I had not talked to my family on the phone for at least a week. These were the same parents that sang me bedtime songs when I was convinced I could not breath because some invisible monster was sitting on my chest. The very same who played John McCutcheon tapes while we drove the grueling four hours to visit Grandma. Clearly, I had my priorities out of line. And now I was riding an emotional spiral like those tube water slides that just keep going, allowing you little foresight.
McCutcheon picked up a six-string guitar and encouraged everyone to sing along.
"I know you're all thinking, 'everyone around me's doing fine, what's my problem?'" he said, telling the audience not to be self-conscious. "The great thing about harmony is that you have three chances to be right – and if you miss, it's jazz."
McCutcheon had a shocking number of instruments sitting up on stage with him. Two guitars (six and twelve string), a banjo, a piano, an autoharp and of course the famous hammer dulcimer. Not bad.
He finished an old favorite and chatted with the audience.
"Junior year [in college] I studied abroad. In Kentucky," said McCutcheon. "[It was] a three month independent project that I'm still working on. My classrooms became regular Baptist churches, picket lines."
The chords softened and one key segued into another.
"Well, the schools in my town, like the schools in your town, had no money," said McCutcheon.
He conversed with the audience. So personable. I tugged at the corners of my nostalgia, trying to pull it off me.
McCutcheon performs at many fundraising concerts, often for causes such as education. His connections with children and family within the context of our society are profound and potent.
Not only is he invested in learning, he is also unafraid to try other languages. In "La Mujer de Don Miguel," McCutcheon sang partially in Spanish. The piece is from his latest album, which he co-wrote with several different authors. Cuban children's book writer Carmen Agra Deedy had mingled her words with his in this song; frequent language switches highlighted the fusion.
Then came the point where the nostalgia and time machine fantasies exploded all over me and I assume, a good portion of the audience as well. Someone's mother was visiting from California and had requested "The Room at the Top of the Stair."
There is no turning back from that. As often happens, McCutcheon's son had gone off to college. The first Christmas he came back, McCutcheon had written a song for him.
"The dog got excited/The day that you came/I guess he thought you smelled weird/And I thought the same," sang McCutcheon.
I landed face down in a puddle of time passed. I was convinced that McCutcheon was now trying to reduce me to a dilapidated shell of myself. Is it cool to be thinking, "I want my mommy," during a Friday night show? Probably not.
Like a distracted child, my tears were dried when McCutcheon turned to the hammer dulcimer for "Leviathan," an aptly named piece he had written after going on a whale watch. He pressed down on one of the strings with a finger to imitate the whale's call. The sound was high pitched and eerie, remarkably similar to recordings I had heard of whale communication.
The hammer dulcimer is a strange instrument. Literally, it involves hammering on the strings with a special mallet. But it does not sound like hammering; rather, it sounds like someone working with a gorgeous ornamental hammer. Historically, the hammer dulcimer was an ancient classical instrument of the Middle East and precursor to the piano. The early American settlement of Jamestown owned at least one.
Stranger yet was the instrument I had failed to list before. McCutcheon's own body. When he was eight years old, the circus was in town and he went to see the sideshow. There, a man played the drums using only his own body parts. "It was the weirdest thing I'd seen a grown man do in front of a group of people," said McCutcheon.
I would have to agree. He then commenced to play himself. It was an impressive bit of percussion involving full bodily participation.
McCutcheon wrapped up the show with the original version of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land." The song was first titled "God Blessed America for You and Me," in response to famous hymn, "God Bless America." McCutcheon has been going through Guthrie's archives at the asking of Guthrie's daughter, Nora Guthrie. A few of the songs on his most recent album are lyrics written by Guthrie, now put to music by McCutcheon. The old "This Land is Your Land" included many unreleased verses that Guthrie had considered too controversial at the time and taken out. Here my focus shifted to the generation of people who would have listened to Guthrie. McCutcheon instructed the audience in tales of the old folk singer. Images of a past I had never experienced dominated my mind. They did not linger, but flashed through, too blurry for comprehension. McCutcheon topped off a pleasurably long two hour show with three encores demanded by the audience. His rendition of Chris Gaines's "Get Together," took me away from my childhood and into the pasts of others, of a generation that McCutcheon seems to represent.
I noticed that Finney was filled not with students, but mostly with the middle aged. Why don't we, the nameless generation (who knows when they'll decide what to call us) recognize the emotion, effort, and style that seems to oddly combine parental love with love for humanity in general? Even I feel like the messages of McCutcheon are somewhat lost to me.
Maybe this explains my nostalgia. Perhaps I was missing not only specific people, but aching in the absence of a generation as well.
From Cool Cleveland reader Laurel Fuson laurel.fusonAToberlin.edu (:divend:)