Songs of Hope 4

Friendship. In these times when the political and social world seems to be tilting in ways unexpected, keeping the light of friendship and encouragement burning with people you know and trust is a subject upon which to reflect, and reflect again.

Kathy Mattea has said that she likes to find songs which keep teaching her lessons, and that she has found that this one does. Not the most cheerful way to suggest that you think about friendship, perhaps, but it is a place to begin. Mattea has recorded the song on her album Lonesome Standard Time. Bill Cooley, who plays with Mattea in this video, has a n excellent album of guitar music out called In Search of Home.

Carrie Newcomer says that she was thinking about all the times someone has encouraged her when she was in a hard place when she wrote the song You Can Do This Hard Thing. As she often does when writing songs, poems, or essays, Newcomer draws on her personal experiences to make her points. From them she creates ideas and images that become universal. Newcomer has recorded the song on her album The Beautiful Not Yet.

As she makes her life as a professional musician, Cathie Ryan well knows about leave taking, and about trusting that you will see friends again and you will keep in touch with each other though time and distance may separate you. She often chooses this song, So Here’s to You, to bring her live performances to a close -- well, almost.

As she does in this clip from a show at the Great Lakes Folk Festival, she often pairs it with the witty song Johnny Be Fair and a set of reels and jigs to send her listeners home in a light hearted manner. That’s also an act of friendship shared from performer to audience. Ryan has recorded So Here’s to You on her album Somewhere Along the Road. You’ll find Johnny Be Fair and the tune set on her recording Through Wind and Rain.

You’ll enjoy other music from these artists as well. Here are stories I’ve written about some of that
Cathie Ryan: Through Wind and Rain
Kathy Mattea: Calling Me Home
Music & Mystery: Conversation with Carrie Newcomer Continues
This story is part of a series on music for these times. Here's another in the series Songs of Hope 3

Fire photograph by Kerry Dexter. Thank you for respecting copyright.

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Autumn Celebrations: gift ideas

Autumn: with the turning of seasons come times for gathering with friends, family celebrations, planning for a celebrating holidays large and small, travels, time for quiet reflection -- and time for music.

Music makes a fine companion for any of these activities, whether you are looking for holiday gifts to give or music for yourself to listen to. Are you preparing for those big holidays -- Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice? It’s never too early. The small circumstances are just as worthy of celebration, as well. Gifts to give and gifts to receive: here are musical ideas for you to explore early in this holiday season:

Cathie Ryan’s recording Through Wind and Rain will make a fine gift for those who enjoy good stories thoughtfully told, as Ryan traces a journey through the dark and light of life with always thread of hope and resilience and faith weaving into the tales. She is first generation Irish American. She has spent time living in both countries, and makes music that respects and connects them, offered with voice and style which invite listeners in. Every song is a keeper, and sequenced in a journey worth the following. If you’ve just a short time to check out the music, though, standout tracks include Fare Thee Well, Mo Nion O, and In the Wishing Well.

Kathy Mattea knows a thing or two about storytelling, too. On Calling Me Home, the country Grammy winner and West Virginia native follows her calling to the heart of mountain music, songs sung in her own way which add to the tradition she respects. This, too, is an album where it is really worth following the sequence as it’s told. If you want to take a quick listen, though, try A Far Cry, The Wood Thrush’s Song, and Hello, My Name Is Coal.

Tim O’Brien is one of the guests on Mattea’s album, and he’s also teamed up with old friend Darrell Scott for a rockin; ramblin’ hot pickin’ set of of country blues, bluegrass, Americana songs. recorded live at the Grey Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina. In a nod to the duo’s wry humor, it’s called We're Usually A Lot Better Than This.Standout tracks include Mick Ryan’s Lament, Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning, and White Freightliner Blues.

Singer Mary Jane Lamond and fiddle player Wendy MacIsaac make a fine duo as well, joining forces to bring a collection of music from Cape Breton in Atlantic Canada on Seinn an album that shares the tang of salt spray and the mystery of Maritime forests, and honors the dance based fiddle music of the place along with its long heritage of Scottish Gaelic culture. Two standout cuts are Keeping Up with Calum and Seudan a’ Chuain/Jewels of the Ocean.

As the autumn and winter season unfolds, treat yourself to listening to these, and stay tuned here along the music road for holiday gift suggestions to come -- and check out our archives too!

you may also wish to see

Best Music, 2011

holiday gift list: Irish music

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Kathy Mattea: Calling Me Home

Landscapes of the heart, of the mind, of the spirit, of time, and memory, and change: this is the territory Kathy Mattea walks in on her album Calling Me Home. A native of West Virginia whose life in music has taken her elsewhere, Mattea’s landscapes are framed in the hill and valleys, mountain and streams, and the lives of the people who call Appalachia home.

In some ways, this is a musical journey Mattea began when she was preparing her album Coal In other ways it is a journey she began long before that, growing up the granddaughter of miners, being drawn to bluegrass and folk music in her teenage years, and leaving West Virginia for Nashville. Mattea’s mainstream country albums have always included an element of mountain spirit and mountain music, howver subtle, because that is a part of who she is as a musician. “Folk music really was my doorway into country music,” she says. At the height of her Grammy winning country music reign, Mattea took time to travel to Scotland and immerse herself in Celtic music to refresh her thoughts. With Calling Me home, Mattea made time to immerse herself in the music of Appalachia and to understand what she could learn from it and what she could bring to it. Respect for the music of the mountains and its sources and a spirit of discovery as to what this music could be background Mattea’s work on this recording.

There is a song on Calling Me Home which takes place in those moments when a miner’s wife, learning that there’s trouble at the mine, makes her way to find out the fate of her husband. With her understated yet intense delivery, Mattea speaks the words of this woman in a way that makes that world and those moments world immediate. The song, written by Jean Ritchie, is called West Virginia Mine Disaster. Holding both love of family and realities of life in the mountains, and connecting these with lives lived beyond Appalachia, it is a centerpiece of the album.


A Far Cry, which opens the album, is a high stepping bluegrass tune, with that bluegrass gift for framing a sad lyric with a lively tune and making them fit well together. Mattea has friends accompanying her on the journey of Calling Me Home, and this tale of a lover who chose a rambling life and returned to the mountains too late is a fine way to meet several of them. Stuart Duncan is on fiddle, banjo, and other things, Jim Brock adds percussion, Bill Cooley is on acoustic guitar, Bryan Sutton on banjo mandolin, and other instruments, and Byron House on bass through the tracks on the album. Emmylou Harris, Patty Loveless, and Tim and Mollie O’Brien are among those who add backing vocals for several cuts.

All the songs are gems, really. They are sequenced in a line worth the following bothmusically and lyrically, too. Change and landscape and reflections on all that are present in The Wood Thrush’s Song. There’s the lively swagger and thought provoking ideas in Hello My Name is Coal, the benediction of Agate Hill, the spiritual with a warning note in Now Is the Cool of the Day. In the title track, Calling Me Home, a man on his death bed says he will leave his stories and songs behind “as sweet traces of gold.” Bringing the recording to a close, there’s is the quiet grace of Requiem for a Mountain, an instrumental piece by Bill Cooley.

Traces of gold indeed. Mountain songs are often thought to be a bit disconnected from today’s world, to be the distant province of scholars. With Calling Me Home, Kathy Mattea continues to show that the songs themselves, and the landscapes and people from which they come, are a vibrant, living part of the world whose joys and sorrows we all share.


Kathy Mattea talks about the album: "Each record teaches you something..."



you my also wish to see
Kathy Mattea sings John Martyn
Music Road trip in West Virginia
Songwriters gather in Minnesota

photographs of Appalachian hillside and of Kathy Mattea in performance by Kerry Dexter

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Music and journey

Music has many roles along life’s roads. At times it a companion, at other times a historian, sometimes music is a connector. At times music is immediate and of the moment, and at still other times it calls back memories. Whichever of these roles music fills at a given moment. it takes us on a journey.

That’s as true whether you are listening to a song, a dance tune, a chamber music piece, or an orchestra movement. Music tells a story -- may stories, really -- and invites us along.

When musicians are creating albums, they think of that aspect too, in the way they sequence the pieces on an album. Now that it is possible for listeners to pick and choose in purchasing and listening to tracks rather than having whole albums, this experience of following a sequence is one that many people choose to bypass.

That can be a mistake. Hearing how an artist chooses to set one song alongside another, listening to what sort of connection there may be across pieces that open an album and that close it, hearing how songs interact with each other melodically and lyrically and in all the ways musicians choose to present them -- those are things which help make the journey of listening to music one of discovery.

Kathy Mattea, Cathie Ryan, and Nuala Kennedy each take quite different journeys on their new albums. Mattea, who has said that her doorway into country music was through folk music, has been walking back through that door since her album Coal, and that she continues with Calling Me Home, an album that begins with a traveler far from home and ends with Requiem for a Mountain. Cathie Ryan draws on her background and experiences in both Ireland and America to create a wide ranging yet clearly focused journey through the joys and sorrows of life on her recording Through Wind and Rain.
Nuala Kennedy brings in her heritage of Celtic tradition and her work in the contemporary world in a collection that looks to past and present for its inspiration on her recording Noble Stranger. You will be hearing more of each of these recordings in days to come.

following up on that, you may want to see the article Cathie Ryan: Through Wind and Rain for more on that album


It is also possible to lead this sort of journey through music without words. Two recordings you may want to check out to hear fine examples of this are Hanneke Cassel’s For Reasons Unseen and Alison Brown’s
The Company You Keep.

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Americana: gift ideas and seasonal music

Melting pot, salad bowl, tapestry: the many and varied cultures and landscapes of the United States find voice in the music that has come to be known as Americana. At the holidays as well at other times of year, it holds many things to explore.

Ideas for gifts, and for Americana music for the winter season, as well:


Kyle Carey draws in her interests in the music of Scotland and Cape Breton with her knowledge a love for the music and landscapes of Appalachia on her debut album Monongah.

Suzy Bogguss is a gifted songwriter and interpreter of contemporary song. She started out singing American folk music and often includes that in her concerts, too -- and she became concerned when she noted that many members of her audience didn’t know the words to songs such as Red River Valley, Banks of the Ohio, and Wayfaring Stranger. Whether it proves a refresher course or an introduction, her album American Folk Songbook is a fine choice for gift giving and for adding to your own collection.

Matraca Berg writes songs that a long list of Nashville superstars record. Her album The Dreaming Fields is a collection of stories by turns funny, reflective, and thought provoking, tales of people of the American south which resonate with people across the globe.

Carrie Newcomer knows a bit about those across the globe connections. She had an unexpected chance to spend time giving concerts and workshops in India. She’s connected that experience with her midwestern Americana ideas in her album Everything Is Everywhere.

seasonal music
Kathy Mattea has two holiday albums well worth your attention, the southern gospel tinged Good News and Joy for Christmas Day, which holds both traditional and contemporary songs of Christmas. The title song of the latter speaks of the place of Christmas amidst the hard knocks of life.

Matt and Shannon Heaton make their music where Irish tradition meets Americana. To experience what that means, take a listen to their seasonal album Fine Winter's Night, which includes traditional Irish and Shetland tunes, an original song for which Matt got the idea from looking a Victorian house down the street, and a piece which is an African American song turned Celtic lullabye.

Gretchen Peters knows that the holiday season goes beyond jingle bells and festive Santas, too. On her album Northern Lights she includes traditional, original, and contemporary songs which look at the many sides of sides of the holiday season with a compassionate and thoughtful gaze. It’s all good stuff, but especially take note of her original song Waitin’ on Mary and her cover of Kim Richey’s Careful How You Go.


you may also wish to see
for more Americana holiday music suggestions
Music Road: listening to Christmas

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Songwriters gather in Minnesota

It has been ten years since top Nashville based songwriter Jon Vezner first came across the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota. A Minnesota native himself, Vezner found that the school's setting in historic buildings on the shore of Lake Superior and its mission resonated with his life and the way he approaches writing his songs. That mission is to enrich lives and build community by teaching traditional northern crafts, and to use heritage crafts as a way connect past, present, and future. So the idea for benefit concerts was born.

Ten years on, there’s a celebration called Northern Harvest coming up on 15, 16,17, and 18 September, with performances by many artists you’ve met here along the music road. In addition to Vezner, those include his fellow Minnesota native Sally Barris, also a top songwriter whose work has been recorded by many artists in country music, and well known folk and Americana musician John Gorka. Top notch guitarist and composer Bill Cooley will be there, along with Grammy winning singers and songwriters Tim O’Brien and Kathy Mattea. Cathie Ryan, whose thoughtful and thought provoking original songs which draw on her Irish American heritage are one of the reasons she has been honored as Irish Voice of the Decade, will join in as well.

Grand Marais is about half way between Duluth, Minnesota, to the south, and Thunder Bay, Ontario, to the north, and it’s a trip well worth the making. If you’ll not be making it out to the shows, however, there’s an especially nice touch: while they are all gathered in Grand Marais, Vezner, Mattea, O’Brien, Barris, Cooley, and Ryan will join up to share their music at a taping for the public radio show Mountain Stage. The show will be broadcast nationally in the US at a later date with excerpts available online by pod cast at that time as well. For more details on when the show will be available, keep an eye on the Mountain Stage web site.

Meanwhile, go explore the North House Folk School web site too. Just looking at the photographs will take you there, and there’s plenty to learn and explore.
Classes are are offered on timber framing, basket making, quilting, northern ecology, and many more subjects, with, as the school’s mission says, an intention to inspire hand, heart, and mind.


photographs of Kathy Mattea, Bill Cooley, and Cathie Ryan were taken with kind permission of the artists (in Nashville, Glasgow, and Portland respectively) are and copyrighted. thank you for respecting this.

you may also wish to see
Music Road: Kathy Mattea: Coal
Music Road: Tim O'Brien’s Americana: Chameleon
Music Road: Cathie Ryan: Songwriter

and

Delicious Baby's Photo Friday, where travelers offer new insights to the world each Friday.

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Music Road trip in West Virginia

West Virginia has a landscape that is at once both beautiful and heartbreaking. Beautiful, for the mountains, the forests, the rivers, heartbreaking because these days so much of that, and the balance of nature within them, and the lives of the people who call West Virginia home, is being lost to mountain top mining.

Two albums make a soundtrack for this duality. Still Moving Mountains -- The Journey Home finds artists, people who live in the mountains, and people who care about them, in a collection of music and short interviews explaining, illuminating, and getting at the heart of what is going on today in, as the classic song terms them, the green rolling hills of West Virginia.

Kathy Mattea is one of those who speaks out on Journey Home. Though her career as a Grammy wining country artist has taken her to Nashville, West Virginia is her home -- she grew with grandparents who worked in the mines, and heard the songs and learned the stories of miners’ life when she was young.

Her doorway into country music has always been through the folk and bluegrass side of things, but songs of the coalfields weren’t ones she felt she was called to do, or could do, until several years ago when a mountain mine disaster recalled to her how she felt facing such events growing up. So she decided to make an album, with some songs she’d known all her life, and some newer ones that speak to the lives of those who work the mines and live in the mountains. She called it Coal, and there’s more about her thoughts on the subject, and the music, here.

you may also wish to see
Mary Black and Emmylou Harris sing Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia
some years before the Coal project, Mattea wrote of her own feelings on leaving her home state in the song Leaving West Virginia
Music Road: Kathy Mattea: Coal
Kathy Mattea’s website she thought the Coal album was going to be a sort of side project for her. as it turned out, there was more.
Music Road: ten songs
to learn more of what the people are singing about in Still Moving Mountains. visit JourneyUpCoalRiver


This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I’m partnering up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’ll find there. Stop on by to see what's on tap for West Virginia at A Traveler's Library, and for more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

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Savannah Music Festival begins

Savannah, Georgia, is a port city, a place where old south meets new, where world cultures converge and intertwine. The Savannah Music Festival both celebrates the world of Savannah and its connections to places and music around the world, with more than one hundred concerts across the city. The events begin on 18 March and continue through 3 April. If you’re not able to make it in person, the festival’s web site offers access to some events through web radio broadcast. Artists you’ve met before along the music road will be there. along with many others. Mark O’Connor, whose eclectic background in country, classical, and jazz makes him a perfect fit of the festival’s focus, will bring his Hot Swing Trio to town. Joe Craven will teach in the education program that open doors to the arts to hundreds of area schoolchildren. Kathy Mattea will offer her folk inspired country and the flavor of her West Virginia heritage, on a double bill with another outstanding singer who grew up in the southern mountains, Patty Loveless. Lang Lang, who has been engaging classical audiences around the world, will appear in a program with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. There will be a concert of ‘Forbidden Music’ featuring pre holocaust compositions, staged in Temple Mickve Israel, Georgia’s oldest temple, with players including festival associate artistic director Daniel Hope, Jeffrey Kahane, and others. Ruthie Foster will bring her Texas based brand of blues, funk, and soul to town, in a bill with Savannah blues singer Kristina Train. Marcus Roberts, also an associate artistic director of the festival, will helm jazz programs featuring concert on the Riverfront and presentations from some of the country’s finest jazz educators, and will appear himself in a piano showdown with Henry Butler and others. There will be a double bill with Bill Frisell and Bassekou Kouyate, while up and comers Canadian Sierra Noble and Texan Sarah Jarosz hold up the bluegrass side of things, along with veteran Del McCoury. There’s quite a bit more: school programs, a competition with singers choosing classic American songs, a New orleans Blues party, a gospel workshop, one off events and continuing collaborations. There’s more about it all at the festival’s web site. you may also want to see Music Road: Boston Celtic Music Festival on the way Music Road: Songs of Homecoming, to Scotland and other places Music Road: photographing music: Celtic Colours

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Kathy Mattea sings John Martyn

This is from the Transatlantic Sessions concert at Royal Glasgow Concert Hall during Celtic Connections. It’s a fine and thought provoking song, and Kathy Mattea has a pretty stellar backing band too -- Jerry Douglas, Eddi Reader, John Doyle, Bill Cooley -- who else can you spot? and take a second listen to that chorus.

Celtic Connections 2009: images, continued

Glasgow, January and February, 2009.


















you may also want to see

Music Road: Songs of Homecoming, to Scotland and other places

Favorite Love Songs: Tuning Up for Valentine's Day

As it’s coming up on Valentine’s Day, that has me thinking about love songs. My favorite ones include






from Kathy Mattea
Goin' Gone

Untold Stories
Asking Us to Dance


from Cathie Ryan
The Farthest Wave

What's Closest to the Heart

from Carrie Newcomer
Tornado Alley

Only One Shoe

Hold On

From Tish Hinojosa
Amanacer
Everything You Wish

from Eddi Reader
Wild Mountainside


from Danu
Follow On

from Emmylou Harris
Someone Like You

from Maura O’Connell
Blessing



What they have in common, I think, is recognition that deep true love includes the hard stuff as well as the joy, and that part of the gift of love is helping us live with and through the humanness of all that. I’m not sure the artists who wrote or who sing all of these necessarily thought of them as love songs, either, but for me they work that way. See what you think, and please share some of your favorites by leaving a comment if you’d like.