John McCutcheon: An Icon Who Listens

John McCutcheon. Photo by Eric Petersen.

Every singer-songwriter needs to like the sound of their own voice—literally and figuratively. It’s imperative. You can’t spend countless hours writing, recording, performing, and self-promoting if you don’t like how you sound and think you have something to say.

But when does liking your own voice mean tuning out other voices? Gigging often makes it tough to catch other musicians’ shows. Sometimes you’re too tired to stay and listen to someone else’s set. And when you do, it’s easy to spend all your time critiquing and thinking “how would I have done that?”

John McCutcheon is an icon who’s always listened. And, as I discovered in a recent interview, he’s doing it better than ever.

For the unfamiliar, McCutcheon is pure old-school folk in the best possible way. Hitchhiking around Appalachia to learn banjo. A stable of acoustic instruments, including dulcimer (hammered and mountain), guitar, banjo, autoharp, piano, and fiddle. Protégé of Pete Seeger. Forty-five albums and six Grammy nominations. Earnest, soaring vocals accompanying a black vest and obligatory goatee.

But McCutcheon spends as much time promoting the music of others as he does his own. He’s produced tribute albums to Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and labor musician Joe Hill. His latest project is Long Journey Home: A Century After the 1925 Mountain City Fiddlers Convention, which honors the “Woodstock of early country music.” This legendary gathering in Tennessee marks a moment in history when the fiddle tune was king—before the music industry turned toward vocal-based (and copyright-able) songs.For the Mountain City project, McCutcheon assembled the best of the best—Stuart Duncan, Tim O’Brien, Molly Tuttle, and the Old Crow Medicine Show, among others—to offer their own spin on the classic tunes played at that event. The result is a solid listen of some of the best talent today, doing some of the best songs of yesterday. To borrow a McCutcheon-ism, “something new that sounds old.”

Photo by Irene Young.

But McCutcheon also shares the ugly reality he learned halfway through the project—that the Mountain City Convention was sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan. This wasn’t unusual; many fiddle contests were put on by organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy to raise funds to erect the Civil War statues that have been recently torn down. “Everybody who plays bluegrass and old-time music knows there’s a racist and a sexist past,” he acknowledges. So, while he gave the musicians an opportunity to bow out, he made clear that this project would be a space for confronting that history while still embracing the music. “This is a conversation that has needed to happen within our community for a long time,” he asserts. “So let it begin.”

Listening to history—good or bad—is at the heart of McCutcheon’s music. He frequently addresses big-picture events, like the bombing of Sarajevo or the Christmas Day armistice when WWI troops came out of the trenches to celebrate together. There are songs about indigenous struggles, Harriet Tubman, and Jackie Robinson. There are modern-day tributes to farmers and first responders. Baseball and unions make frequent appearances. You could teach entire history classes from the McCutcheon catalog.

But lately he’s been learning how to draw from the simple act of morning meditation, reading poetry, and listening—learning to “surrender to whatever comes along as inspiration.” Sometimes that a bird’s song. Sometimes it’s a phrase or memory. Once a song came from the sound of a truck’s tires on gravel. “The more I do this, the more I have to admit that we don’t really know where all this comes from,” he admits. “It sounds woo-woo, and I’m not a woo-woo kind of guy, but every writer, every serious writer I know understands that.”

That also means listening to his audience. McCutcheon has long encouraged people to leave requests on the stage during intermission. “Part of it is curiosity. But also, these people have paid to come and see me, and I just want to make sure I know what songs they want to hear.”

This give-and-take between musician and audience harkens back to what brought him to folk music in the first place—participation. “That was the thing that fascinated me when Peter, Paul, and Mary sang ‘If I Had a Hammer.’ Everbody sang. It was so different from the kind of performative music the Beatles did in 1963, something that was done by professionals for the masses. This was entirely different.”

McCutcheon doesn’t see that participatory spirit waning. “It’s about what is happening on the grassroots. And there are more people today playing music, there are more people playing little tiny gigs, there are more people writing songs. Folk music couldn’t be healthier, and I gauge it to a different kind of metric than the music business does.”

“Can I tell you about the first time I heard you in concert?” I ask McCutcheon sheepishly. Even though he’s probably endured a thousand such stories, he obliges. I recount how he played at my Mennonite college decades ago when I was 19. Halfway through the concert, he turned to the audience and asked to hear an acapella hymn that Mennonites are known for. I tell him how proud the audience was to share it with him. And I tell him that it was the first and only time I’ve seen a performer and audience truly switch roles. I quickly assure him that given the thousands of concerts he’s performed, I don’t expect him to remember this.

McCutcheon with his dog, Maybelle. Photo by Eric Petersen.

But he does. “I was so gob smacked. I mean, I had to sit down because it was so beautiful and so unexpected,” he marvels. And he reminds me that from an etymological perspective, the word “concert” doesn’t need to mean “a guy showing off in front of a big group of people.” It can mean “something we do together, in concert with one another.” He explains, “I got over the whole ‘I’m gonna show off for everybody’ a long time ago. I would rather have someone come up to me afterward and say, ‘I was really moved by this’ than ‘I was really impressed by this.’”

True to form, McCutcheon then closes our conversation—not by returning to his long and storied career—but by staying with our shared experience. “Thank you for bringing that up,” he says in a quiet voice. “It was a beautiful thing.”

San Diego Folk Heritage presents John McCutcheon on Oct. 18 at 7:30 p.m. at Good Samaritan Episcopal Church, 4321 Eastgate Mall, San Diego. Tickets are $35 and available here. at https://www.ticketweb.com/event/john-mccutcheon-good-samaritan-episcopal-church-tickets/13920084.