John McCutcheon Shares His Cabin Fever in 'Songs From The Quarantine'

It's very much hit and miss whether musicians can work during this time of quarantine and big upheavals. Some are finding it to be inspiring, spending more time reflecting on their lives and creative directions, while others are finding it paralyzing, understandably. But most are finding some way to engage with the music that's keeping us sane right now. John McCutcheon is someone who didn't plan an album, but he found himself in the right condition to put pen to paper every day, and the result was Cabin Fever: Songs from the Quarantine, a collection of new Folk Music that's very personal, heartfelt, at times reassuringly traditional, but always surprising in its turn of phrase. The album has also been released digitally, and is using a pay-what-you-can model, taking into account the fact that many people are strapped for cash right now.

McCutcheon has been pursuing many instruments for many years, and is a very significant fixture in the survival of traditional music and American Folk in general, not just due to his own compositions and performances, but due to his commitment to teaching and the outreach he does in introducing audiences to styles of music they may not have encountered before.

John McCutcheon spoke to Tower's PULSE! about what it takes to write songs and about his own history in music, which has striking parallels to this Nation's history. If you like reading PULSE! for the stories that musicians tell, McCutcheon has some great ones, so read on...

Hannah Means-Shannon: For recording Cabin Fever, were you in North Georgia?

John McCutcheon: Well, that’s where I actually wrote it. I actually recorded it in my little home studio down here in Smoke Rise, Georgia. But everything was written in Cherry Log. It was maybe the first time in my life that the clarity of what my job is supposed to be was laid out in such an obvious fashion. I had nothing at all to distract me from the job of writing songs. I didn’t have to make supper for me and a bunch of people. I didn’t have to go out and mow the lawn. I didn’t have any of the necessary or invented distractions that people are presented with on a daily basis. It was me and my dog and 24 hours. I just got into the groove and sunk deeper into it as it went along. The conversation between pen and paper was really robust.

HMS: I’ve noticed that I’m running out of a lot more pens during quarantine, too. Partly due to work and partly due to personal projects. Never has a pen shortage been such an issue.

JMcC: I actually went to a hand doctor the other day because I have inflamed some latent arthritis in my right thumb and writing is the thing that does it the most. I guess I’m suffering from a workplace disability!

HMS: That’s crazy because of how manual so much of what you do is. It must be different angles for writing.

JMcC: It’s totally the angles. And this is an age-related thing that happens with almost everybody. You usually hear about it in major joints, like knees and hips, where the padding wears away. They said, “You use your hands in lots of different ways, but everyone notices it in writing.”

HMS: Are you relieved that you managed to get the album put together before you had these symptoms?

JMcC: It doesn’t affect my playing, fortunately. But I didn’t set out to write an album. I just got the sense, “Something’s going on.” I remember when I met my first grandchild, I thought, “This is a really big deal. So the day I meet her, I’m just going to start writing and see what comes out.” It’s not always germane to the subject—not all the songs I wrote were about quarantine or the virus. Most of them weren’t. It’s just about letting things happen.

I’ve been doing this all long enough to know that I don’t exactly know how this works. Every writer I know has those moments when they write something, they look at it, and they think, “Whoah, where did that come from? I wrote that?” It’s a process of paying attention in a way that we’re not used to. What gets easier is turning loose of the control, trusting that a character in a song or a story is not you, and they have a mind of their own. Now, I don’t resist it. I don’t try to wrestle that character back into shape. Instead, I think, “Let’s see what happens here.” It’s what keeps me wanting to go back there, like rereading your favorite book.

HMS: Does that keep things exciting for you, rather than feeling like it’s work?

JMcC: I’m a field where you try to get better, hopefully you’re whole life. You’re always pushing yourself. Every time I write a song, it’s not, “Thank God it’s over.” It’s, “Wow. I can’t believe I can do that. That’s so cool. Let’s do another one.” In the same way that I will discover something new on the Hammer Dulcimer after playing it for 45 years. It’s like the questions that mathematicians have: Did you invent this or did you discover it?

HMS: Oh, that’s interesting, yes.

JMcC: Was it always there and you just stumbled upon it, or did you really create this new mathematical theory?

I do these songwriting camps at the Highlander Center, and one of things that I’ve frequently said to the people there is: “Your main job is to pay attention. I’m convinced that God went around for centuries, whisper in people’s ears, saying ‘Duh-duh-duh-DAH. Duh-duh-duh-DAH.’, and finally people were just aware enough to say, ‘Oh cool!’’. It’s not like the muse is feeding you everything, but as you’ll know as a writer, the rule of writing is “Ass in chair.” But the chair gets a little more comfortable over time.

HMS: When I look at all the different interrelated things you’ve done over the years, including teaching and being an ambassador for different types of music in a public way, it’s surprising that you’ve now been in a situation, during quarantine, where your vocation has suddenly become more clear to you. I would imagine it’s been clear or you wouldn’t have spent so much of your life on these things. But, as you, say I understand there was nothing else to dilute your attention.

JMcC: I have always taken my job seriously, but like every mother you know, even in the most equitable of shared parenting situations, your kids come first. I have a friend who’s a poet and she writes these concise, beautiful things, and I said to her, “God, I wish I could write short poetry. How do you do that?” She said, “I’m a mom! I don’t have time to write long things.” So, you fit your work into the time that you have.

Now, I’m a grandfather but my grandkids don’t live with me. I’m a son-in-law and my mother-in-law does live with us. I also keep bees, and I’ve got a garden. Even my responsibilities here at the house are varied and multitudinous, but at the cabin, it was nothing. It was, “Gotta take the dog for a walk. Gotta feed the dog. Gotta scratch the dog’s ear.” That was basically it. This was like heaven for her!

HMS: The one constant is that dogs everywhere are loving the quarantine because they are getting to spend time with their owners.

To go back in time, when do you recall first being aware of traditional music and Folk music?

What was your reaction to that?

JMcC: That’s an easy question. I can tell you that exactly. It was August 28^th, 1963. My mom made me sit down and watch the March on Washington with her. Coincidentally, that was the first thing that was ever broadcast live on all three networks. The next things was Kennedy’s assassination, about three months later. I grew up Catholic, and my mother was a social worker, before she became a mother. So she was interested in the spiritual underpinnings of the Civil Rights movement. It was a righteous cause.

They used clergy and Biblical language, and most of the music was repurposed hymns. They just changed singular pronouns to plural, and suddenly it was, “We Shall Overcome”, and, “We Shall Not Be Moved”. It was something that made sense to me to watch. It was powerful and astonishing, with 200,000 people, the biggest gathering of humans in our country. There was preaching like I had never heard in our church on Sunday.

Then there was this music, and it was everything from Mahalia Jackson to Marion Anderson, and then Folk music. It was my first exposure to Folk music, with Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. It was not only the music, it was especially when Peter, Paul, and Mary sang, “If I Had a Hammer”. As the camera panned the crowd, everybody was singing. Everybody had been singing, “We Shall Overcome”, but I had heard that before, and I thought that was a hymn, because it began life as a hymn.

But I could tell that, “If I Had a Hammer” was something I could tell was not a hymn, but everyone knew it, black, white, young, old, even the people on the dais were singing. That was a really powerful moment. My best friend, across town, happened to be watching, and he had a really similar mother. I called him on the telephone and asked him if he’d seen it, and he said, “What was that music?” We both began exploring it, and talking about it, and we both got guitars. Then, that was it.

It wasn’t hearing it on the radio at first, though all of the sudden we were paying attention. Suddenly, Folk music was out there, and how had we missed it? It was on the radio? It was on the news? It was connected with something contemporary. That was really different.

I loved The Beatles, and this was about the same time The Beatles came out. But at that time, they were just about girls and dancing. This was stuff that felt like it had serious roots and had been around, but yet it was urgent. It was fascinating to a young teenage boy in mid-60s America, who like every other kid was trying to figure out the world. Music of all sorts, but especially Folk music, was very powerful. It was useful to parse everything out, and it was a good companion, but it was also necessarily connected with other people. It was about participation more than performances.

In the big Folk Music revival, you didn’t have the “hot pickers”. Doc Watson came along eventually, but he was the only bona fide instrumental star. You only had a small handful of writers that everyone was recording, whether Phil Ochs, or Tom Paxton, or Bob Dylan. You could count on one hand the people who were considered incredible singers, and they were all women. There was Odetta, Joan Baez, Judy Collins. That was it, but today you have wunderkinds on instruments, thousands of great writers and singers. People say that, “Folk Music isn’t what it used to be.” It’s way more than it used to be, it’s just a different metric that you have to use now.

So that was the beginning for me, and it was a thirst that never slaked. Looking over my studio now, I’m still learning to play different musical instruments and trying all kinds of stuff out.

HMS: That’s wonderful. I love this story. I did not expect you to say that it was something so current and urgent that got you hooked, rather than looking toward the past. When you hear about people playing traditional instruments, it’s easy to assume that they were absorbed by the history of our ancestors and that’s what got them started playing.

JMcC: That came later. I played the guitar and then listened to people like Pete Seeger. Then when I went to college, my college library had all these Folkways albums. They were the real field recordings, and I heard people like Roscoe Holcomb, and Clarence Ashley, and Doc Boggs. I thought, “Oh my God! I want to play the banjo!” I was going to college in Minnesota, and in 1970, it was not a hotbed of banjo playing. So, I convinced my advisor to let me do a three month study hitchhiking around Appalachian South and meeting banjo players. That was the beginning of everything, really, since I went south and never came back. It’s a three-month independent study that I’m still on! It’s a big subject. Takes a lifetime.

HMS: [Laughs] Amazing! It reminds me of previous centuries where people who wanted to learn a trade or a craft would have to go on the road and be apprentices or journeymen to learn from different masters.

JMcC: Yes! I was talking to my dear buddy David Holt who started off around the same time, and we were the unwitting beneficiaries of a cultural shift that happened, not only in Appalachia, but that’s where we encountered it. Where this process of one generation teaching the next kind of broke down when people my age were about to get up to bat. They didn’t want to play that old-fashioned stuff. It was a combination of the world opening up via radio and television, and being assaulted by anti-hillbilly images.

HMS: Right. Of course.

JMcC: Like Li’l Abner, Snuffy Smith, the Beverly Hillbillies. People thinking, “I don’t want to be identified with that ignorant rube.” So people wanted to play Country Music and Rock ‘n Roll instead. Also, the roads had come in, creating more mobility. The synchronicity of all those things coming together created a huge exodus. Then there was the failing of the coal mines, and the huge urban exodus from Appalachia into places like Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago.

Suddenly I show up, David Holt shows up, and other people show up around this time, and approach Roscoe Holcomb and say, “Hi! I’m from a thousand miles away, and I love your music. I wanted to know if it was okay to hang for a bit.” Suddenly there was somebody filling that role that they expected their kids, nephews, and nieces, to fill. I never met with anything other than generosity and kindness, and complete hospitality. I didn’t realize that a lot of that was innate. But I thought, “Thank God!” I thought I was going to be denied that responsibility. I was amazed by how welcoming everyone was to this goofy, clumsy stranger who turned up at their door.

HMS: Because there is a strong regional aspect to all of this, you must have felt very much the odd one out coming in, I imagine.

JMcC: I did. But it was clear to people that I wasn’t a missionary. I wasn’t on a mission to save this music. Thank God, I went into with no preconceived notions of what I was going to find. I didn’t expect to find Li’l Abner on the other side of the door. It was just another human being who talked a little different than me, and had different experiences. But what was in common was, “Hey, let’s play some music.” And the fact that this guy is interested in music that not many people are interested in anymore. Like so much of my life, I was the unwitting beneficiary of something that I had no control in creating.

I fell in love with the people and the region, and also it was about a lot more than music. Academia had been my life right up until then, and in school and college, everything had been packaged up into neat little bundles, and taught by a professional. Who has a syllabus and teaches you in an organized, sequential way, to the exclusion of everything else in the entire world. You can study Trigonometry, or French Literature of the 19^th century for 45 minutes in a room, but this was music connected to every aspect of their life.

They would say, “Sure, we can play a little banjo, but first I have to fix this thing over here. Give me a hand.” Or, “I gotta play for the church service tonight. Do you wanna come along?” Or it was, “I got picket line duty.” It was the first time I encountered this notion, which somehow seemed natural to me, that musicians were another type of worker who had a job to do. In our culture, artists tend to be either the elite, or the insignificant. But this was, “They need me at the church. They need me at the pie supper where we’re trying to raise some money for a health clinic. They need my at the picket line. I guess I’ll take my guitar down there and we’ll sing a few songs to make the time go faster.”

What became my focus, and I think this is reflected in the music that I’ve done and the songs that I’ve written, is the community and how music is instrumental, rather than ornamental, to that. I’m still the 11-year-old kid, sitting on the sofa next to my mom, thinking, “Wow, this means something! This is more than just cotton candy to the ears. This is more than just something that moves your hips. This is something that moves your heart, and maybe moves mountains, who knows?”

So that’s been the interesting exploration of how this music can be useful. Yeah, it’s entertainment. You hope that’s the original ruse that you use to get people to sit down and listen to you, and hopefully it has some nutritional value as well.

HMS: At any rate, it’s the furthest thing from a museum piece. It’s the furthest thing from just a relic, as great as those can be.

JMcC: Oh, yeah. It was no longer these ethnographic renderings in my college library. It was wrapped up in this notion that, “All this music is going to die so I better document it before it goes.” I ran into other young people who were doing this. That handful of people who said, “Oh, my granny sings these old ballads. I’ve heard them all my life. I’m going to learn how to do that, too.” Or, “I remember going to a square down at the community center once a month on a Saturday evening. And I remember this fiddle tune that made the feet lighter. I think I’ll learn what that tune is.” It takes curiosity, and it takes the energy to expend. It’s the musical version of ass-in-chair.

HMS: In that early period for you, was there ever a time where you felt overwhelmed, because the more you looked, the more you found?

JMcC: It was so exciting! I was a twenty-year-old kid. I didn’t have a family. I didn’t have a job. This was my job. I managed to cobble enough money together to satisfy me, to just do it all the time. There was no, “No” in my vocabulary. If you’re a banjo player, you’re hanging around with fiddle players, and eventually you get lured in by the “curse of the haired bow”. You start playing the fiddle, then you realize that the same fingerings that you use on the fiddle apply to the mandolin. Then, “Boy, I sure like The Carter Family and I wish I knew how they did that with the autoharp.” Then, suddenly, you have an autoharp. And then your girlfriend goes off to a music workshop and builds a Hammer Dulcimer. And says, “Here, you play a bunch of instruments. I bet you could learn to play this.”

Or you hear that there is a sacred harp singing someplace. You go there and think, “Wow, this is really different, but really connected. This singer knew Mother Jones and John L. Lewis, and fought in the battle of Blair Mountain to unionize the West Virginia coalfields. So he’s got stories to tell besides traditional ballads to sing.” As long as you paid attention, and your heart, and your mind, and your life were open, it was overwhelming in the most fabulous way.

HMS: That’s amazing. That’s another great story. I hope you’re thinking of writing a memoir of some of this. I know you already write instructional books.

JMcC: I’m of the age where what interests me now is stuff that scares me. My wife is an author, and I’ve written some children’s picture books, that’s her forte. And she’s written some novels as well. I was talking to a novelist who’s a friend of mine the other day, and they said, “You really have to write.” I said, “Everyone is telling me to write a memoir. And maybe I will, but I don’t want the first book I write to be about me.” Maybe I will tackle a memoir at some point, but when I see Justin Bieber come out with a memoir, it’s like, “Child. You have not lived long enough to have anything worth writing about.” I’m almost 68, but I think I have some really good stories that are still yet to happen to me that I should put into this, if I ever get down to writing it.

HMS: That’s true. But also, there’s not just one format that you must use to use to tell your stories. They could be composed in separate short stories, for instance. That’s just another option. I’ll stop giving you advice!

JMcC: Well, you’re a professional writer.

HMS: Actually, I was also an English Professor for ten years. But I know that you’re an educator, too, and spend a lot of your time teaching. That’s very impressive. Thank you for doing that.

Stay tuned for the second part of our interview with John McCutcheon!