>> From the library of Congress in Washington, DC. >> Steve Winick: Welcome, it's September 12th, 2018. We're here at the Library of Congress. My name is Steve Winick. I'm the editor in the American Folklife Center, and I'm here with our guest John McCutcheon, and John is going to be performing a concert tonight in the Coolidge Auditorium, and in the meantime, we're going to ask him some great questions about his life and his career. >> John McCutcheon: Great, let's go. >> Steve Winick: So, John, let's begin with the sort of typical question, your early life and how you got interested in all this music stuff? >> John McCutcheon: Well, I was born and raised in Northern Wisconsin, a little town called Wausau, Wisconsin and was interested in music in general the way young kids are, but the seminal moment happened actually not far from here. I wasn't there, but my mother, when I was 11 years old, was watching television in the middle of the day, and my mother didn't watch television, period. And, here she was in the middle of the day -- who know there was television in the middle of the day, and she said, "Come over here and watch this with me." And, I was the eldest of her nine children, so I was the -- and my father was a traveling salesman, so I was the closest to adult companionship that she had, and what she was watching was the March on Washington. And, it was, as you probably know, the first thing in our nation's history broadcast live on every channel, which at that time meant three. And, it was an astonishing thing to watch, and the takeaway of that for me, it was my introduction to folk music. I'd never heard of folk music before, and there was John Baos [assumed spelling], Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul and Mary singing, what my mother told me were folk songs. And, I recognized them, because they were all original songs that they sang. Well, there was Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson, which was a religious experience for a kid from Wisconsin. But, I recognized this music as something that was deep and potent, but also something that was connected to contemporary issues as well, this being the most contemporary issue. It was on the news every night, and my best friend was watching at the same time, and we -- the next day we saw one another. I said, "Did you see that? What was that," and we started talking about this music that we knew nothing about, but that had really moved us. And, we started listening to it. It was at a time -- this was 1963. You could hear folk music on the radio. It was on television, and it was -- I immediately went through the sort of more rustic sound. I mean, a few years later I got a guitar, because my best friend got a guitar for his birthday, and I went down to the library, and the only book in the library that could teach me guitar chords was Woody Guthrie folk songs. And, I didn't know who Woody Guthrie was. I was 14, and I'd sung a song from school. Every American kid grows up singing Woody Guthrie songs, but they never tell you who writes those songs. So, I opened it up, and here's a page of chord grids. I thought, "Great, I know what these are," and here's a whole bunch of songs. And, so my first real heavy duty exposure to learning this music was Woody Guthrie, who was firmly planted in traditional roots, built his writing firmly on those roots, and what it meant is I completely missed the sort of button-down collegiate of folk music. I didn't know for five more years, for instance, that the Kingston Trio existed. I was right in the flannel shirt and work boot world. It was Woody and from there it was [inaudible] and, you know, somebody gave me a Bob Dylan album, and I could tell what well he drank from. So, it was, you know, it began that crooked road that took me right down into one day saying, "I want to play the banjo." >> Steve Winick: Interesting. So, one of the things that you mentioned that was interesting was that these were all people on TV doing folk music. They were all doing, as you said, original songs. >> John McCutcheon: Original stuff. >> Steve Winick: So, that sort of opens up that question of the connection between traditional folk music and the original songs that are called folk songs by a lot of Americans. What's your take on that? >> John McCutcheon: Well, I was -- I fell prey to that as well. I mean, I knew that this was somehow, you know, when Pete Seeger sang John Henry, Broadside, or -- and, then he sang, you know, Who Killed Davey Moore. They were somehow connected. They were built on the same matrix, and so I thought, "Well, I'm going to write songs." Look at this whole -- I finally found out who Woody Guthrie was. "These are all original songs. I'm going to write songs too," and I did, and I wrote really awful songs like you do when you start off. And, they were all the more awful, because of the traditional songs I knew that have been warm, smooth, and beautiful on thousands of tongues before mine, and-- >> Steve Winick: So, they were awful by comparison? >> John McCutcheon: They were awful by themselves. My best friend, the guitar guy who's -- we both started off together, he's got a tape of all those songs, and he claims he's going to go right up on YouTube if we ever have a serious falling out. So, you know, what I did when I got to banjo world, you know, I was going to a little college in Northern Minnesota, Saint John's University, and it was at a time when there were pretty free willing about giving people independent studies. And, I went to my adviser and said, "I want to -- I'm going off the deep end on this banjo thing, and I can tell I'm heading for not being in college anymore, and is there a way we can make this work? Can I get credit? I need to be around banjo players." And, Guy Carawan had come to our college, and I was designated his host, because I was the only kid in college who knew who he was. And, then I met Pete Seeger later on in the year, and both of them said, "You just got to go south. If you want to play the banjo, you got to go down where it's part of the meat and potatoes of people's daily diet." So, I convinced my adviser to let me do a three-month independent study of traveling around the Appalachians. I didn't have a car. I was -- I hitchhiked, and so there I was at the side of the road with a banjo and a backpack, and it was like a free bus ride. You know, people would pick me up, and they'd say, "You play that thing?" And, I learned to say, "I play at it," and they'd say, "Well, play me something." And, we'd be driving along in a truck or something, and I'd take it out and play some and they'd say, "You play that old-style." And, people called it alternately flailing and whacking and knock down, claw hammer, and old time. And, they would say, "Well, yeah, that's like my Uncle Beechert [assumed spelling] plays." And, I'd say, "Well, where does Uncle Beechert live?" And, they'd say, "Well, he's right up here." And, I guess the prospect of seeing two banjo players was enough to derail people's plans for the day. And, then it was, you know, you meet one person, and that one person would say, "Hey, come on over. We're going to have a party." And, eventually, you know, three month into this, three-month independence study I knew I was just figuring out how to do this. Because, you know, you come out of academia, and you -- in a little room, and they -- a professional teacher comes in, armed with a pedagogy that is sequential or whatever, and to the exclusion of everything else you study, you know, late 18th century French literature. And, then you go to another room, and you do something entirely focused and different. With this, it was as about as unacademic as possible. They weren't teachers. They didn't have a pedagogy for me. I just had to -- I had to learn how to learn traditionally. I had to learn how to listen and remember and duplicate and be quiet and pay attention and hang around the fringes. And, I discovered quite later that I was the beneficiary of a cultural phenomenon that I didn't know -- I didn't recognize it in time. I was part of the first generation of kids who grew up in that part of the world who had -- was totally immersed into radio. And, they were -- they had all kinds of stuff coming in, all kinds of music, and the kids of the people that I was just happening upon in general were not interested in learning that music. They wanted to learn this music, the popular stuff, the stuff that would give them, you know, possibilities. And, there was the radio, there were roads, there were jobs in cities elsewhere, and I end up knocking on someone's door unwittingly saying, "I'm from a 1000 miles away, and I'd like to learn this music." So, I became the unwitting beneficiary of this cultural phenomena, and, you know, it didn't take me long to fall in love with everything about the region, the people, the music, the land, the stuff that was just percolating up in every -- you know, whether it be the reform of the mine workers union or a popular protest against strip mining. What they call them [inaudible], land rights issues, you know, water issues, and every little community seemed to have this kind of stuff. So, there was a lot of energy. I thought I was going down to learn how to play the banjo, but what I found was the most interesting thing, and it's been my study, since that time, is how music functions in -- as a fundamental rather than an ornamental part of community life. That's what was really interesting to me. And, if I learned some fiddle or [inaudible] or a story or a song or a dance or a hymn at the same time, wonderful, but if I walked away and just got to go to a pie supper or go to an old regular Baptist meeting or whatever. It was a treat. >> Steve Winick: Great. So, were you recording all of this at the time or? >> John McCutcheon: At first, at the very first I wasn't, and then as I started to accumulate contacts and context, I realized that I should get some of this down. I became friends with the people at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and they had good recording equipment [inaudible] boxes and stuff like that, that I was able to -- and, I contacted the Folklife Center. Joe Hickerson was the head archivist at the time, and he and I have been -- we're still friends. I still see him every time I go to Portland, but they arranged to give me free reel-to-reel tape, and so I started off doing it that way. I got really dissatisfied with reel-to-reel tape, and I remember Mike Seeger and I would have lots of discussions about high-quality cassette recordings, just because it wasn't -- it was less intrusive. You could do more. It could be longer, and I can't tell you how many times I would watch someone singing or playing something, and they're watching the reels go around. And, it just felt like it was altering the whole atmosphere, and I was all about, you know, I was really reluctant to, you know, it was sort of like asking someone if I could kiss their daughter. Excuse me, I know we've, you know, I think I put my time in now. One funny story. One of the traditional musicians that I was the closest to was a fellow named Isaac David Stamper, ID Stamper. Just the most stunning mountain [inaudible] player I've ever met, of blues mountain [inaudible] player, originally from Searcy, Arkansas, but his family moved up to Letcher County, Kentucky, and I met him at a festival, and we agreed to meet at his house. So, I went to his house, and after I was there for about three hours, I said, "Mr. Stamper, you know, my memory is just not that good, and I really love your music, and would you mind if I went out to my car and brought in my tape recorder and tape some of your stuff? I'll be happy to make a copy for you and your family." And, he said, "I'm so glad you asked. Can I tape some of your music as well?" >> Steve Winick: That's a nice outcome. >> John McCutcheon: Yeah, it's better than some that's been around there. I've heard lots of stories over the years. Somebody taped me, and made a record, and made a million dollars off it, and there was no way of dissuading people of that. So, I was hesitant to do it. A part of it was the immediacy, but I also knew that I was given incredible intimate access to this stuff, and for the longest time I believed, like a lot of people did and some do, that this is dying out. That wasn't my experience at all, and it was vibrant and evolving, and it's sort of like, "Can I tape you?" you know? You know, I didn't meet people who wanted me to be a human tape recorder, mimicking what they played. These were musicians. They were interested in being musicians. They wanted to see, well, how do you play? You know, let's play something together. No, I don't care if you can play just like me, you know, and that's what I tried to do at first, and I -- but I was young, stupid, and I'd learned, and now I'm old and stupid. >> Steve Winick: Well, your recordings of ID Stamper are here in the library. There's copies of them, and within that collection we also have some other interesting folks that you interacted with and recorded at that time. And, I wonder if you mind telling us a little bit about some of them, starting with Peanut Cantrell. >> John McCutcheon: Peanut Cantrell was from McMinnville, Tennessee. He was one of the very few hammer dulcimer players in the south, and as a hammer -- you know, when I got to -- when someone gave me a hammer dulcimer it was -- she built it. And, she said, "Here, I just wanted to build it. I don't want to play it. You play a lot of instruments. You could probably play this." And, I started to, but I felt really ungrounded, because of all the instruments I played, I had really sought out people who'd played all their lives. I felt like they gave a kind of, you know, gravity and depth that I didn't find. And, I couldn't afford to take lessons, but when it came to the hammer dulcimer, I couldn't find anybody who was a traditional player. I went up to West Virginia and met with Russell Fluharty and Worley Gardner was up in the Morgantown area. And, I never made it up to meet Chet Parker up in Michigan. So, I happened to be out at some fiddle convention in McMinnville, and I decided I was going to get up on stage and play the hammer dulcimer. And, somebody came over to me and said, "You know Peanut Cantrell?" And, so I went over to his house. It was the only time we met. He died shortly thereafter, but it was so exciting for me, because by this time I'd actually been to Europe and traveled around and found hammer dulcimer type players over there to find someone with an American repertoire. And, Peanut was a perfect name for him, little short guy and lovely man. >> Steve Winick: So, how did he play? I mean-- >> John McCutcheon: It was very simple type stuff. I mean, I approached the dulcimer as a drum, because I got sticks in my hand, and all of a sudden, I was eight years old, you know, beating on the table with pencils. So, I was -- you know, one of the things I'm so grateful for is that I went into this whole experiment with a completely open slate. I didn't, you know, when I went south, you know, I was raised on the Beverly Hillbillies, Little Abner, and Snuffy Smith, and all that crap just like everybody else. But, luckily, somehow I didn't believe any of it, and everything was information. So, with Peanut, it was -- I had no preconceptions of what he was going to do. It was just like, "Let's go. Let's play," but it was -- you know, I have less -- I have fewer recordings of him than I would've liked, but I was really grateful that I had an opportunity to see him. >> Steve Winick: And, it's rare that anyone recorded a traditional hammer dulcimer playing in the south anyway. So, it's great that you did get those recordings, yeah. >> John McCutcheon: Well, if you're -- I mean, that's one of the -- it's sort of like being that 20-year-old kid with the banjo and a backpack. I had a signal out there. This is what I do. So, when someone saw me play the hammer dulcimer -- I mean, the first time I ever played the dulcimer, I was at [inaudible] Mountain Music and Dance Festival in Asheville. And, I was playing some tunes, and I'd been playing for 24 hours, but I knew how to find fiddle tunes on it. And, this woman said, "I've never seen anybody play the [inaudible] before." So, it was a pretty unusual instrument. So, when I did, people would come up and say, you know about so and so. >> Steve Winick: Right. Great. Well, another person in that collection is Cas Wallin, who is kind of better known I suppose, but what was your experience with [inaudible]? >> John McCutcheon: I stumbled into Sodom Laurel. There are the three Laurels, Shelton Laurel, Sodom Laurel, and Big Laurel, up in Madison County, North Carolina. Many years ago, the Morris Brothers from West Virginia, John and David Morris, got a grant from the Ford Foundation to put on some community festivals around the Appalachian south, and one of them was in Sodom, and I heard about it. I was probably 20-21 years old, and I had heard some of the Folkways Records of people like Dillard Chandler, and I -- so, I went up to this festival, and it was, you know, Sodom was properly named. I mean, there was a shooting, and a knifing, and people would come around, and say, "Stay in your tents." But, the music was just fantastic, and Cas, again, was a short fellow, very expressive, and he would plant himself when he would sing. And, he would motion with his arms, you know, "Where will I shelter my sheep tonight," and he had that very adenoidal kind of voice and just an incredible repertoire and a wicked sense of humor, once you got to know him. And, his wife would talk the entire time that he was singing, which is memorialized in the collection. But, he sang old ballads, and he was part of that whole Dellie Norton, Dillard Chandler, Obrey Ramsey group up there that -- and, Sheila Kay Adams, by extension, who was Dellie Norton's granddaughter, and who I met that weekend. We're -- Sheila Kay and I are about the same age, and we were both young, you know, banjo struck young people, who just wanted to eat, breathe, and play traditional music. And, I remember we sat out most of that evening, and then she took me up to see Dellie, who I think is the unsung star of that whole clan up there. I mean, her singing is just some of my favorite in the world. But, Cas -- I'm going to be singing some of Cas's stuff tonight, yeah. >> Steve Winick: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I think Sheila would agree with you too about Dellie. She talks about her. So, one more person in that collection is sort of a separate tradition, Michael Kennedy. >> John McCutcheon: I met Michael Kennedy through my friend Malcolm Delvish [assumed spelling], who was a beautiful hammer dulcimer player. He was -- when I started playing, I was living in the Knoxville area, and Malcolm was living in the Cincinnati area. And, because there weren't very many hammer dulcimer players in the world at that time, we glommed on to one another and just burned up I-75 going back and forth between Knoxville and Cincinnati, almost every weekend if we could. And, Malcolm was particularly taken with Irish traditional music, and he met this fellow, Michael J. Kennedy, who was a melodeon player, an Irish national immigrant to this country, and he was living in Covington, Kentucky, which is right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. And, he would take -- and, he and his musical partner, Grey Larsen, would -- excuse me, I just hit the mic. He and his musical partner, Grey Larsen, would take me over to Michael Kennedy's house, and I had, by that time, started to organize some of my field recordings into albums for June Apple Records, which was a, you know, a nascent record company that was a division of Apple Shop. And, had gotten a small grant from the National Endowment for the Arts where Alan Jabbour was the head of -- what was it called -- Folkarts or something like -- but, it was something even more broad earlier on. And, I'd gotten a small grant to put some recordings together and organize them into LPs, and so I got together with -- at a radio station in Cincinnati -- with Michael. And, he wanted to do it very formerly. You probably, you know, people who listened to it, you know, he would announce what he was going -- "This is this tune." And, then he would play it, and he wanted people to clap at the end, which was problematic, because after two or three hours they were sort of like. And, I'm running the tape recorder, clapping like, "Come on guys. Be a little more enthusiastic." And, there's four of us in the room, so. But, he was a lovely man, and he died -- when did he die? But, I remember I was passing through, and he was in a hospice -- in a hospital, and I went -- Malcolm and I went by and played him some tunes that would turn out to be the night before he died, and Michael Malcolm called me the next day to tell me, and I thought, "I hope that's my fate." That some of my musical friends will come in and play something at my bedside. He was a beautiful man. He looked -- you know, it's funny I saw his picture the other day, and I never asked him if he actually got a gig as Santa Claus, but he certainly had that look. >> Steve Winick: Excellent. So, I mean, yeah, it's interesting, because you've mentioned before that these traditions, although we might have thought at one point they were dying out, they aren't really. >> John McCutcheon: No, no. >> Steve Winick: But, the individual people that you meet and record. They pass on, and so-- >> John McCutcheon: As we all do and will, yeah, and so there was a period of time when I got much more aggressive. Not aggressive, I got much more -- spent a lot more time doing field work and trying to figure out how to do it better all the time. I mentioned that Mike Seeger and I worked, you know, there was a period of time for years where we were both, you know, really trying to -- we were experimenting with different high-end cassette recorders, which seems like an oxymoron. But, there were actually some -- Nakamichi had a three channel -- it was a stereo and a mono, and I have some beautiful recordings, which I'll be sending up to the library, of this banjo players Will Keyes [assumed spelling] from Upper East Tennessee, from Gray, Tennessee, and he played in such a way -- he lost one of his -- he lost the tip of his index finger in a sawmill accident. And, he, as a child -- so, he learned to play the banjo in this very unusual two-finger style where he could play all five strings with his index finger, because it was short relative to what his thumb was. And, he sort of held the banjo out here. So, the Nakamichi, for instance, allowed me to do a stereo micing and then put the third mono mic actually in -- point it in the back of the banjo, and it's the most -- it's my favorite banjo recording I've ever heard, because it's dull. You're really inside the banjo, and for someone who plays it's sort of like someone who plays the autoharp. They get to hear this orchestral sound, and to everybody out in front it's sort of [imitating strumming]. So, and then, of course, DAB machines came and it's funny. I remember I was in -- I was thinking of this today, knowing that we were going to talk. I happened to be coming back from Nicaragua where I had been doing a bunch of field recording. This is in 1980, mid-80s, and I was waiting in baggage claim, and up walks Flawn Williams, an old friend of mine, who at that time was working at NPR. And, he's saying, "So, where have you been?" So, I've just come back from three weeks in Nicaragua. I'm waiting for my suitcases of tapes. He said, "Yes, I just went off for NPR to Vietnam, and I've got a 100 hours." And, I said, "I do too. Mine is in three suitcases." And, he said, "Mine is in the shoe box under my arm here." And, I said, "What?" He says, "It's this new technology, a little tiny DAB machine." So, of course, I went out and got one, and it changed everything. It -- I mean, it was -- didn't have the hiss of a cassette, and again, it was even smaller than the smallest cassette machine. And, it just made the recording experience for everybody much less obvious, which is what you want. >> Steve Winick: Right. And, now, of course, the media size is negligible compared even to the equipment. I mean, everything's so small, yeah. Yeah. >> John McCutcheon: Yeah, and -- but, back then, it was the Wild West. I'm really grateful that I had access and [inaudible] studios here in the area. Bill McCaroy [assumed spelling] had a Nagra that I would rent from time to time. So, I mean, I was grateful I had access, because there was a period of time I had a wallet sack. >> Steve Winick: Right. >> John McCutcheon: You know, big bear of a thing, and it was like you were moving a television into somebody's house. >> Steve Winick: And, the funny thing is they called those things portable, because they had handles on them. >> John McCutcheon: Yes. >> Steve Winick: But, yeah. >> John McCutcheon: Well, you know, it's sort of like what's, you know, the original laptop computers where-- >> Steve Winick: Right. >> John McCutcheon: Filled your whole lap. >> Steve Winick: Yeah. Yeah, great. So, well we've talked about a couple of the instruments you play, but the hammer dulcimer kind of stands out being an unusual instrument, but also people consider you a master of this instrument. So, you talked about your beginnings with the instrument, but how did you get further involved? >> John McCutcheon: I had a girlfriend who took an instrument building class up in [inaudible] West Virginia, and I went up to visit her at the end of this class, and she had built this thing called a hammer dulcimer. I'd heard about it. I'd seen Guy Carawan play it and that was the -- you know, I never thought I wanted to play it. But, she said, "Here, I have this thing that I've built, and I just -- I've accomplished my goal. Why don't you," -- and, my birthday was nearby, and she said, "Here, happy birthday." >> Steve Winick: That was nice, and what was her name? >> John McCutcheon: Jude Odell [assumed spellings], and she is a wonderful banjo player who lives up in -- and jeweler who lives up in Indianapolis. And, it's, you know, there are many different tunings, but the tuning that has sort of become dominant in American music now is very logical, and it was diatonically set up, and I was primarily a fiddle player at that time. It happens, you know, banjo players discover the fiddle, and then they are -- they fall into the rabbit hole of the haired bow. And, so I was just playing fiddle. So, I had an encyclopedia of fiddle themes in my head, and I just started pecking them out, and, "Okay I know how this works," plus you can do rolls, and when I was a kid, I wanted to play the drums. And, so this was like the close -- it was a string drum, and so what I did, as far developing my playing on it, I mostly played fiddle tunes, but I was different from most other hammered dulcimer players that I was meeting. And, they included people like Sam Rizzetta and Paul Reisler who played with Sam in the group Trapezoid and Malcolm. Different people who were all parts of ensembles. They had some kind of chordal foundation upon which they were playing, and it effected how they plaid. I was a soloist. I wasn't going to be in a band. I didn't want to be in a band. It was nice and mobile and portable, and it worked for me. So, I had to figure out how to create some kind of harmonic foundation upon which to play, and it really -- so, I was playing these tunes, and then trying to create an accompaniment at the same time or at least an arrangement that didn't make people say, "Well, that'd be pretty good if he had a guitar player with him or something." But, I was also looking for those traditional players, and I was frustrated enough that I knew of a fellow named David Kettlewell who had done a book called, "All the Tunes That Ever There Were," which was a little mimeographed thing I got from Andy Spence [assumed spelling]. Talked about a bunch of dulcimer players throughout England and Ireland. So, I said, "I have the same feeling as when I open that, you know, Mountain Music of East Kentucky album that came into our college library." There was a picture of Roscoe Holcomb on the front, and inside was directions. You know, here's where these people live, and I thought, "Okay, I'm going. I want to have some kind of traditional foundation for my playing." So, I went over and met Bill Fell [assumed spelling] and Billy Bennington, and the absolute star was Jimmy Cooper. Just the most astonishingly versatile player. He played on streets as a young man and just played all the kinds of tunes that you would expect a traditional Scottish player to play. [Inaudible] and [inaudible] and hornpipes and jigs and reels, but he also played Cha Chas and old parlor songs and accompanied singing, and it was like opening up a whole world, because prior to that it had been fiddle tunes. Then, I started with ragtime piano pieces. >> Steve Winick: There's a certain logic to that. >> John McCutcheon: Yes, and then in the mid-70s, I discovered [inaudible] Caroline, and said, "Okay, well, I'm going to take harp music," which, again, there's a kind of logic to this, but I came back, and this is 1977, when I met Jimmy. I came back, and I was playing at the Buffalo Folk Festival, and my -- I didn't know my life was about to change. I was doing a hammered dulcimer workshop, and this young woman came up to me and said, "You know, my dad plays the dulcimer." I said, "Really?" She says, "Yeah, my dad and his two brothers and my great-grandfather and, yeah, so it's a tradition in our family." And, I said, "I would love to meet your father." And, she said, "I bet he'd like to meet you." And, so the day after the festival I went over to her house, and there sat Paul [inaudible], and he changed everything. I mean, not only did he become one of my dear friends, but he was a guy who was the most musical dulcimer player I've ever met. He loved to play. In fact, I walked in, and there he was, sitting behind his dulcimer with his hammers in his hand, you know, like, "Come on. I don't want to know about your family. I don't want to make small talk. Let's just play." And, he made everything he played sound like it was written for the dulcimer, and it was like a light going off, and I thought, "This is what American hammer dulcimer music is." And, he just passed away in March. >> Stephen Winick: March, yeah. >> John McCutcheon: And, he -- at 97, and at 97 he was still the best hammer dulcimer I've ever heard. He'd -- and, he got more adventurous the older he got. When I met him, he was playing a dulcimer that his grandfather had built, and it was a fifth across the treble bridge, and then like the Michigan players an octave from the right-hand side of the treble bridge to the bass bridge. And, it was a really funky instrument. And, it was held together with bailing wire and scotch tape, and he was very interested in my Rizzetta instrument, because it was chromatic, and eventually had dampers on it, and it was light, and it stayed in tune well, and so he ordered a Rizzetta instrument. And, Sam tweaked it here and there to make it even more chromatic, and then he was off to the races. Whenever you saw Paul after that, he was playing the most wild chromatic -- you know, let's substitute this B flat chord here for this, you know. And, so he was really adventurous, loved music, loved musicians, and he was just -- I don't know what my playing would have been like, and he was learning new tunes. >> Stephen Winick: Was he trained as a musician? I mean, like reading music and all that? >> John McCutcheon: No, not at all. He learned to play from his maternal grandfather, a fellow by the name of Jesse Martin [assumed spelling], who was a professional hammer dulcimer player. He played in movie houses. >> Stephen Winick: In that Henry Ford era when-- >> John McCutcheon: He won the audition to be Henry Ford's hammer dulcimer player, but he -- but, Henry Ford, very famously, was a [inaudible], and Jesse Martin, very famously, was not. So, he won the audition, but never played, but -- so when he -- he played in movie houses, while they were changing the reels, and, you know, and people who know what I'm talking about are officially old. And, then in his retirement he moved in with his daughter and taught his grandsons, Phil, Paul, and Sterl [assumed spelling], and Sterl was a fixture and sort of the -- he played fiddle and dulcimer in the sort of western New York Bluegrass and folk music world. Phil, who built dulcimers, moved to Arkansas, and I actually have one of his dulcimers built after his grandfather's design, and Paul lived in [inaudible]. Paul was a tool grinder for [inaudible] craft by trade, and then when he -- it's funny. I was just playing at the Wheat Lands Music Festival up at -- near Traverse City, Michigan this last weekend. And, some people came up to me, while I was there, saying, "I remember when Paul [inaudible], and you would come to the Everett, you know, old time music at the hammer dulcimer convention, and Paul would be the first one up and the last one to bed." He would wear everybody out in the jam sessions, and I attended several [inaudible] family reunions where I got to hear the three brothers play together which was just angelic. >> Stephen Winick: Amazing. >> John McCutcheon: Yeah. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. So, in addition to playing all these instruments you're also a well-known songwriter, and I wanted to ask you about writing for different instruments. I mean, do you write a song for a particular instrument or what's your writing process like? >> John McCutcheon: I tend to -- the two instruments I write the most for -- on are guitar and piano, and I switch back and forth, and sometimes, in the middle of writing of something when I'll just say, you know, "I want to have," -- the guitar for me is very blockish, the way it's all set up, and the piano is very linear. And, it's all about voice. But, everyone now and again, you know, I'll be writing something, and I'll say, "This is a banjo piece." And, to me all these instruments are absolutely related. I mean, number one I started playing all these instruments, because I would be at some banjo player's house, and a fiddle player would be there, and we would have the same vocabulary. And, I remember the first time I ever played a fiddle I was at a square dance in Benfield, Tennessee, and the fiddle player didn't show up. And, I was used to playing the banjo, and somebody there had a fiddle, said, "Here, you can play this." And, I said, "No, I can't." They said, "Well, the dance is 20 minutes long. You know what the notes are. By the end of this 20 minutes I'll bet you'll be playing it." And, they were right. I could play really badly this particular tune by the end of it. So, it was -- and, so then you realize, well, this is the same fingering as the mandolin, and a lot of it was just you're using -- you're doing this with one hand and something completely unrelated with the other. So, once you get this tapping your head and rubbing your belly. All that is to say that I look at these as having a great, big, really expensive tool box, and when I'm writing something, sometimes I will write it on the guitar and I'll say, "No, no, it doesn't belong there." Or, what would it be like? How would this change? And, sometimes it's an atmospheric thing. A banjo gives it a different -- Wade Ward, one of my favorite musicians from down in Independence, Virginia had this beautiful way of talking about musical terminology, and he would call -- when you wanted to play in the key of A, he'd say, "Let's get up in that high atmosphere." And, I always thought that's such a beautiful way of talking about keys and the different voices of, you know -- whether I'm writing in a voice, you know, I'm going to be a 14-year-old Native American girl, or whether I'm going to say I'm going to give this piece an atmosphere by singing it with the fiddle. You know, it -- sometimes, it happens right from the beginning, and sometimes it's saying, well, let's try on another suit of clothes and see what it looks like. >> Stephen Winick: So, in your song writing -- I mean, you've mentioned Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger as two influences. Are they influences on the songwriting part of your life as well? >> John McCutcheon: Woody, certainly, because in that book -- this was a book that I thought was a guitar instruction book. I mean, that's how little I knew about Woody Guthrie, and it as was a -- and, so I thought, "Well, it's an instruction book, so you start in the beginning." And, I went sequentially, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that it was arranged alphabetically. I mean, what are the chances that all the easier songs start with A, but what that meant, that kind of, you know, that's just how they decided to do it. One page was a love song, the next was a kid song, and then there'd be an historical song, and then a topical song, and then a funny song and an angry song. And, it was an introduction to someone who wrote about everything for every possible audience. It wasn't weird to write kid songs directed to kids. It wasn't weird to write a song about a historical event that you knew your listener knew nothing about. Your job was to pay attention and to try to tell the truth. And, so that was huge. I mean, that was -- and to have guts, to be courageous, to be willing to name things, and to give something of -- I mean, I remember one of the very first -- because, it was alphabetical, one of the very first songs in this book was the 1913 Massacre. And, I got to this line that said, "I'll take you through a door and up a tall stair." And, man, I was there. It was very, you know, a song as a movie, and I thought that's how I want to write. I want to be that cinematic and take people inside, you know, invite them into these spaces. So, yeah, Woody -- the songwriters that were really powerful for me, as I was starting out, was Jean Ritchie who is such a good songwriter that most people don't know she's a songwriter. >> Stephen Winick: Right, they don't know the songs were hers, right? >> John McCutcheon: Yes, and you hear a song like Cool of the Day, and you -- which, she told me once that she wrote while she was ironing. And, most people don't know that that's not a traditional song. Hazel Dickens, the same thing. I mean, she was thoroughly immersed in traditional music, and so her writing came out of that, and talk about a courageous writer, that song Black Lung. My god. Utah Phillips, again, came out of that school of knowing, you know, about traditional music, using those forms, and having a kind of empathy and compassion that, you know -- I mean, to Utah no one was dispensable. And, so yeah, you'd -- funny thing, why is he singing me this song about this hobo? I don't know anything -- I don't know any hobos. Are there hobos anymore? And, all of a sudden, you couldn't look away, and that was the kind of writing that really inspired, and continues. Bernice Reagon Johnson, just an astonishing songwriter that, again, people don't know. And, she came right out of the church. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and that's another kind of influence that you can detect in your songs. I guess, there's both kind of the sacred heart side of things and the African-American spiritual side, so. >> John McCutcheon: Well, I, you know, I grew up as a Catholic, which has the meagerest singing tradition. I was actually the seminary for a couple of years, and when I decided I was going to leave, I told my mother. I said, "No, I don't think I want to be a priest. I think I'd rather be the choir leader." And, she said, "That's a tougher job at a Catholic church." So, when I came to a place that was, you know, there was this rich musical tradition. And, it was -- I could be completely misspeaking, but I think American folk music is unique or certainly rare in that it includes religious music in music that's considered folk music. And, you know, on one hand I would be sitting with Janette Carter, and she would be singing, "Little Moses," or "The Poor Orphan Child," and the next day I would be attending a regular Baptist service with Roscoe Holcomb. And, everybody somehow knows the melody of this circuitous -- and, someone is lining out the words, and then the next day I would be at an old harp singing, and it was all religious music, completely different stuff. And, the next night I'd see Ralph Stanley And The Clinch Mountain Boys doing, "Oh, Death," or, "Children Go Where I Send Thee," or "Cry From The Cross," or, you know, "Two Coats Lay Before Me." And, it was -- again, I think if you look at the history of political music in this country, the most powerful stuff was the music from the Civil Rights Movement. And, a lot of it was because it had the depth of not only it being traditional based, but spiritually based stuff, which gave it a kind of gravitas that, you know, newly composed stuff just wasn't approaching. >> Stephen Winick: Right. Well, the other sort of great political movement bringing us songs was the Labor Movement, and I know you've worked with both, labor songwriters and labor as a musician. So, let's talk just a little bit about your projects with [inaudible], for example. >> John McCutcheon: Well, Sai [assumed spelling], as the people who are watching this, is a rabbi's son who grew up in State College, Pennsylvania and signed up for SNCC in the very early days of the Civil Rights Movement. He, you know, was a guy who played guitar, but wasn't writing songs, but quickly understood the kind of plane spoken vernacular usage of people's own words. I mean, when you -- when one of the things that I recognize about Sai's music early on, this is back in the days where he denied he was writing, and he would flat-out lie. "No, I didn't," you know? I'd be at a party [inaudible], "Wow, that was a great song. Where did that come from?? He says, "This guy down the road," and eventually, I just drove down to his house in Mineral Bluff, Georgia, and I said, "I want to meet this guy down the road." And, he says, "Well, I wrote it." And, I said, "Well, why aren't you admitting this?" "Well, because everyone is into collecting stuff. Now, and I figured if I said I wrote it, the people wouldn't take it seriously," sort of like J.P. Fraley, who I spent a lot of time with, and he wrote half the tunes he played, but he said -- and he would confide in you. I mean, he's dead now, so I can -- he'd confide, and he'd say, "Well, if I told so and so I wrote that, they wouldn't pay any attention to it, so I tell them that I, you know, collected it from [inaudible], or I learned it from my grandfather." But, Sai is just one of the most prolific and wonderful songwriters in his spare time. We met on a Harlan County picket line on Thanksgiving Day, 1972. He was there working with the Brookside Strike, the subject of Harlan County, USA, the Barbara Kopple Academy-award-winning film, and I was there, because I didn't have a Thanksgiving Day invitation. And, I knew there was a strike, and I figured, okay, well, I'll go up and sing at the picket line. So, I was sitting around a 55 gallon oil drum with a bunch of guys who were wanting to be back at work, and somebody said, "There's a guy who is a banjo player down at the picket line." And, so I showed up. And, he was working for the UMW at the time, and we recognized our mutual love of traditional music and southern music and struck up a partnership that exists to this day, and we started writing songs together in the early 1990s. We did a lot of work together, and we toured together in the early and mid-80s, but we were both singing our own songs at that point. We started writing together, because we're guys, and we had to have an excuse to get together. We'd have to say well, you know, "Yeah, we just like to hang out for a few days, but that would be weird, and we don't hunt. So, why don't we get together and write songs?" And, we found that we worked really well together, because we were compatible and complementary. Sai is a wall and stud guy, and I'm the guy who comes in and does the finish work, and the way we would write is sometimes I would write a whole song, sometimes he would write a whole song. We used the Lennon and McCartney rule, everything that, you know, everybody knows John Lennon had nothing to do with, "Yesterday," but they both -- you know, this is an agreement. But, there were times when we would -- Said would come up with some structure, and he'd say, "Fine, okay, you finish it." And, years later he would see it on an album, and it would be credited to him. He said, "Did I have anything to do with it?" Yeah, yeah, you did, and at the time I started working with Sai, I was the kind of guy that if I wrote a song, I was like, "That's a good day's work." And, Sai would say, "Great, what's next?" And, we got to the point where we wrote an entire album in a day and a half, and it was a good album. We got a Grammy nomination for it, but we were just in the groove, and we were, you know, passing stuff off back and forth. And, Sai would go off and take a nap, which he's really good at and come back and be ready to go. He's the most present person I've ever met. He's just, you know, I got to do a conference call, and he's right there, and then he hangs up and he's right back there. He's astonishing, and he's also an endless font of fantastic ideas. I just recently started doing his song that -- I remember when he wrote it called, "Go To Work On Monday One More Time." It was just -- he was working on the J.P. Stevens Boycott at the time, and he happened to -- they were trying to get brown lung introduced -- recognized as an occupational disease. And, he just -- it was a guy talking about, you know, "I'm sick. The doctor is lying to me, my boss is lying to me, and everybody knows what's wrong, and I can't do anything else. So, I'm just going to have to go to work on Monday one more time." And, it's, you know, I've known that song for 40 years, and every time I sing it, and I just -- I do it with fiddle now, just give it a different voice. It's an astonishing song, and it's so effecting, and it's one of the things that fiction does. It opens us op to an experience that we would -- I mean, I defy anybody not to be changed somehow by hearing this really authentic voice saying, you know, "The doctor says I smoked too much. He says that I ain't trying. He says he don't know what I got, but we both know he's lying. I'm going to work on Monday one more time," and not just be in that guy's presence. And, it's a special songwriter that can do that, and Sai is that kind of songwriter, and I'm lucky enough to sort of be on the planet at the same time he is, and we're pals, and we get to write together. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. Well, there's one other pal I'd like to ask you about, because I had the pleasure of interviewing her here when she was here, and that is Carmen Aberdeen. >> John McCutcheon: I mean, I do know her. >> Stephen Winick: Carmen is John's wife. >> John McCutcheon: Yes, yes, for ten years now. Well-- >> Stephen Winick: I mean, as an influence though. >> John McCutcheon: It was her birthday yesterday. You know, I met Carmen sort of back in the mid-90s. I was doing a collection for -- I was on the board of Grassroots Leadership which was Sai's regional organizing organization. That was his real job. He was a great songwriter in his spare time, and I was -- I put together a multicultural children's album of music for the, you know, for 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus stumbling on the New World. And, it was very successful, and I didn't know Carmen at all, and I was going to do a multicultural storytelling album to benefit the same organization, and our mutual friend Michael Parent [assumed spelling], who was a wonderful storyteller of French-Canadian descent, said, "Well, here's who you should get." And, I had been to the National Storytelling Festival a couple of times, I guess as sonic relief, but somebody recognized that a lot of John's songs tell stories or have introductions that are more than just sort of pedantic or I wrote this because. And, Carmen was one of the people I approached, and she agreed to be a part of this. And, then once it was clear that she and I were an item, I got invited almost every year to the National Storytelling Festival, and that was where I was really in the company of workers of the word. And, if you're a word nerd like I am, just to hear people use language, it was one of the things that made me fall in love with the south, just the way people would talk. I mean, I had, you know, and people would say, you know, "I just dread Christmas, all this rushing and swarping around." Or Janette Carter used to say, "Well, that Johnny Cash just needs to get all his shit in one sock." And, I just thought, well, that's a weird thing, but I know what you mean, you know. Or, she was in a state of high fuss. And, my exposure to the storytelling world via my relationship with Carmen -- but, I mean, Carmen has the best sense of story of anyone I know, in her writing. She's the hardest-working writer I know. I mean, she has primarily worked in the world of children's picture books, which everybody looks at and says, "This is 32 pages. How hard can that be?" But, she completely understands the form. She's working on a book until they tear it from her fingers to print it. I mean, she gets [inaudible] fold it and gather the proofs and says, "I want to -- no, I got to change that line right there." She just wants to make it perfect. She is the hardest-working writer I've been around, but a great sense of story in both, the way she tells her stories and that sense of story has really influenced my songwriting. I mean, my last album of original songs, I look at it, and I thought I couldn't have written that ten years ago. I didn't know how to use -- I mean, I understand the distillation of language that songwriting and poetry is, but to present a convincing story and not have that pebble in the shoe moment was something that, you know -- I did an album of songs and stories that I recorded live at the National Storytelling Festival. And, one reviewer happened to say, "It's obvious that his marriage to Carmen Aberdeen has turned him into a first rate storyteller," so. >> Stephen Winick: Even better storyteller. >> John McCutcheon: Well, and I showed that to her, and she, of course, said, "No, you were great before." But, it's true. It's true. You can't -- if you are someone who loves words and loves story and loves the world that you can create in a few minutes, you can't help, but be influenced by her. I would like to think she is influenced by me, but I certainly know that I'm influenced by her. >> Stephen Winick: All right. Well, I think we have to leave it there, but it was wonderful to have you here. John McCutcheon, thank you so much. >> John McCutcheon: Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov