Ode to John McCutcheon on the Occasion of His 45th Record Album

This week's Poets & Storytellers United prompt calls for odes, in a classical metric pattern if we can manage it, to things and people that deserve celebration.  

Fair use of a photo McCutcheon posted on YouTube.

As a young Northern singer drifting southward,

You helped record the songs of our very eldest,

First in Kentucky, then here in Virginia.

Nobody knew your name.

Then Malcolm Dalglish showed his handmade dulcimers

(Forty-eight years ago?) at a summer festival.

You said they seemed the most logical instrument;

So your career began.

When Jimmy Smith aired a Dalglish recording

On AM radio in the nineteen-seventies,

Old people said, "What pretty, funny music!

We've never heard before."

The awkward wooden trapezoid, crisscrossing

Strings over bridges to give different notes to each,

Some say, yields sounds as raucous as a circus

And clear as angel's harp.

Smith aired the first tune from "Wind that Shakes the Barley"

In between Christmas and Inauguration

Day, 1980. It was not familiar;

It sounded fresh and new.

Where the artesian well below Clinch Mountain

Pours down its little babbling, gurgling branch-creeks,

Fiddle and dulcimer find inspiration,

Echoing natural sound.

Soon you were called "King of the Hammer Dulcimer."

Soon you gave yearly concerts in the Capital.

Proudly I told my dates for each year's concert,

"He lives in my home town."

You gave free concerts at the children's story hour,

Children and parents, at the public library.

Asked why, you told a TV interviewer,

"Some day I'll be a Star!"

Years came and went, and fashion passed us by,

Us fusion folkies of the 1980s.

People remember only synthesizers

And banging back-beats, now,

Of years when we did guitar variations

Of Bach cantatas, classical fugues on themes

From ballads, ragtime, even Broadway show tunes--

Music both cheap and fun.

Yet you still sing, and people pay to hear you,

Not only your own generation, either.

What never sold well never has been sold out.

Your music's still your own.

--------

You can't hear a lot of McCutcheon's music free of charge on YouTube, and for some reason the recordings don't sound the same there. This song from the "Wind that Shakes the Barley" album sounds as if it was recorded from a 33rpm LP played at, maybe not 45, but 40rpm. On the record (and in real life) his voice might have been classified as tenor, not treble. On the other hand you get a sepia-toned photo of the back yard of the house where he used to live, a mile or two up the road from my house, between forty and fifty years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0y3AO-gkXk&t=10s

To hear this canny Scotch-American's music as it really sounds, you have to pay for a recording, even the digital kind. They are worth paying for. He had to wait a few years to get the rights to the Internet address "folkmusic.com"...anyway, that's the current place to buy his records.

https://www.folkmusic.com/

And if he's been a slow steady seller rather than the rock star he joked about becoming, he is well off enough to be inviting fans to join him on a riverboat cruise up the Danube next summer.

The part that always makes me chortle is when people who never lived here talk about the hammer dulcimer being part of some old Appalachian Mountain tradition. The instrument is ancient all right; similar instruments are portrayed in old Asian and European art, and one of them may well have been in the band described in the book of Daniel in the Bible. Here and there a dulcimer was even brought to the United States, or built here, before 1890. However, it's a large clunky thing that takes skill to build, string, and tune, and it didn't become popular until it was mass-produced, along with autoharps and zithers, and sold by Sears Roebuck. 

Most people would not consider this a logical way to build an instrument...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIS4vxvlIF8

So it did not exactly sweep through the Appalachian Mountains--before the radio craze in the 1920s, mountain towns were isolated, each one its own subculture, so any generalization based on what was observed in one town was never accurate for the next town down the road in any case. In many parts of the mountains churches seemed to be competing to have the strictest rules, and many churches had rules against spending money on such frivolity as musical instruments. The dulcimer was not greatly admired in the early twentieth century. It was derided as a "lumberjack's piano." Nobody in my town had bought one. People who played instruments played guitar or mandolin, violin or cello, organ or piano, or some sort of wind instrument in a school or military marching band. Then the accordion was brought back from Germany as an early twentieth century fad. The only thing dulcimers reminded anyone in my town of, back in the Carter Administration, was the trickling of a mountain stream. The dulcimer was not one of our old traditional instruments when McCutcheon recorded "The Wind that Shakes the Barley." But it is, by now.

Fair use of a more current photo from PBS.