John McCutcheon

Destination: Everywhere

Music: John McCutcheon’s album Mightier Than the Sword (Appalsongs Records)

A GUEST POST by Kerry Dexter

John McCutcheon a musician who has written songs for children and adults,  has released more than thirty albums, and  is respected as a teacher and player on hammered dulcimer, banjo, and many other instruments.

McCutcheon is also a reader. One afternoon while on tour with his music he was browsing in a bookstore and came across Barbara Kingsolver’s book Small Wonders. Reading one of her essays, he heard the words of a song. The idea for the album Mightier Than the Sword was born.

Across fourteen tracks on the album McCutcheon collaborates, in varied ways, with writers ranging from Kingsolver to Pablo Neruda to Rita Dove. McCutcheon’s  hand is distinct in the songs — this isn’t setting prose or poetry to music — and so is the voice of the author with whom he works. If you’re familiar with Lee Smith’s southern novels, Neruda’s vivid images in poetry, or Kingsolver’s forthright essays, you’ll have no trouble figuring out which songs come from whose work without referring to the liner notes. In some cases songs were simply inspired by McCutcheon’s reading; in some cases he collaborated with living authors; and in others he drew from the works of those who have passed on.

Though some songs work better than others, one commonality they share is McCutcheon’s respect for story. With that, he’s able to translate the ideas in these diverse written works into the spare and poetic forms required by song. Sail Away, for example, was inspired by Carmen Agra Deedy’s story The Yellow Star, about Denmark during World War II. McCutcheon sings, in a section connecting verses about a couple separated by the conflict

I number the stars
In the heavens each night
Across these seas that divide us
We are guided by their light

In the liner notes, McCutcheon offers lyrics and often, a bit of back story about how each song came to be. There’s also a section with short biographies of the authors, who in addition to Kingsolver, Smith, Dove, Deedy, and Neruda, include Wendell Berry, Woody Guthrie, and Sister Helen Prejean.

Album Cover

Listen to and buy the songs at Indie music DigStation.

The photo above is from McCutcheon’s web site and the album cover comes from DigStation.

Leave it to Kerry to find an album that fits so well in the Traveler’s Library. I love to see the arts mix and mingle like this. Thanks, Kerry, for this lovely find. Kerry is our partner in the Great American Road Trip, and each Wednesday you can click over to Music Road for her suggestions to accompany our road trip stops in individual states.

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Destination: New Orleans

William Faulkner did not stick around New Orleans very long, but he certainly made an impression while he was there, Mardi Gras every day!  He received encouragement from playwright Sherwood Anderson, and wrote short stories and his first novel Soldier’s Pay. When we go to the city today, we can be grateful that his rooming house, the narrow, three-story house at 624 Pirates Alley behind the Cathedral has been preserved and turned into a wonderful bookstore. Faulkner House books is also the center of the Faulkner Society that sponsors many events include Words and Music, a fall celebration of literature and music.

Used and new books fill two small rooms where William Faulkner lived for half a year in the mid- l920’s. He wrote home about the cathedral garden outside his front door, but probably not about firing a b-b gun at the nuns coming down the alley. Faulkner invented his own life as well as literary characters. He told his friends that because of a wound suffered in the war, he had to drink vast quantities of alcohol to dull the pain. The ‘vast quantities’ part was true.

Faulkner, however, truly belongs to Mississippi.  It is Tennessee Williams who absorbed and best portrayed New Orleans. Amazed by the openess of New Orleans that visitors see at Mardi Gras, he role-played himself for a change.

“No one has ‘conferences’ here. They have to be ‘festivals,’” says Kenneth Holditch, my guide on a walking tour of the French Quarter. Holditch was one of the founders of the Tennessee Williams Festival, which brings panels, master classes and performances to several thousand attendees in New Orleans each March.

Holditch wrote about Tennessee William’s favorite table at Galatoire’s restaurant, in Galatoire’s Biography of a Bistro. Williams also is associated with the Court of Two Sisters where he waited table and the Napoleon House bar (now also a cafe) which he favored. Williams lived in several places off and on between the late 1930’s and the l950’s. In 1946, in an attic room of 632 St. Peter, he wrote Streetcar Named Desire. Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, quote Williams in their Tennessee Williams and the South.

On St. Peter Street he heard that ‘rattletrap streetcar named Desire’ that ran through the Quarter, ‘up one old narrow street and down another’ and the one named Cemeteries running along Canal Street six blocks away. ‘It seemed to me an ideal metaphor for the human condition,’ he wrote.

And Tennessee Williams certainly captures the spirit of New Orleans as well as any writer ever has. My bookshelves are crammed with Tennessee Williams plays and it was a thrill to walk through “his” New Orleans. Tomorrow more writers who thrive in New Orleans, including Anne Rice.

For more on New Orleans at A Traveler’s Library, see

Surviving in New Orleans

Literary Hotel

New Orleans as Seen by Faulkner

Classic New Orleans Restaurant

Book Lover’s NOLA

Book Stores

Writers from Faulkner to Ford

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library

©2010 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.