(I am lucky enough to have a few friends in the music world who I sometimes call, just to chat. Many of them -- Chet, Vassar, Uncle Josh, Bobby Thompson, Eddy to name a few -- have taken their final bows and I miss them. I was fortunate enough to be asked by CMA Closeup online in August to do a story on Mac Wiseman's new album, "Songs From My Mother's Hand." I did that and was proud, as Mac is a friend and a damn nice guy. I then wrote a much-longer version, which I share here.)
Mac Wiseman pushes past the bottles of potions to treat the
maladies of age and rescues a yellowed notebook from stack of them on the
table. Then, with a smile, he leans back in the generous recliner, lifts his
voice and “reads” one page.
“When I was young and in my prime…..” he sings -- in
pitch-perfect, room-filling tenor -- “Blue Ridge Mountain Blues.”
“That’s my locale and that’s where the CD begins,” he says,
explaining the song choice to demonstrate what is in many ways the most
important album of a storied career that was nurtured in the Shenandoah Valley
by a mom who meticulously wrote down lyrics of songs that played on the
radio. Twelve of those songs make up the
heart-yanking project Songs from My
Mother’s Hand.
Revisiting Depression-era Appalachian folk songs, scrawled meticulously
by his mother as she listened to the radio, could be mistaken by some as the
bookend on a long career. Except Mac, 89,
is already diving through his mom’s 13 journals of lyrics to see which songs
will make for a sequel. Some call Mac Wiseman a bluegrass musician, at least in part
due to the company he’s kept, from Monroe to the Osbornes. But he also was a
dear friend of America’s troubled country-folk troubadour, Hank Williams. And this isn’t a bluegrass album. It’s pure
American folk music.
When Mac had his own outfits, that voice – HIS VOICE – was
the most important instrument, high-lonesome solos guiding listeners through a
landscape of guitars and fiddles.
His career in music began when he went to work as a radio
announcer in Harrisonburg, Va., about 25 miles from his hometown of Crimora,
Va.
“I began to notice that the program directors were driving
Fords and Chevrolets while the hillbillies were driving Cadillacs,” he
says. He made a career decision right
then and there. He wanted to drive a Caddy.
That decision has paid off for listeners and for Wiseman
himself, as his career has had him singing all types of music, from classic
bluegrass to novelty tune “If I Had Johnny’s Cash and Charley’s Pride” and a
top-10 version of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” back when every boy had a
coonskin cap.
While some might call him the “last man left” from the
classic era of bluegrass, his musical palette includes rock ‘n’ roll, gospel
and, especially, folk songs. It’s an eclectic repertoire shaped by his
upbringing in the Shenandoah Valley, thanks to the inspiration of the woman who
wrote down the lyrics to songs she heard on the radio and used them to
encourage her family during the dark times. “We had long nights during the
Depression when we would all gather around the organ and sing,” he says.
Other times, he “performed” solo. “We had no running water, no plumbing, no
electricity, no phone. And I would leaf through my mother’s books and sing
every song.”
And that’s why this newest album Songs from My Mother’s Hand, a collection of folk songs from the
era before “bluegrass” became a genre of its own, may well be the most
important of his career.
“It’s going to reenact an era of my life I had almost
forgotten about,” he says, noting that the songs come from a time when
11-cents-a-dozen eggs were considered expensive.
“Everybody else was poor,” he recollects of those days. “But
there was always love in our close family and we never missed a meal.”
While she was intent on feeding her family, his mother also
wanted to instill in them the love of music that had her sitting by the family
radio and jotting down song lyrics as she heard them. What she didn’t write down on the first
listen was captured on the second, third, fourth, whatever it took.
And those are the songs, captured by a mother’s love, that
make up this new album.
Some of these songs he’s recorded before. Others remained as
mementoes, words on yellowed paper, put there by his mom.
While these notebooks remained as important as a family
Bible, the pages are hardly “kept under glass” protected. The songs were jotted down so they could be
sung not worshiped. And though he pages
through the notebooks regularly – they are literally letters from Mom and home,
after all -- he really never thought of recording a collection of them
until a few months ago when producer and guitarist Thomm Jutz and co-producer
and Americana songsmith Peter Cooper visited with him.
They went out to his home in what he refers to as “L.A.” –
aka Lower Antioch, for the section of Nashville that holds his cozy,
memorabilia packed home – and wanted to talk to Wiseman about doing a record of
folk songs.
That, in itself was a good idea for this fellow whose voice,
though seasoned with the grit of age, remains among the purest instruments to
produce country ballads.
Those discussions were held where Mac – hobbled by child
polio – is mot at home, in the easy chair planted in a living room where a
Christmas tree stays year-round – “I got one strand of lights burned out on it.
But I keep it up because I don’t have to bother taking it down and putting it
back up every year.”
Wrapped presents and even an Easter bunny – again never put
away when that season ends – decorate the floor next to the 90-year-old table,
which came from his mother’s house, that was the writing surface used by his
mom when she captured these songs. On
this day, though the volume is muted, “Family Feud” is being played on the TV
crowning that important piece of furniture.
He spends a lot of time in this room, a literal museum
filled with instruments, posters and other souvenirs of a life well-spent in
music. In addition to being an engaging live performer, Mac’s recorded 60
albums and at least 800 songs in a long and diverse life spent mostly with
guitar in hand.
Among the relics are the yellowed notebooks – sort of like
the lined essay books used for written exams in college – filled with the
lyrics of “You’re a Flower Blooming in the Wildwood,” “Little Rosewood Casket,”
“Put My Little Shoes Away,” “East Bound Train” and “Answer to the Great
Speckled Bird” and a life’s worth more.
Jutz – a German expat who has embraced his adopted
home-country’s texture on his sprawling, multi-artist exploration of the Civil
War, The 1861 Project -- explains in his lightly-drawling, German
accent that while he and Cooper talked
with their hero about capturing some of his favorite folk songs, Wiseman told
them about the 13 yellowed notebooks filled with the scrawling from his
mother’s hand.
One of those cartoon light bulbs went off in Jutz’s head.
“To me it’s really a treasure of country music. We were here and I had always
wanted to do something like this.” He points to the notebooks.
“Nobody had ever asked him to do this before,” says Cooper, offering
up one of the well-used song journals so a visiting journalist could page
through it. “The timing was right. You come across something so special and you want to document it.”
He elaborates on the timing issue by noting that Wiseman, 89 and the last surviving member of the original board of directors of the Country Music Association, finally will be inducted into that hallowed hall this autumn.
“I was speechless for a little bit,” Wiseman says,
remembering the call from the CMA .
In his mind perhaps his time had passed. Overlooked. Perhaps he wasn’t going to get
into the Hall of Fame, while younger acolytes like Vince Gill and Garth Brooks
– “and they are deserving,” he says, were enshrined.
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed,” he says of
the annual rite of melancholy when he’d learn his name and likeness weren’t
going to be preserved on bronze in the Hall of Fame rotunda… at last not yet.
“My only consolation was these people didn’t know my track
record,” he says, explaining that he took comfort in the semi-ignorance of
those who didn’t know they were overlooking a folk-singing, bluegrass-playing,
even rock ‘n’ rolling musical pioneer.
“I’ll hurt my hand, patting myself on the back,” he says,
after rattling off a litany of great musicians with whom he has performed and
venues where he has taken bows since becoming a professional artist in
1946.
“Mac’s the longest-tenured living singer in America today,”
Cooper says of that 68 years of performance.
Only Anthony Benedetto,
Tony Bennett – who began winning amateur singing contests and working as
a singing waiter in the early 1940s – could challenge that claim. And truth be told, he’d likely be proud just
to be mentioned in the same sentence as Wiseman, who earned plenty of his early
acclaim up north.
And that success included rock ‘n’ roll, Wiseman says,
noting for a time he was appearing on Dick Clark’s (American Bandstand) shows and selling hits everywhere but in his
native Southland. “In the South, they were throwing my records in the trash
can. And up north, I was cutting new tracks.”
The conversation returns to the source material for this
newest record, though, and why it is important to him, personally and
professionally, and to anyone who has an abiding love in American music.
While he has recorded some of these songs earlier in his
career, most are captured for the first time by this iconic American singer
whose voice and phrasing is as unique as that much-younger singer, Willie
Nelson, who is a mere 81.
Co-producers Jutz and Cooper note that while many
contemporary artists take a full day to get one track, Wiseman cut all 12
tracks in a six-hour period, with the sound as live and lively as possible.
“I don’t think we played any song more than twice,” says
Jutz. “It’s perfect with its
imperfections.”
The players include Musicians Hall of Famer Jimmy Capps,
rising star mandolin virtuoso and beauty Sierra Hull, Grammy-winning bassist
Mark Fain, multi-instrumentalist Justin Moses, harp man Jelly Roll Johnson and
hammered dulcimer delight Alisa Jones Wall.
“It’s the matter of
getting the right players in the studio and letting them go,” says Jutz.
And the 89-year-old singer points out that it is folk music
and certainly not bluegrass, even though it is that form for which he’s
best-known. “I don’t like the raucous
sound of a banjo,” he says, smiling.
He says the songs are timeless. While perhaps “old-timey” in
delivery and production technique, he says the songs are as relevant today as
they were when his mom began writing them in the journals.
“The reason for the longevity is it’s slice-of-life,” he
says about the collection. “People don’t change. We just get a new crop.”
It’ll be difficult to
find anyone in that new crop to replace the man who sings the songs his mom
wrote down.
“I asked the doctor the other day whether taking Viagra
would conflict with my medicines,” says Wiseman. “It said ‘it wouldn’t do you any conflict,
but what you do after it might kill you.”
He opens up one of the yellowed notebooks and begins to sing
The Stanley Brothers’ classic “Old Rattler.”
“Rattler was a good old dog as blind as he
could be,But every night at suppertime I believe that dog could see ….”
He puts the book down and smiles toward the
ceiling as he sings.…
(P.S. from writer: If you don't buy this album or -- if a Grammy voter you do not vote for it -- you are an idiot.)
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