmental institutions have ground to a halt due to partisanship and public distrust. An opiate epidemic is ravaging Middle America. Scientists say that the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere will cause temperatures and sea levels to rise dramatically in the coming decades.

Half of the country — at least, half of those who actually voted — responded to this pervasive uncertainty and anger by voting for Donald Trump — a con man, a liar, and a racist. His lack of knowledge and preparation alone should have been disqualifying. His election has already sparked racial violence and protests across the country. He has promised to deport millions of people and ban Muslim immigration to the country. His aggressive rhetoric and unpredictable temperament threaten to spark international conflict. He has already named a climate change denier to staff the EPA and a known KKK sympathizer to lead his administration.

The frustration and change of the past several years has given us glimpses of a coming golden age of protest music. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly may come to define the Black Lives Matter movement in the same way Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan defined the Civil Rights Movement. With their new album, American Band, Drive-By Truckers haven’t only put out their best work in a decade, they've crystallized our current political moment. Still, these examples are largely viewed as one-offs rather than part of a larger trend.

In light of the election of Donald Trump, this can’t remain the case. In my original piece, I encouraged songwriters who “feel called to write protest songs” to step up and do so. Now, that rhetoric feels too soft. Now, we have a responsibility to do so. I’m not saying that every song you write should be a political screed. But we must use our voices to inform people, rally people together, and help mobilize a movement that will resist the dangerous forces that Trump threatens to unleash in the next few years.

This can be a scary step to take. I know from experience. Two years ago, after putting out two albums in quick succession, I felt like I’d run out of things to say as a songwriter. At the same time, I was growing increasingly frustrated with the political landscape. After reading AIynda Segarra’s May 2015 Bluegrass Situation piece, in which she called on folk musicians to — in the words of Bell Hooks — “fall in love with justice” and use our music to discuss issues of social justice and human rights, I decided I wanted to write songs with greater political relevance. Almost immediately, though, I got scared. I was scared of rubbing some people the wrong way. I was worried about the effects this direction might have on my career. Mostly, I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to write good songs in this new style. But I kept repeating the mantra I’d adopted when I first made the terrifying leap into my music career: Lean into your fear.

So I got to work. And two years later, my earlier fears have evaporated. I filled my brain with ideas related to politics, history, economics, and race — studying writers like Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Thomas Piketty — and wrote, rejected, and edited dozens of new songs. Along the way, I learned to write songs that effectively blend the personal and the political. And as I’ve spent the past year traveling around the country playing the songs that ended up on How to Dream Again, I haven’t encountered any heckles or boos. In fact, I’ve been humbled and surprised by the positive reaction to my political material. Over and over, I’ve heard people express how much they're craving honest, thoughtful voices that can help them frame and understand what’s happening in the country and the world.

After all, we live in a time when it seems like there are no trustworthy leaders, institutions, or public figures left. Church attendance is at an all-time-low. Distrust of government is just about about the only thing liberals and conservatives can agree on. Time and again in 2016, the media has proven its inability to understand the changes happening in the country. Hell, even Bill Cosby — the one-time epitome of a wise, honest father figure to many of my generation — turned out to be a monster. And as we’ve learned in the past year, where courageous, trustworthy truth-tellers fail to emerge, demagogues thrive. 

All of us humans have a deep need to understand the world we inhabit. We need to be reminded of universal truths. There will always be a need for songs about love, pain, and heartbreak. But we also need to be confronted with temporal, day-to-day truths specific to a particular place and time. These kinds of truths are what folk music was created to communicate, long before the Internet and cable news. As Woody Guthrie put it, “A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it, or it could be who's hungry and where their mouth is, or who's out of work and where the job is, or who's broke and where the money is, or who's carrying a gun and where the peace is.”

This type of information can be life-changing. If it reaches enough people, it can alter the course of history. If more modern-day Woody Guthries had emerged over the past year, maybe Trump’s message wouldn’t have resonated the way that it has. This is the deep power of folk music. Perhaps the next golden age of protest music has yet to arrive because we, the next generation of songwriters, have yet to fully realize this power.

It’s understandable. As songwriters and musicians, we're reminded of our weaknesses on a daily basis. No one buys records anymore. Fewer people are going to shows. Streaming pays fractions of a cent per play. I don’t need to remind you: Your bank statements and half-empty clubs are daily reminders, as are mine.

I think many of us secretly believe that our songs don’t matter. We were born with the gift — and curse — of needing to make music so badly that we can’t do anything else. But we were also unlucky enough to be born in exactly the wrong time, a time when songs have become practically worthless. It can often feel like no one is listening to these songs that we’ve devoted our lives to creating.

But people are listening. I take the subway to my part-time job twice a week when I’m not on tour, and nearly every passenger in every car is wearing headphones. At the gym, nearly everyone is wearing headphones. On the sidewalk, nearly everyone is wearing headphones. Sure, songwriters and musicians are making less money, but everyone is still listening to music. Every day. And we’re listening to more music than ever.

If you’re a songwriter, or an artist of any kind, now is not the time for apathy, complacency, solipsism, or silence. You have a mouthpiece, even if it’s relatively small, and we all need you to use it. Be brave. If, as Woody Guthrie once said, all human beings are really just hoping machines, then it's our job to provide the fuel.

So protest and encourage solidarity through your art. It’s not as scary or as hard as you think. God knows there’s plenty of material out there, and audiences are hungry for these kinds of songs. Our country and world desperately need them, now more than ever. If enough of us listen to our intuition, lean into our fears, and dig deeply to find new kernels of truth, we just might discover a power we didn’t know we had — the power to inspire thought and change, to bring people together around a common cause, and to drastically change the political conversation in our country and around the world.

We could make more than songs. We could make more than a living. We could make history.

Max Porter is a singer/songwriter who performs as M. Lockwood Porter. His newest album, How to Dream Again, came out this September on Black Mesa Records (US) and Hidden Trail Records (UK/EU).

Nothing to Hide: A Conversation with Dan Layus

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After more than a decade at the heart of Augustana, Dan Layus recently released an official solo album, Dangerous Things. And anyone who thinks they are going to get another bunch of roots-rock anthems out of Layus has another think coming their way. The sparsely drawn, country-tinged singer/songwriter set summons Gram Parsons, Woody Guthrie, and early Tom Waits as its patron saints, and Layus's Rodney Crowell-esque voice feels right at home in the form. There's a fragility to the whole artistic affair, but one which makes it clear that there's strength in being vulnerable, in asking for or offering help.

I dig this record. A lot. And I'll tell you why: It has a serious lack of pretense. It's not trying to be anything that it's not. You're just putting it out there with nothing to hide behind. How's that feeling?

I appreciate that. Without sounding pretentious, ironically, that's exactly what I was going for — to, essentially, go for nothing. [Laughs] It's like Seinfeld; it's a show about nothing. That's probably my favorite compliment about the record. Thank you. That's very intuitive and a little bit left-of-center approach to describe it. And that's absolutely what I was going for.

Let me put it this way: It felt far too predictable to say, “I think I'm gonna make a country record now. That seems like the thing to do.” It felt like that would've been laughed off the map. Being a self-described narcissist, I know that I care a little too much about what people think sometimes, especially music people. So I needed to challenge myself … I'm joking about the narcissism, by the way. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah. I gotcha.

I hoped you would. I needed to let go of a lot of the practices — the writing practices, sonic habits I had in the past. It's very easy to fall into a pattern of crutches, when it comes to music. You get used to certain elements around you. Even things as simple as “Where do the drums go on this song? What's the bass gonna do?” — assuming that there needs to be these four cornerstones of a record that make the sound of the record. I think what I was able to do — and it was a greater challenge than I thought — was to just not worry about it at all. Just rely on the characters in the songs, let them be themselves.

I won't lie: I'm absolutely in love with the few elements, sonically, that are implied and nodded to, as far as pedal steel and fiddle and, of course, the Secret Sisters and the female background vocals. I'm in love with those, but I think the subtleties of them are what make it say, “Yes, this is what you think it is, but I'm not going to stand on top of the building and say, 'I'm a country artist now. Hear me roar!' I'm just going to let it be what it's going to be.”

It seems fitting, too, to leave the band name behind with the big, sweeping melodies and the arena-rock drums fills. Just let that all live in its own world.

Right. Yeah.

Why, for you, was that shift in branding and that shouldering of responsibility important? Because, like I said with the music, there's nothing left to hide behind, brand-wise.

That is true. It was kind of for selfish reasons. Sometimes you forget, at least for me, if I'm a fan of a certain artist or singer that's associated with a band, you forget that they have their own feelings of weight or they're battling with their own self-image in that environment. You forget that. “Oh, I just like the music. I like that band a lot.” You forget there are all these times that, potentially, they don't feel totally comfortable in their own skin underneath that umbrella, that moniker, that brand or band name. It comes with a weight. It comes with an expectation of a certain sound, a certain style, a certain form.

I think what happened was, I put out this last record — the last Augustana record — I made it, essentially, by myself with a few producers. It felt like a desperate plea. I loved the songs, but the album felt completely scattered. I tried my very, very best to be myself in that situation and carry it or be comfortable with it. But it became glaringly obvious, after a few years, that this was done. This was not what it once was. To call it a band and call it what it used to be in 2005 is just silly. I'm lying to myself and to the fans. Times change. Things change. Relationships change. People's careers change. One day you work in a business office and one day you don't want to work there anymore. You need to try something new to feel motivated or excited about something.

So it really is more of a reboot than an evolution, creatively, then?

I think so, yeah. I felt that, creatively and in a career-minded way, Augustana had reached its resting place. I have nothing but wonderful feelings about it. Never felt angry about it. Never felt jealous about other people's standings, maybe people we were coming up with and where they ended up, if they ended up anywhere at all. I was always able to keep that all in perspective.

But I think, for my own benefit and the benefit of my family and our future and definitely my future in music, I felt like, “You know what? Let's live in the current place that we are.” And the current place that I am is that I'm ready to make an album that has my name on it and sounds the way I've always wanted it to sound. And nobody's gonna tell me no, that I can't have pedal steel, that I can't have a fiddle. [Laughs] Nobody's gonna tell me that it sounds too Americana.

[Laughs] And it's a fiddle, damn it. Not a violin.

It's a damn fiddle! [Laughs] Nobody's gonna tell me that this isn't gonna work at alternative radio because it's too alt-country or whatever. I'm just gonna make the damn record sound the way I wanted it to, ever since I heard Gram Parsons or Ryan Adams, when I was 16. That's the record I've always wanted to make, but for whatever reasons, I was never able to fully realize that sound and feel. I feel more at home now, than I ever have.

I think that's going to be reflected in the people who respond to it. I'll be honest, I have a few Augustana songs in my iTunes, but I wasn't that big a fan.

Yeah.

But I seriously love this record. It reminds me of Chely Wright's new one. I was never a commercial country listener, so I knew of her and liked a few of her tunes, but on her new record — it's the same thing — she found her true voice. I feel like that's what you've done.

Awww. Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that very much.

You're welcome. And I don't say that just to say it.

[Laughs] I can tell! I can tell that you mean it.

[Laughs] Now, you've talked about having to let go of songwriting in order to write these songs. Is that because of the personal nature of the songs — that they were for your album and not for a singer to be named later or for a band?

Yeah, that's part of it, certainly. I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't partially my fault for investing a lot of time in co-writing with other people over the last five or six years. Especially in Nashville over the last two to three years.

That's the way it is here.

That's the way it is here. I learned a lot. I learned a lot of good writing habits and I learned a lot of bad writing habits over the course of a few years. And I already had my own style of writing, which a lot of people do, when they come to town. I was writing with people in L.A., too. It just has its own thing to it. Coming to Nashville and being like, “Alright. I'm going to try to get some cuts. Some BIG country cuts. I need to make some damn money for my family. I need to let go of my whole artistic thing, because it ain't working out.” [Laughs] “If I'm a music guy, if that's what I'm gonna do, then I better find a way to support my family with music because I don't know what the hell else I'd be able to do. I know I can write a song, so let me get in with some writers. Let me try to get some cuts.”

And it didn't really work out. I had a hard time letting go of my own … I don't know what it is … my own method. I couldn't just say, “It's for the money. It's worth it.” I was never able to go to the point where I said, “Yeah, this song is worth barely being able to sleep at night.” [Laughs]

[Laughs] Well, it's putting a price tag on your soul, right?

Yeah, it really felt like it. I think, at the end of the day, I found that there were a few songs that really impacted me with some of these writers who I'd met in town. And they made the record. They were close to being cut by other, larger artists in Nashville who passed on them and I was like, “You know what? Then I'm going to do it because this feels like my song.” So there are a few of those cuts on there.

The rest of the record, I wrote myself, which I hadn't done 70 or 80 percent of a record on my own for seven or eight years, so that was part of letting go of the songwriting process that I was referencing. After driving into Nashville from Franklin every day from, essentially, 9 to 5, coming home to dinner after writing a pop-country song or whatever it was, it becomes this occupation, this lackadaisical, mediocre endeavor, if you let it.

At some point in that process, it became that. It became very mediocre, very uninspired, and I realized that I needed to stop and stay at home for a minute and not try to go get cuts and write my own songs. I had to figure out how to write my own songs again, by myself without another writer. It sounds crazy, but I needed to. I became too reliant on the process where the goal is just to finish a song a day. That was a very convoluted perspective to develop and I felt like, “Man, I don't know how I lost my way on this one.” So I took a step back, stayed home, and … I don't know what song it was, but it just broke open the floodgates. I was so proud that I could write a song that I could feel something about, that I wanted to showcase and go play. That's what happened, as far as writing was concerned.

Got it. “You Can Have Mine” … it might be my favorite cut. I'm not sure. There's some competition there.

Ohhhh, wonderful!

It reminds me of that old parable of a friend jumping down in a hole with someone because they know the way out. So I wonder if that is that a role you've played for someone … or had someone play for you? Or if music plays that role for you?

You know what? A little bit of everything. That's one of those songs. Two of these songs are written with a wonderful writer named Emily Wright — “You Can Have Mine” and “Call Me When You Get There.” There was a stretch of a few weeks when we were getting together and writing a bunch. It was a wonderful connection, as far as writing was concerned. We saw things in a similar way. Both of those songs kind of just shot right out and felt really great right away.

“You Can Have Mine” — the title just popped into my head and we just started writing it. So I don't know where it came from, specifically, but it came out of something. It definitely came from experience. At that time, either myself or my wife was battling a pretty heavy bout of stock seasonal depression, I think. Which, living down here, as you know, can be very impactful when January, February come around and money's running low and you're feeling tired and estranged from any feeling of inspiration and kind of a little lost or down. That's something my wife and I, and probably most people, go through — just feeling like you've got someone there to go through it with you, you have somebody to call or go home to or get up for the next day. That's something that I don't think I address as often as I should, these bouts of depression that I feel or that my wife feels.

It is something you explore, though, on this record.

Absolutely.

Like on “Only Gets Darker.” For you, it's not a passive state with a big “Time Heals” light at the end of the tunnel. You have to be an active participant in your own healing, right?

Yes. Yes. That was how I felt about it, and still feel about it. This is a long life. Just because I've been sober for five-plus years doesn't mean that's it. [Laughs] It's a constant struggle for anyone to get out of their own way, essentially. That's the battle every day that I feel I'm fighting. It's not just booze or whatever. It's anything. Just trying to move yourself out of your own way and find a way to appreciate the moment that you have, what's happening around and in front of you, people who love you, people you love. That's a challenge. It's easier to see the things you're not getting or that aren't being given to you.

That song, in particular, I never felt as if … and this is just my perspective, everyone feels differently … but my experience is, seeing yourself out of a dark place or having a hand to help you like in “You Can Have Mine,” that feels like the only way. Not only is it empowering to give you confidence for the next time, but it also just feels like the truth. I mean, I've never just woken up one day and said, “Oh, shit. I feel better.” [Laughs] It's a conscious effort. It's a thought process. It's your actions. It's your choices that help you wind up in a better place, mentally and emotionally. But I don't know. That's just me.

 

For another folk-country songwriter's perspective, read Kelly's interview with Lori McKenna.

Photo credit: Justin Clough

Traveler: Your Guide to Unique Music Museums

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When it comes to visiting music museums, there are the usual suspects: The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, the Grammy Museum, and the International Bluegrass Music Museum. While they are definitely fine institutions, there are also a number of lesser-known collections that are slightly off the beaten path but worth discovering.

Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center

Photo courtesy of the Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center

Though Pampa is a small town in the Texas Panhandle, far from the state’s music centers, it holds an important spot in American music history because it is the place that Woody Guthrie moved to as a teenager and where he got in his first guitar. In 1991, several community leaders created the Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center, which is located in the old Harris Drug Store where Guthrie worked as a youth. While not as fancy as Tulsa’s recently opened Woody Guthrie Center, Pampa’s museum — currently open by appointment only — has a homespun charm that reflects Guthrie’s common man values. On display are Guthrie-related newspaper articles, old photos, and even an over-sized version of his “This Guitar Kills Fascists” guitar. Michael Sinks, the Center’s director, says Nora Guthrie is working on an exhibit for them. They also promote Guthrie’s legacy through public song circles on Friday nights and an annual concert in October (to mark Woody’s passing) that cowboy balladeer Don Edwards is headlining this year.

Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center
320 S. Cuyler, Pampa, TX, 79065
Free admission; donations welcome
Open by appointment only. Call 806-664-0824 or email [email protected]

The Bluegrass Bus Museum

Photo courtesy of Danny Clark

After seeing Flatt & Scruggs perform on the Beverly Hillbillies, a young Don Clark became a lifelong bluegrass fan and dreamed about having a Martha White touring bus like Flatt & Scruggs had. After buying a bus like the duo’s, Clark filled it with his various bluegrass and country mementos and created the Bluegrass Bus Museum in the early 1990s. When you step inside the bus, you’ll be walking on vintage Grand Ole Opry carpeting. Clark’s eclectic array of Americana includes Lester Flatt’s old mailbox sign, antique Martha White mic stands, and a Bill Monroe’s stage suit. A centerpiece is the bus door that is covered with autographs from hundreds of musicians. After years of traveling all across America, the aging bus now only hits the road 5-10 times a year around the Nashville area, where Clark and his son Danny now reside. If you want to check out the museum, you can contact Danny through their website to arrange a visit. He is also keeping bluegrass history alive by posting on their YouTube channel a number of archival live performances that his father videotaped at festivals back in the day.

Bluegrass Bus Museum
To make an appointment, email [email protected] or phone 615-497-6731

Fur Peace Ranch

Photo credit: Scotty Hall

Why can you find a treasure trove of memorabilia for Haight-Ashbury’s golden age some 2,000 miles from San Francisco in southeastern Ohio’s rural countryside? Because this is where is Jorma Kaukonen (of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna fame) and his wife Vanessa have their Fur Peace Ranch. Their ranch is best known for its long-running guitar camp and popular concert series, but Jorma and Vanessa decided a few years ago to transform an old silo into a '60s-centric museum named the Psylodelic Gallery as a way to share the many items he saved — along with offering a personal look into that historic era. Kaukonen’s original Fillmore posters adorn the walls. The typewriter heard on his famous bootleg recording with Janis Joplin is on display, as are period outfits like the one his bandmate Jack Casady wore at Woodstock. The gallery also hosts temporary exhibits, with the most recent one presenting Jerry Garcia paintings. If that isn’t enough of a flashback for you, there’s a Brotherhood of Light-designed liquid light show to further enhance the '60s vibe.

Fur Peace Ranch
39495 St. Clair Rd., Pomeroy, Ohio 45769
1 pm – 5 pm, Wednesday-Friday and during concerts
Free admission; donations welcome

Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park

Photo credit: John Fletcher

Way down along the Suwannee River is a natural place to find a memorial to the man who penned the famous lyric: “way down upon the Swanee River.” (He took spelling liberties to suit his melody.) Located about an hour west of Jacksonville, in White Springs, Florida, this museum salutes the Pennsylvania-born songwriter, who apparently never actually visited the Suwannee River. On view are eight original dioramas inspired by Foster’s songs, along with a number of 19th-century pianos, including the one that he played. It’s hard to miss another main attraction — the 97-tubular bell carillon tower that plays Foster’s music throughout the day. The park, which also serves as Florida's official folk culture center, hosts the annual Florida Folk Festival and the Stephen Foster Old-Time Music Weekend. Sadly, the replica paddle steamers no longer travel the river as they once did.

Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center
11016 Lillian Saunders Drive / US HWY 41 North
White Springs, FL 32096
Park is open from 8 am to sunset
Museum and Tower are open 9 am – 5 pm daily
Admission Fee: $5 per vehicle. Limit 2-8 people per vehicle.
$4 Single Occupant Vehicle.
386-397-4331 / 386-397-4408 for tours

U.S. 23 Country Music Highway Museum

Photo courtesy of Paintsville Tourism Commission

While U.S. Route 23 stretches nearly 1,500 miles from Michigan to Florida, it is the 150 or so miles that runs through eastern Kentucky that has contributed so much to the music world that it has been officially named “The Country Music Highway.” Loretta Lynn, Tom T. Hall, Ricky Skaggs, the Judds, Billy Ray Cyrus, Dwight Yoakam, and Chris Stapleton — who have all called this area home — are among those honored at the U.S. 23 Country Music Highway Museum in Paintsville, Kentucky. Each of the 13 inductees have their individual exhibit, displaying personal items, such as a couple of Loretta dresses, a vintage Skaggs guitar, and a pair of Stapleton’s boots. As Paintsville’s executive director of tourism, Jeremiah Parsons, notes, all of these performers haven’t been afraid to be different and create their own unique style. If you visit on a Thursday, stick around for their Front Porch Picking night; maybe some of the region’s musical magic will rub off on you.

US 23 Country Music Highway Museum‬
100 Stave Branch Road, Paintsville, KY 41256
9 am – 5 pm Monday-Saturday; 12:30 pm – 5 pm Sunday
Admission: $4
606-297-1469‬

The Big House

Photo courtesy of the Big House Museum

Mention “The Big House” in Macon, Georgia, and it means only one thing — the place where the Allman Brothers called home in the early ‘70s as they rose to stardom. In 2009, the old Grand Tudor mansion opened as the Allman Brothers Band Museum. Visiting it is like walking through the coolest music-themed house ever. Some rooms, like Duane’s Room and the “Casbah” Music Room, resemble how they looked when the band lived there. The Living Room and Old Dining Room, meanwhile, now present a wealth of Allman artifacts — Where else will you see Cher and Gregg Allman’s pool table? — and the walk-in closet is lined with posters and photos instead of clothes. The “Fillmore East Room,” where the group used to jam, is stocked quite appropriately with their old instruments. There’s even a room that salutes their roadies! Besides its central role in Allman Brothers history, the Big House also is where latter-day Allmans Warren Haynes and Allen Woody lived in 1994 when they put together their own band Gov’t Mule.

The Big House Museum
2321 Vineville Ave, Macon, GA 31204
11 am – 6 pm Thursday through Sunday
Admission: $10 adults, $4 children 3-10
478-741-5551

Lede photo courtesy of the Big House Museum

STREAM: Del McCoury Band, ‘Del and Woody’

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Artist: Del McCoury Band
Hometown: Nashville, TN
Album: Del and Woody
Release Date: April 15
Label: McCoury Music
In Their Words: "We've all heard Woody Guthrie's songs for years, so being asked to put music to his lyrics is a real honor. When I read the lyrics, I knew exactly where Woody was going with the song, so I hope he'd be happy with the final product." — Del McCoury

Lucinda Williams: Every Exit Leaves a Little Death

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The Ghosts of Highway 20 may sound, in title, like it has traces of wanderlust, but the ideas behind the 14 songs on Lucinda Williams’ latest record find their weight in where they come from rather than where they’re going. In many ways, Ghosts is a record that honors Williams’ father, poet Miller Williams, with opening track “Dust” its most obvious but certainly not its only homage. The song is her second re-imagining of one of Miller’s poems, expanding on his composition of the same title after finding success with a similar endeavor on 2014’s “Compassion.”

“[‘Compassion’] was not the first time I’d tried to tackle it. I’d been, for years and years, wanting to take one of his poems and turn it into a song, but I hadn’t been successful at it — it’s really quite challenging,” she says. “When you sit down to do it, you realize the difference between poetry and songwriting. You can’t just take a poem and slap a melody onto it. You have to take the lyrics and rearrange them into something that looks like a song.”

“Dust” is the only track on The Ghosts of Highway 20 that directly stems from the poetry of her father, but the record is filled with glimmers of his influence. “If My Love Could Kill,” a gut-wrenching glimpse into the pain of watching a loved one grapple with Alzheimer’s, directly draws from her father’s battle with the disease. But Ghosts isn’t limited to honoring Lucinda’s roots alone: There are fathers and grandfathers and brothers and sisters whose stories fill the lines of the expansive record, too. Bruce Springsteen’s “Factory,” the record’s lone cover song, finds its meaning in Lucinda’s father-in-law, who spent over three decades working in the factories of Austin, Minnesota.

“First of all, it’s a great song. I love doing it. But, also, it’s sort of a tribute to Tom's [Overby, husband and manager] dad. It’s a short, just really sweet song that’s very concise,” Lucinda explains. “It says so much in so few words. The line that I love is, ‘They walked through the gates with death in their eyes.’ I remember Tom saying to me, ‘I’ve seen that. I saw the men walking out of the factory. I could have been one of them.’”

It’s a haunting image, and one that isn’t a far cry from the fire-and-brimstone billboards and desolate stretches of road that set the tone for the entirety of the record. “Every question and every breath, every exit leaves a little death,” she sings on the album’s title track. Highway 20 weaves its way through many of the towns in the South that have held memories for Williams, so much so that the fascination with its reach began when she was naming her label, Highway 20 Records.

“I was looking at this map — I think Tom and I were talking about different towns in the South — and I saw Highway 20 and all the towns that it was running through,” she says. “It runs through all these towns where I grew up. My brother was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi. My sister was born in Jackson. I started school in Macon. Monroe, Louisiana — it also runs all the way through there.”

The exits that dot I-20 played host to some of the more formative experiences in Williams’ life, from growing up to experiencing music and, later, finding familiarity amidst a life of back-to-back shows and endless touring.

“I went back to play in Macon, Georgia, a few years ago at the old Cox Theatre in downtown Macon, which is one of the first places the Allman Brothers got started,” says Williams. “It’s this really cool little theatre. I hadn’t been to Macon, been back there, in however long, and I remember it amazed me how little had changed. It’s one of those Southern towns that, unlike places like Nashville that are kind of ‘boom’ towns right now, one of these towns you go back and hardly anything’s changed.”

Williams started elementary school in the small Georgia city and, even in those early years, her father was exposing her to art and music in its natural environment.

“One of the reasons it’s so significant for me is that I remember my dad taking me to downtown Macon to see, back then, this blues — gospel blues — blind preacher street singer guy named Blind Curly Brown. He never got real well-known or anything,” she says. “Needless to say, that was a significant moment because there I was, six years old, listening — that’s seeping into my little six-year-old mind.”

Williams tagged along with her father often during that time period, even chasing peacocks on the estate of his great mentor and friend Flannery O’Connor and, ultimately, finding O’Connor’s work to be a jumping-off point for her own. Songs from throughout her career — the vivid, dark imagery on 2003’s “Atonement” or the symbolism in 1998’s “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten — exemplify the way Williams’ art was informed by the classic Southern writer. On Ghosts, this reveals itself in tracks like “Louisiana Story,” a tale of abuse masked in Southern idioms. Meanwhile, “House of Earth,” a song with borrowed lyrics from Woody Guthrie, continues Williams’ tribute to her influences in a tangible way without sacrificing her own distinct voice.

“I was actually sent those lyrics,” remembers Williams. “[Nora Guthrie] sent me the lyrics to [“House of Earth”]. She said, ‘You know, the lyrics are not your average Woody Guthrie lyrics, and I thought of you when I was trying to think of who might want to try to put music to them. I thought, if anyone can do it, you would be the one to do it.' So I read them, and at first I went, 'Wow.' Especially for that time — it was written in the ‘40s — it’s basically about him visiting a prostitute. It’s pretty liberal thinking, especially for that day.”

Nora was right, though: If anyone was up for the challenge, it was Williams, who went on to perform the provocative number at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. before eventually recording it for The Ghosts of Highway 20.

“One of the things my dad taught me as a writer was to never censor yourself,” says Williams. “I’ve always been a rebel at heart, so I think I like to push people’s buttons a little. I like to make people think, like any good artist does, I think, whether it be a painter or a songwriter. I think it’s good to make people go, 'Wow, what was that?'”

The Ghosts of Highway 20 was largely recorded along with songs from Williams’ last record, 2014’s Where the Spirit Meets the Bone. Working with the intention of releasing it via her own label — and producing the record with her trusted team at the helm — helped her to solidify which songs were a fit for the unconventionally long record.

“I feel secure,” she says. “It makes me feel secure if I’m working with people I trust, and I think that’s the bottom line.”

Williams’ tranformative work on songs like “Dust” or “House of Earth” makes for its own road map of the way art can reimagine itself, paving a formidable road for artists of a new generation to look back on her work for their own cues. In many ways, Lucinda Williams’ creative output mimics the unwieldy stretch of road that’s borne witness to it; like an expansive Southern highway, the best records are never really finished being explored.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WOODY!

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‘This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ours, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.’

(Written by Guthrie in the late 1930s on a songbook distributed to listeners of his L.A. radio show ‘Woody and Lefty Lou’)
 

Today marks the 100th birthday of Woody Guthrie – a man to whom the folk/Americana community owes a great debt. Guthrie’s songs represented those who could not be heard otherwise, and gave voice to citizens who were not content with the status quo.  His legacy lies in lyrics which transcend time itself and are just as relevant today as they were when they were penned.

Southern California was a special place for Woody, having lived in Echo Park from 1939-1941, just east of Dodger Stadium and Elysian Park.  It seems only fitting that Los Angeles celebrates one of its favorite residents with one hell of a party. Events are scheduled throughout the city to mark Guthrie’s centennial, including tomorrow’s celebration at the Grand Ole Echo (behind the Echoplex).

We’ll leave you today with a video of our good friends The Farewell Drifters covering one of Guthrie’s classics — ‘California Stars’.  The Nashville-based Drifters will return to LA for their second appearance next week, July 27 at McCabes Guitar Shop.  Tickets are available here: http://www.mccabes.com/condata.html

So thank you, Woody. You’ve inspired countless generations and even after a hundred years, your guitar still kills Fascists.

Woody Guthrie Festival at Santa Monica’s Broad Stage

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Who’s attending the LA Acoustic Music Festival’s  event, IN THE SPIRIT OF WOODY GUTHRIE on Sunday??

Looks to be an awesome day filled with music and food in and around The Broad Stage (11th and Arizona, Santa Monica).  The festival begins at noon, and the first two shows are FREE!

Here’s the schedule:

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2011

NOON – Festival begins on Plaza
2pm – Joel Rafael presentation (FREE! Admission limited to first 120 patrons)
3pm – Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion (FREE!)
4pm – Jimmy LaFave
5pm – Ellis Paul
5:45pm – Eliza Gilkyson
7pm – Ribbon of Highway

Festival tickets and more information can be found here.

Hope to see you around this weekend!  (And if you do go to a show, tell me what you think!)