|
|
John McCutcheon and Tom Paxton - New Album |
|
Sitting and interviewing one music legend is special. Having the
opportunity to interview two music legends at the same time rarely
happens, and yet this writer was fortunate enough to do just that
recently when Tom Paxton and John McCutcheon sat down with me to discuss
their new album, Together.
The most poignant song from this beautiful and heartfelt collection of
songs is “Invisible Man,” and Paxton and McCutcheon would be quick to
tell you that this song is also about the invisible woman and invisible
child too. With words such as, “I am the invisible man / This really
was not my plan / Wherever you don’t look there I am / I am the
invisible man.” The song is
about the homeless, or the person you work beside that you never speak
with or some other person that society has overlooked or forgotten,
perhaps an elderly person. It draws attention to our need to do better.
John McCutcheon talks about his personal inspiration behind the song, “I
think I had just finished reading Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man (editor’s
note: not to be confused with HG Wells book of a similar title),
which of course is about the black experience in the United States.
During the pandemic, I remember contemplating the whole term of
sheltering in place and I thought there is a whole class of people who
have been sheltering in place for years in this country. Nobody knows
them. They are absolutely invisible.
It is not just the homeless down the street, it is the guy you work with
in your office or who shines your shoes or who picks up the garbage.
They are like accessories to most people. The guy who mows your lawn and
you pay him and you have no idea what his last name is. That is a kind
of invisibility. We are just looking through the other end of the
telescope to give a voice to that person.
Tom Paxton joins in, “I love that line too, but how about the line that
precedes it, “This was not my plan.” (In unison the three of us say
“Yes.”) When you think about it, nobody plans to spend their life at an
intersection begging from the cars.”
“It is a very old notion that (homeless people have addiction issues)
somehow you are sick because you sinned or something happened, because
you didn’t pray hard enough. It is your fault, because we have to brush
this away by creating something or someone to blame and it certainly
cannot be us,” says John.
To understand, if we may use these words where “the soul” of John
McCutcheon and Tom Paxton’s Folk music comes from, you have to
understand what informed their music in the early part of their
respective careers.
Pete Seeger in many ways was a disciple of or mentored by Pete Seeger.
Tom says, “Pete one time sent me a songbook of his with a very nice
inscription on the title page, so I sent him one of my songbooks, and
inscribed it to Pete on whose aching shoulders I have stood for fifty
years. (John chuckles)
That was the right thing to say. Pete was an enormous influence on me,
as an artist and as a human being. He was a mentor. He took some of my
very early songs and sang them in places like Carnegie Hall and he
certainly raised my name in the Folk Music field. He got me started very
nicely.
We had wonderful conversations over the years. I didn’t see him nearly
often enough, but we had substantive conversations when we did meet. I
was very interested in his political background and he was very frank
about having joined the (communist) party as an idealist in the
thirties. He was equally frank about leaving the party when, in his
words they realized that Stalin had been worse than Hitler and that they
had been sold a bill of goods and now they were thinking differently. He
said to me I have decided to live my life as a small “c” communist. That
was fine with me. It was Pete I loved and his music.”
John McCutcheon’s influences were different, but essentially arrived at
the same place as Tom Paxton did.
He recalls, “I was introduced to Folk music when I was eleven and my
mother made me sit on the couch next to her on an August afternoon and
watch on television what turned out to be the march on Washington. It
was the first thing that was broadcast live on all three channels that
we had in those days. The civil rights movement was a big thing in our
house. My mother had been a social worker before she became a mom. She
knew there was a bigger world out there than the little Wisconsin town
where we lived. I came from a very religious family and the civil rights
movement, just ticked all of the boxes. It was led by clergy, they used
biblical language and the songs were repurposed hymns. I was the eldest
of nine kids, so I was the closest to adult company that she had.
It was something that especially should be noted for people who are
planning big rallies, because we have certainly forgotten how much music
there was at this event. We seem to recall it for Martin Luther King’s
speech and I guess I heard it, but what attracted me and made me
remember the event was all of the music. Mahalia Jackson was mind
blowing, but then there was all of this Folk music. In 1963, as an
eleven-year-old kid, I had no idea that Folk music existed. There was
Peter, Paul and Mary, Len Chandler, Odetta, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.
They were all singing relatively newly written songs, but they
sounded old.
I began a campaign to get a guitar and it took three years for my
parents to give me a Sears Roebuck Silvertone, for my fourteenth
birthday. I went down to the library to get a guitar instruction book
and the only book they had for the guitar was the Woody Guthrie
songbook. I didn’t know who Woody Guthrie was, but here it was sixty
songs. Inevitably, it set me on that path.
I didn’t know the more collegiate type bands like The Kingston Trio or
the Brothers Four. I didn’t even know they existed. From the beginning
it was Woody, Pete and the rawer end of things.
Eventually, it got me playing the banjo and I convinced my college
advisor to let me take a three-month independent study, while I
hitchhiked around the south and met banjo players, which I did. It is an
independent study, which I am still on fifty-three years later. I fell
in love with the south and I have lived there ever since. I have
immersed myself in Appalachian music of all sorts, the traditional
stuff, the newly written stuff.
Somewhere along the line I met Tom Paxton. It’s funny, because Tom, Pete
and I became friends. He mentored everybody. When you went to a Pete
Seeger show you were going to school. He taught us all how to create a
set list, how to engage an audience, but mostly how to be courageous.
That is something that is rare to be taught. It is a blessing. I saw
that in Tom too, that willingness to speak the truth. I guess it was
inevitable that we were going to meet.”
Then there were the Greenwich Village days in New York City.
Tom says, “I got there in 1960 exactly. I am punctual that way,” and we
offer up, that must have been the end of the Beatnik era? He recalls,
“It was there before my very eyes. When I got there the Beats were still
performing in the coffee houses, but by the end of 1960 it was all Folk
music and the Beat generation had moved on.
The coffee house scene in Greenwich Village in the 1960s was very
exciting for a young person. It was a great time and place to be young
and aspiring to do great things. We had stages we could get up on with
microphones and we had an audience. We got to perform almost every
night. It was the greatest school you could imagine. As a matter of
fact, at the Gaslight (The Gaslight Café) in the early sixties, the
format was eight of us were on the bill and we would do three songs
sets. Then they would turn the house over and we would do it again. When
you think of three songs sets it is perfection in training. You learn
how to get on stage, what to do next and how to get off. You did it
seven times a night. It was great training.”
As far as those years influenced his music and life, Tom Paxton says,
“They inform every part of my life. I learned about friendship. I
learned how to be part of a group of soloists who nevertheless pulled
together. We were friends and partners. We didn’t write together, but we
played our songs for one another and we got valuable criticism. Phil
Ochs was the one you wanted to sing your new song for him, because he
would tell you right away exactly what he thought. Luckily, he pretty
much liked what I wrote, but now and then he would point out that I had
developed a stinker and I needed to get rid of it as quickly as possible
(there is a hint of a chuckle in Tom’s voice). He could do that, because
you trusted him. I never took offence ever of criticism from Phil.”
Now that you understand where John McCutcheon and Tom Paxton started
from, let’s talk about their song “In America,” that reflects upon the
America they knew early in their lives and the America through their
eyes now. We pose the question if the song is about what America once
was or what it still can be.
John McCutcheon begins, “I am married to a refugee. Her parents like
most Cubans supported the revolution until they realized that they
couldn’t. That meant they couldn’t get a job and they couldn’t get food
ration cards. They didn’t have much choice but to leave the country they
were born in and that they loved.
The immigrant experience in America and especially to refugees is an
extraordinary experience from the rest of us who were born here.
I think I came in with this song partially written and I just didn’t
know what to do with it. We built it up and put it as a Pole (as in from
Poland) coming into this country in just enough time. He was here for
thirty-five years from the time the Nazis invaded Poland. Like the last
verse says, it cannot happen here. What do you even call it? With the
Nazis it was fascism and imperialism. We wrote this when new
antisemitism was starting to happen. The protagonist is Jewish. That was
decided, before I brought it to the table.
The song tells a story about one guy and through his eyes. One of the
things I love about writing with Tom is we let our characters be their
characters. They can say what is on their minds. Every character is not
an avatar for Tom or me. I
have talked enough, Tom, do you have an opinion on this?”
Tom Paxton says, “I have always used the first person almost exclusively
and it is almost never actually me. It is the character that I am
creating and through whom I speak. I try to draw pictures with words and
music that show everything that I need people to see.
I was born in a different America than I live in today. It was almost
incredibly innocent and idealistic. Things (however) weren’t actually as
bucolic and idealistic as they were reported to be. I was late in
developing any kind of political consciousness. I didn’t have any when I
arrived (in New York). The only thing that I knew when I got to New York
in 1960 was I believed in the civil rights movement and that racism is
wrong. Everything else that I learned started there. I loved writing
this song (In America). I loved singing it and I loved hearing it,
because it is a very real kind of picture.
This fellow (in the song) came to a country where he did not speak the
language and where he experienced some rough and incidental
antisemitism. He played the game, he did everything right, he worked and
he had a family, but then it all came crashing down on him when his
homeland is raped. I just think we needed to have that kind of
experience musically. This is a
song that I am very proud of.”
Then we have the song, “Ukrainian Now,” which is stark in its commentary
about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, but it is not just through
the eyes of the people of Ukraine, for not forgotten are the Russians
who protested in the streets and were beaten and jailed by Putin and his
henchmen. “I am Ukrainian now / I am the Muscovite protesting out in
the street / I am the Rabbi learning to pray with my feet / I am the
soldier who used to dance in the ballet / I am the father sending my
family away…”
“We shared with millions of people a visceral reaction to it. It was
horrible. We knew it was coming and then it came. People began to die
and it was all one man’s ruthless determination. We have a long,
personal history of writing songs in reaction to international bullying
or bullying here at home. It was a natural thing for us to put pen to
paper and pick up the guitars and to say this cannot stand unanswered.
It happened really fast. When we have our sessions, we almost never
(just) start writing a song. We talk about sports and find out how we
are doing and other stuff. With this song we both sensed an unusual kind
of solidarity around the world. The
months after the invasion you saw symphonies around the world, beginning
their shows with the Ukrainian national anthem. Even today, two years
into this conflict, when we play that song, (people) still cheer. It was
an important song for us to write.
What was really interesting is I made a little Facebook video and we
started getting comments from frontline soldiers in Ukraine. They said
we are just out here doing this. We don’t know what is going on in the
rest of the world and this was a great sense of solidarity to hear this
song. You don’t know in this crazy digital world where your songs go.
You just send them out there hoping they will pull their shift,” says
Tom.
Tell us about the song “Life Before You.”
Tom says, “It started out to be a conventional love song and at some
point, in the process, and I believe it was my idea, but I could be
wrong I thought of this wonderful twist that would make it into another
love song.
We both kind of cracked up and I guess it was because of the pleasure of
creating and the ideas coming thick and fast. That makes collaborative
work so much fun and so rewarding. We didn’t have that end to the song
in view when we began the song. Let’s put it that way.”
The song “Complete,” is based more in truth than fiction and talks about
the connection between Tom Paxton and Johnny Cash.
“I got a call from an engineer in Nashville with whom I had worked and
he said he had worked on some albums with Johnny Cash. He had three of
my songs. I was anxious until it came out and I finally heard them. I
was blown away. When you hear somebody sounding like (He does his
best Johnny Cash impersonation of Johnny singing his lyrics). I
thought oh my god, that is my song that he is singing.
I had met Johnny a few times over the years, never in any great depth,
but I found him to be a warm and generous hearted man. I was overwhelmed
to hear him sing my song. I thought he did just a great job on it,” Tom
recalls.
John says, “To me what makes this song work so well is, you write a song
and then someone sings it and you realize, ohhh that’s the song. That is
why we wrote the line “I thought it was finished, but now it feels
complete.”
John McCutcheon remembers living for many years in Scott County,
Virginia, “which is the home of the Carter family and I was close
friends with Janette Carter. She had a music venue there that started
off little and became big. Johnny would come over once a year and do a
show to help raise money for it. I knew him as the guy at Janette’s
table for Sunday dinner. He was an ordinary, friendly guy, who happened
to be one of the great singers of our time. Tom is absolutely right he
was generous and kind-hearted. He is also right that he wouldn’t have
lived anywhere near as long if June Carter had not saved his ass.”
Shifting gears he says, “Tom and I had never recorded together, but it
was such a treat listening to him do “Letters From Joe” and “Together”.
It is a well-traveled world-wise voice in much the same way as you think
of Johnny Cash’s voice being that way.
I remember the engineer turning to me after “Letters From Joe” and he
asked do you want to do another take and I said absolutely not. There
was just some magic that happened in there. At the risk of lauding our
songwriting I have to say, that line in “Together,” that says, “I know
we can’t go through that door together,” that gets me every time. I have
heard this song more times than anyone in the world will ever hear it
and I still love that line and I love that song.
It was an absolute treat to record together and we are going to do it
again.”
That is the best news that all of us could hope for.
#TomPaxton #RivetingRiffs #JohnMcCutcheon
#RivetingRiffsMagazine #TomPaxtonInterview #MusicInterview #JohnMcCutcheonMusica
#EntrevistaMusica #CompositorEntrevista
|
Again,
it was creating that character that isn’t me and isn’t Tom and giving
them a voice. I have no idea who came up with the line “wherever you
don’t look there I am.” Tom and I said, God wrote that song. We aren’t
that good. 
John
rejoins the conversation, “I will add this was really informed by living
with my Cuban in-laws. My father-in-law was very clear eyed about what
was good and what was bad about where he was living now. With Cubans it
is always next year in Havana (he laughs). He died, before that even
became a possibility. He was grateful to his core for what this country
offered him as an immigrant and as a refugee. That is something I wasn’t
even born with. It was just boom here I was. That sense of gratitude and
possibility, really, informed my participation in the song.”