Folk singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and educator John McCutcheon recently released his 45th album, Field of Stars, encompassing a wide array of moods and storytelling, but carrying his songwriting stamp of the genuine and focused. It’s also a testimony to masterful musicianship from McCutcheon and longtime collaborators like like Tim O’Brien and Stuart Duncan. The further features vocal duets from Carrie Newcomer and Claire Lynch.
The story of the album’s development has a few interesting twists and turns that have made it a reflection of its original inception, pre-pandemic, and more recent concerns, as having completed the songwriting on it years before, McCutcheon found himself making a string of other albums in the meantime, prompted by all the changes in the world. Returning to the same material that had been waiting, he found a need to express his current mood more fully by creating a newly conceived collection. The result of this intentionality makes for a very focused feeling to the album that, nevertheless, allows for its wide range of topics and ideas.
I spoke with John McCutcheon about the mentorship lessons he learned from Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger, why Appalachia still looms large in his work, and about some of the songs, older and newer, that made the cut for Field of Stars.
I’m familiar with your recent collaboration album with Tom Paxton, and with some of the music that came out of the Covid period for you, but how does Field of Stars fit into that timeline?
I’ve put together a kind of hybrid of the album that I thought I was going to do back then, before the pandemic, and what felt important to do now.
Now that I look back, I see that really the circumstances and the timing of the releases of your previous albums helped you select what you wanted to put on them.
My normal way of recording is that we get together, my core band, and they’ve just had rough demos. Maybe they’ve had an idea of how to arrange something, but oftentimes not, and we collaboratively make things happen.
With my pandemic-era albums, including Bucket List, Leap!, and Cabin Fever, the one thing I did was make sure that the keyboard player was one of the first people to be involved. He’s sort of the bandleader. But the circumstances dictated what we could do. Everyone that I knew learned how to do new things back then, from streaming concerts to how to get along with their wife and kids when they were spending so much time together. Now I know that, should the circumstantces arise, we can make an album and it will sound surprisingly good. The real magician in all that is the engineer, Bob Dawson. He’s remarkable.
You were just coming off an Australian tour when the pandemic hit and you were first working on this album. I think you were maybe even a little bit of a different guy back then since I know that you’re no longer in the road dog mentality and more focused on songwriting.
[Laughs] Yes, I’m touring a lot less than I used to, and even whining about that! Writing used to be something that I fit in between all the other stuff that I do in my job, whether it be rehearsing, touring, teaching, whatever. Now, I’m writing with five or six people every week, and we almost always come up with something worth working on. Everything was taken away from me during the pandemic, all the usual outlets for my music, so I had lots of time to write, and I came out of that feeling, “This is what I’m supposed to do.”
My buddy Tom Paxton, who was meant to be doing a California tour with me, has had a couple of serious health episodes. He’s 87. He decided to listen to his body, his doctor, and his family, and said, “I’m done. But I’m still writing.” So the last two weeks, just like normal, we’ve been writing. That’s who he is now. He’s off the road, and he’s a writer. I know that lies ahead for me. That’s one of the many ways that Tom, who is my last living mentor, has modeled things for me.
I think it’s so important, no matter what age you are, to have someone who’s gone a little ahead of you, and you can see from them what the way ahead might be for you.
Absolutely. I remember the first time I ever met Pete Seeger, which was over 50 years ago. We were at the same festival, and he sat down and listened to my show. I wanted him to love what I did, and he was encouraging, but also guiding. He understood his role as a mentor, but more importantly, this was the great gift that he gave to me and to many other people: He understood that he was a piece in this process. He had his time when he was the center of attention, and as he grew older, and some of his skills started to wane, which made him self-conscious, he identified people who were part of that continuum. He purposefully spent time with them, and it was rich, generous, and forgiving of him. He had his eyes on a different prize. He didn’t want me to just be successful, he wanted me to do my job well. Which is really different.
That is great. That’s amazing.
I came up with this phrase, Tom and I wrote a song about a week ago that we realized was really about Pete, since he was a mentor to both of us. It had a chorus that went, “He did not go for glory, And he was not afraid to fail, And where he did not find a path, He left a trail.”
Wow, that’s powerful.
That’s Pete in a nutshell, especially for those of us who were fortunate enough to find ourselves taken under his very generous wing.
That’s a wonderful story. That is really the gold standard, paving the way for other people like that.
Yes, and every once in a while when a young musician comes up to me and starts a conversation, I realize, “Oh, I’m that old now. What did I learn about being a mentor?” The final act of mentorship is to be open about how to do that. It sneaks up on you. You realize, “That’s me forty years ago. And how hungry was I, how lost was I in this amazing world?” I remember being at the national storytelling festival in the late 2000’s. Pete was there, and he was just about to go on and do his main set. He called me backstage and said, “I want to show you my setlist, and tell me what you think of it.”
I thought, “Boy, this is the world upside down!” If anyone taught me, just by observing what he did, how to put a set together, it was Pete! Even he thought he needed some feedback, and that’s the ultimate humility, “I’m going to ask one of my students what I think about this.” That same festival, Pete was in the audience, and I asked him to come up and do something with me, and he bounded right up there. He was a rare treasure. There’s nothing like him going on today.
Do you think that if you see people behaving in such a laudable way, for instance teaching young people like that, that it’s then your responsibility to do that too? Do you feel more responsible to do that having been the receiver of Pete’s guidance?
I think any evolving human being understands, “I’m still working. I’m a work in progress.” In this line of work, you don’t go to school for Folk music. I guess you can get a degree in Folk music these days, but it doesn’t teach you how to do it. I wrote this song, and I don’t think I ever told her this, called “The Future” after I was at a festival with Molly Tuttle.
It was before she became the next big thing. I just saw her and thought, “I saw the future yesterday, On a small town Kansas stage.” It was exciting, it was awe-inspiring, and it made me remember being in my early 20s. It was like being a kid learning how to play baseball, where you hung around the older kids and watched. You wanted to do that. You went out, and you made mistakes, and adjustments, but you were forever watching who was good. I think that’s your whole life, if that’s how you approach your work. When I hear a good song, I do a post-mortem on it.
I notice that this collection of songs does have a lot of Appalachian emphasis or influence. Why is that, particularly?
Well, the song “Redneck” was written for the hundredth anniversary of the The Battle of Blair Mountain, which I learned about from my mentor, Nimrod Workman, who fought in The Battle of Blair Mountain. He was one of the most memorable people in my life. I kind of did it to honor him, but it was also one of the sources of the term “redneck.” The miners wore red bandanas around their neck to identify themselves, and it was a mark of pride, but today in Southern West Virginia, the kids in school learn that redneck is not a derogatory term.
But that’s what the other side always does. They commandeer your language, and they turn it into a pejorative, or into a joke. Whether it be “social justice warrior” or “you’re such a redneck.” Part of it was just reclaiming that, and I think Appalachia is all over a lot of these songs because that’s what I came into 50 years ago. They made me feel at home, and I felt at home. Today, when I think of home, I don’t think of Georgia, I think of Appalachia, which is an hour and a half north of here, and we have a little cabin up there.
There are a couple of songs that are decidedly Jewish in origin, too, on this album, “The MS St. Louis” and “Tikkun Olam.” I just felt like with the rising tide of anti-Semitism these days, speaking up on racism feels like a responsibility. There were also some timely songs, like “The Hammer.” Unfortunately, in another little while, people aren’t going to remember Henry Aaron. I had a front-row seat watching what an amazing humanitarian he was. Then there were just some lovely songs like “Waiting for the Moon” and “Only Ones Dancing”, which I wrote with Zoe Mulford and knew right away I wanted to record. So there’s some punchy stuff in this album, but there are some moments that are sweet, like “The Blessing” at the end.
I think there’s a seriousness even to these sweeter songs. The general feeling I get listening to this album is, “Wow, he’s not messing around here!”
I’m too old to be messing around! I can be goofy and have fun, like “Too Old To Die Young.” I felt that was an important song to have in there to say, “Let’s laugh for a little bit.”
Are there particular songs that were from that first iteration of the album before you overhauled it?
The song “Here”, the opening cut, was one of the first ones. Then, “MS St. Louis”, “At the End of the Day”, “Tired”, and “Peter Norman.” The song “Here” was actually the last song to make the cut. But in the studio, I turned to my engineer, who’s also my co-Producer and said, “This feels like an opening cut.”
I think it’s tremendous as an opening song. That’s part of why I got the impression that you are not messing around on this album! It’s so direct.
Like a lot of songs on this album, the meaning changed as the song developed. At first, it’s just a nice little story about your sister making you a sandwich. Then it becomes your reminiscences of summer arriving. It’s that thing that so many of us fall prey to, that you’re so looking forward to the next thing that you’re not really present. That you could miss your whole life.
I think that part of what makes that song so powerful are the moments in life that you choose to illustrate in the song, like the wedding. The contrast between the beauty of the wedding and not being totally present is heartbreaking. It shows what human beings can be like, what we all see in ourselves.
Well, not every human being is like that. And that gift of being present really is a “present.” It wears those two meanings beautifully.
