John McCutcheon was 11 years old watching history being made on live television when he heard his first folk song.
“My best friend and I had kind of discovered folk music because we had watched the March on Washington on TV,” he said. “We watched it and, if you ask me do I remember the ‘I Have a Dream Speech’ I would have to truthfully say ‘no.’
“But I remember the music. It was everything from Mahalia Jackson to Marian Anderson to Bob Dylan to Peter, Paul and Mary. And this whole folk music thing, we never heard of. This was northern Wisconsin …,” he said. “We fell in love with this music and it took three years of pestering our parents until they finally broke down and gave us guitars.”
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And in the years since then, the Grammy-nominated McCutcheon has done just that, penning 43 albums, the most recent three written during the pandemic. The prolific folk musician will perform some of those new songs along with old favorites during his concert at 7 p.m. Feb. 19 at the Unitarian Church of Hinsdale. Proof of vaccination and masks are required.
When he finally received that guitar on his 14th birthday, he needed to learn how to use it.
“I went to the library to find a book to teach me to play guitar,” he said. “The only thing I could find under the subject ‘guitar’ in the Dewey Decimal System was this book called ‘Woody Guthrie Folk Songs.'”
One of the most influential figures in American folk music, Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land.”
“I didn’t know who he was until I got to that song in that book, which was buried deep in that book,” McCutcheon said.
But in the meantime, he went through the book of songs, which were listed alphabetically. So he would play a love song on one page, a children’s song on the next, and so on.
“I guess what kind of osmosed into me with that early exposure to someone who was just thoroughly ecumenical in his subjects and in his audience was that you can write about anything,” McCutcheon said.
Since the start of the pandemic, McCutcheon has written around 100 new songs. He wrote “Cabin Fever: Songs from the Quarantine” in three weeks. The second album, “Bucket List,” was released in September and “Leap!” will be released later this year.
“Most of the songs were written in the place where I was quarantined in the North George Mountains,” he said.
A wide range of topics are explored in the music, including songs about a small town in France that harbors refugees, children’s crayon art, moonshine, and the piano that first played “We Shall Overcome.” McCutcheon teaches a series of songwriting camps at the Highlander Research and Education Center in east Tennessee, where that piano is located.
“It was where the women who were striking tobacco company workers from Charleston, South Carolina, came for a workshop in 1947 and they brought this song based on an old hymn called ‘I’ll Be Alright Someday,'” McCutcheon said. “And in the course of that weekend workshop, it morphed into ‘We Shall Overcome.'”
Before staring to write each day, McCutcheon followed ritual of sorts to get him in the right frame of mind, so to speak.
“I have this routine in the morning that involves everything from prayer to poetry to meditation, all of which is totally right brain stuff,” he said. “It’s as though I’m clearing the deck of any left brain activity. And so when I start to write at the end of that routine, which takes an hour or two, stuff just came out. And there wasn’t any order and in most cases there wasn’t any intention.”
For instance the song “Atonement,” which ended up having a really detailed story, he said, “just started because I heard a truck going by and I heard the gravel crackle … I was just sort of in that zone and I wasn’t interrupted by anything for months and months.”
The main problem caused by the flood of new songs, he said, is picking which new ones to play in concert along with the songs audience members already know.
“The difficult part is going to be sort of reining myself in and not wanting to say, ‘hey, let me sing you a new song’ and walking that line between the familiar and the new,” he said. “It’s a nice position to be in.”
Not that he plans the set list in advance. He picks a song when he starts the concert and goes from there.
“I walk the wire without a net. I don’t plan what I’m going to do before I go out there,” he said. “It’s the advantage of being a soloist, I can just play whatever comes to mind. And usually what comes to mind is the particular trip that you’re on that night with that audience.
“It’s fun to experiment and see what combination of songs contextualize each other,” he said.
John McCutcheon
When: 7 p.m. Feb. 19
Where: The Unitarian Church of Hinsdale, 11 W. Maple St., Hinsdale
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Tickets: $20
Information: 630-941-7797, acousticren.com
Kathy Cichon is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.