Photo by Irene Young
When John McCutcheon was a kid, his mom sat him down in front of the television one day to watch live coverage of the March on Washington. “It was strange,” the 66-year-old musician and storyteller says, because “she normally tried to prevent us from watching TV.”
McCutcheon considers that afternoon in 1963 the starting point of his devotion to folk music and social activism. “The march was remarkable, but people forget about the music. They only remember the speeches, but people like Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson ... imagine being a kid from rural Wisconsin and hearing Mahalia Jackson sing. It was a religious experience.” And then there were the folk singers. “Bob Dylan was there, Joan Baez, and Peter Paul & Mary, who sang ‘If I Had a Hammer,’ which was written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays. I’d never heard any of these songs before, and it piqued my interest in what was going on with the civil rights movement.”
McCutcheon’s new album, his 40th, “To Everyone in All the World: A Celebration of Pete Seeger,” is a rousing tribute to his idol, who died in 2014 at age 94. The set also features Virginia blues master Corey Harris, country singer Suzy Bogguss and bluegrass band Hot Rize.
“The first LP I ever bought was by Pete Seeger, and it was called ‘We Shall Overcome,’ ” remembers McCutcheon, calling from his home in Smoke Rise, Georgia, near Atlanta. “It was a concert recording, and I had never been to a concert before. This LP was a revelation because Pete’s audiences, they came to sing. And everyone was singing along in harmony. I’d never heard anything like it.”
McCutcheon’s immersion in traditional music continued through his days at Saint John’s University in Minnesota. On a whim, he traveled south to Virginia and West Virginia to try to learn from some of his Appalachian musical heroes such as banjo player Roscoe Holcomb, fiddler Tommy Hunter and mountain dulcimer artist I.D. Stamper. “Originally I thought, as a college student, that I would come down here and study and marinate myself in it for three months. It was a three-month study that I’m still on 47 years later.”
Not long after the move, he came across the instrument for which he is best known — the hammer dulcimer. “I found myself at a Folk Arts Workshop at a college in West Virginia. They wanted to make traditional folk instruments, and the first thing they built was a hammer dulcimer. They gave me this instrument, and I had to learn how to play it. The rest as the say, is history.”
The hard-touring player made Charlottesville his home before relocating to Georgia more than a decade ago. “I moved for the best reasons anybody does anything, for love.” He is married to children’s book author Carmen Agra Deedy, and it’s perhaps not coincidental that, in recent years, McCutcheon has concentrated on making children’s albums.
“When I was a kid, I went to the library, and there was only one book under ‘Guitar,’ and that was ‘Woody Guthrie Folk Songs.’” The songs were arranged alphabetically, he recalls. “One day you’d be singing a love song, then a song about a historical event, an anti-fascist song, a funny song. What I learned from all of this is that everything is fodder for songwriting.” How did his first efforts turn out? “They were terrible,” he says, laughing. “But I won my high school talent contest with one of them called ‘The Ponderosa No Cream in My Coffee Blues.’ A friend of mine says that he has a cassette of it and it’s going straight to YouTube if we ever have a falling out.”
A self-described “carpenter onstage,” McCutcheon will bring the tools from his toolbox — guitar, banjo, fiddle, hammer dulcimer, autoharp and more — to The Tin Pan this month. As with his two previous appearances at the venue, Seeger’s work will be front and center. “The songs he wrote changed people,” he says. “ ‘Hammer,’ ‘Turn Turn Turn,’ ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ They are so ingrained into our vocabulary. People sang them in church or at summer camp and may not even know they are Pete Seeger songs, but that’s a great tribute to Pete.”
John McCutcheon performs at The Tin Pan in celebration of the Richmond Peace Education Center on April 28. 7 p.m. $30 to $35. tinpanrva.com
