In 2012 John McCutcheon released an album honoring Woody Guthrie’s 100th birthday. In 2015 he released an album in memory of the 100th anniversary of labor songwriter Joe Hill’s execution by the state of Utah. Then in 2019 he honored Pete Seeger’s 100th birthday by gathering a boatload of his music friends and putting new twists on Seeger classics. These recordings were interspersed with albums of songs from his own prolific catalogue. So, it should come as no surprise that this year John McCutcheon has mounted another centenary project, this one remembering an iconic fiddle contest in the small Appalachian town of Mountain City, TN.
“I was introduced to Mountain City as an 18-year-old, thanks to a Folkways recording, Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s. I was a fledgling banjo player and this sounded like the kind of music I wanted to play.” He traveled South a couple of years later, fell in love with the region, and never left. But it took him nearly forty-five more years to finally get to Mountain City. “My wife, children’s author and storyteller, Carmen Agra Deedy had been there and planted the seed for an Arts Center in the town. She brought me there to do a benefit to raise money for the Center. It was love at first sight and I’ve been back there many times since.”
The 1925 convention brought together some of the most prominent country musicians of the time. The nascent recording industry stumbled on to old-time fiddling when Fiddlin’ John Carson surprisingly sold a million 78’s in 1923. The recording companies and radio stations signed up fiddlers by the dozens. And many of them showed up in early May of 1925 to compete for a $10 gold piece.
“There’s a famous photograph taken that day that almost every fiddler knows,” McCutcheon said. “It was like the Woodstock of early county music. Seems like everyone was there: Carson, Clarence Ashley, GB Grayson, the Fiddlin’ Powers Family, Uncle Am Stuart, the Hill Billies, Charlie Bowman, Dud Vance, and more. There’s a giant mural of that photograph on the side of the Arts Center.”
It wasn’t difficult to enlist the many talents that agreed to participate. Stuart Duncan was the first ask. Then Tim O’Brien came on board. Old Crow Medicine Show not only signed on but offered their studio to record many of the tracks. IBMA Fiddler of the Year Becky Buller, blues man Sparky Rucker, guitar phenom Molly Tuttle, Jake Blount, and Bruce Molsky lined up. The wild banjo duet, Tray Wellington & Victor Furtado and Mountain City native Kody Norris offered their music. And Cathy & Marcy’s Old Time Coalition and the Earl White String Band rounded out the lineup. Finaly, McCutcheon added the piece of music that first captured his attention decades ago, Clarence Ashley’s Cuckoo.
What’s unique about this recording is that, like his other centenary projects, this one is anything but a museum piece. Each cut offers an exciting new interpretation of music made famous by those musical ancestors of a century ago.
“An inconvenient truth about the 1925 convention is that is was co-sponsored, in part, by the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. That famous photograph contained no Black or female fiddlers,” McCutcheon observed. “But this collection shows just how much things…everything!...have changed. Here we have nearly equal numbers of men and women featured. Black and white musicians playing together. This is a picture of the old-time and bluegrass music community today. Song titles are changed, lyrics are rewritten, and some songs are simply excised from the repertoire because they are outdated, offensive, or just plain wrong. This is what happens in culture. It grows and changes, evolves and resurrects.”
So, this is a project about continuity and change. It honors the past, but lives and breathes today.
And this is also a project about tomorrow. All the musicians agreed that any profits generated by this recording would benefit the Arts Center in Mountain City, celebrating their past while building their future.
Says McCutcheon, “It’s astonishing to me that stumbling upon an obscure recording as a teenager would come full circle over fifty years later. It was the joy and the camaraderie of that album that drew me in. Bringing all these musicians together, celebrating the mastery that each of them brings, was another unexpected joy. Who knows what comes next?”
